Trump 'Strikes' Venezuela: A Preview of Preemption
While The Hill primed audiences for the spectacle of military 'strikes' (the link is dead, a fitting metaphor for the substance), the Trump administration's real assault on Venezuela was less about kinetic action and more about crippling sanctions. Since 2017, the US, under Trump, ratcheted up sanctions that strangled Venezuela's oil industry, froze its assets, and caused an estimated decrease of
374,000 barrels per day in oil production by 2019, according to Reuters. This economic strangulation, not flashy bombs, constitutes the actual 'strikes' against Venezuelan sovereignty. We are consistently told Venezuela is a 'failed state' due to internal mismanagement, yet mainstream media rarely connects the dots to the punishing sanctions designed to destabilize the government and force regime
change. It's a classic case of 'crisis initiated, crisis blamed'—Washington creates the conditions for collapse, then points to the collapse as justification for further intervention. How convenient that the 'threat' always seems to require a military response, rather than, say, lifting the sanctions that starve the population?