Kidnap, murder, torture, brutality, subversion, treachery, and barbarism, writes Adrian Blackburn reflecting on US President Donald Trump’s New Year present to the world.
COMMENTARY: By Adrian Blackburn
Blatantly, boastfully, bullyingly, shamelessly, Trump overnight threw open to the world’s eyes the cruel reality of US foreign policy. He has brought out from the shadows the ugly reality of what for generations previous administrations have found politic to keep covert.
That foreign policy has been shown most especially arrogant in regard to its neighbours anywhere in the Americas.
It has been based on a lie, a lie to its own people first but no less potently to the nations, including New Zealand, which have subscribed to that fiction of a United States democracy representing all the best human qualities.
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The nicely gift-wrapped package includes belief in equality, fairness, justice, the sanctity of human life, acceptance of difference, mutual respect, kindness and love: The American way, the ultimate Christian morality in practice.
Trump has done all of us who have bought that lie a favour. What he is saying out loud with the attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro is the age-old message of a rogue state — might is right, all power comes from the barrel of a gun, bow down to us.
Any self-reflection by Trump, unlikely, would reveal to him the deeper historical truth that empires which once seemed invulnerable resort to such desperate measures as his Venezuelan adventure in an attempt to deny, to delay, to divert from the fact they are in their death throes. Decline and fall.
It will get worse for the United States, as a state. The lie will become increasingly acknowledged internationally as trust is shown to be a one-way street. The allied fiction of US Treasury bills as a long-term safe repository for the world’s savings may be undermined even faster.
Run on the US bank
Trust gone, it’s the work of moments for an international run on the bank of the US to begin. Even if its already hard-working monetary printing presses go into overtime, an economy and society propped up on trillions upon trillions of dollars of debt can quickly become bankrupt
Immediately, though, what can the international community do in protest? I believe there’s a special obligation on the “Western” nations to assuage a little of their guilt as willing US accomplices over many years, accomplices ready to abandon true independence and a fair bit of morality to self-interest, cowardice.
Just a gesture in protest, but a powerful one, would be to immediately and in unison demand the temporary closure of US embassies and the withdrawal of their staff as persona non grata.
Unrealistic? Of course. Real-politik will rule, OK!
Turning blind eyes to Venezuela
But we should all beware of turning blind eyes to Venezuela. Who next, after Maduro, incurs the Don’s displeasure? If Zelensky stubbornly won’t surrender to Don and Vlad’s territorial demands, will he be safe on his next State visit to the US from arbitrary arrest and incarceration as an alleged war criminal?
Does our own Christopher Luxon need to brush up his flattery skills even further? Losing every hole of a golf match with Trump would help.
Trump, though, has already lost, whether in his hyperbolically hypocritical state he knows it or not. But he has done the world a useful service in revealing how an empire on the way out is likely to act.
Big oil will be triumphal about a grab for Venezuela’s oil riches in the hypocritical guise of protecting the US from illicit drug imports.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, is quietly gloating.
Adrian Blackburn is lifelong journalist and writer. Staff writer on many publications, including The NZ Herald, Sydney Morning Herald, BBC World Service, Beaverbrook Newspapers, NZ Listener and NZ Woman’s Weekly. Author of The Shoestring Pirates (Hodder and Stoughton, 1974) a history of pirate Radio Hauraki, and Gift: A Troubling Message from the Afterlife (2024). This commentary was originally a Facebook posting under the title “Trump grabs Venezuela by the pussy” and is republished here with permission.
