NYT Discovers Trump's Venezuela Justifications Were... Justifications
The New York Times, in its infinite wisdom, published a piece meticulously fact-checking every convoluted justification Donald Trump offered for his ill-fated Venezuela operation. One might almost believe that US interventionism suddenly requires stringent factual basis, especially when the target is a pet project of a former reality TV star. What’s often left out of such analyses, however, is the
inconvenient historical context: the US has been attempting to destabilize, isolate, and sanction Venezuelan governments since at least Hugo Chávez’s rise in the late 90s, if not earlier under different guises for other Latin American nations. (Remember the Monroe Doctrine? They certainly do in Langley.) The question isn't whether Trump's specific excuses were 'true,' but why the New York Times —
or any mainstream outlet — so rarely fact-checks the premise of US exceptionalism that allows for such interventions in the first place. Are we to believe 'spreading democracy' or 'fighting drugs' suddenly became plausible justifications only when a Republican said them, and not when they’ve been used for decades to destabilize sovereign nations? One might wonder how many times the US needs to
'fact-check' its own history of regime change operations before the policy itself gets some journalistic scrutiny.