VENEZUELA THREATENS AN IMPERIALIST WAR FOR OIL - AND THE LEFT IS SILENT
By Mark Almond [8/12/23 - Redacted]
While Western peace movements have eyes only for Gaza, their former model socialist republic, Venezuela, is threatening to invade its smaller and less Left-wing neighbour, oil-rich ex-British Guyana.
Deafening silence is the Left’s response to the looming threat over oil swells. Time was it would have had Jeremy Corbyn and his acolytes marching down Whitehall chanting “No war for oil”.
But now as the Maduro regime in Venezuela has staged a referendum to legitimise its claims to the oil-rich region in neighbouring Guyana, warning lights of an impending conflict ought to be flashing among Britain’s peaceniks as much as in the Biden White House.
Even The Guardian has acknowledged that turnout in the referendum was “minimal”. The regime claimed ten million out of 22 million voted, but in a country where queuing for hours for basic supplies is the norm, there was no sign of lines at the polling stations.
Maduro’s economic record makes Communist Cuba seem well run. His oil-rich regime has overseen Weimar-style hyper-inflation and currency collapse, so boosting the turnout by five times may seem a rather modest fraud. Seven million Venezuelans have fled abroad.
The Biden Administration has been courting Maduro by suspending sanctions on his oil production despite his dictatorial policies to replace Iranian oil supplies with Venezuelan ones. But Mauro and the Ayatollahs see Biden as a sucker and proceed in harmony accordingly.
The destabilising impact of any Venezuelan aggression would roll well beyond Guyana. Further waves of migration northwards across Central America and the Caribbean to the USA would follow.
Feckless as Joe Biden’s administration is becoming, it would be mad for the Republicans to abandon the Monroe Doctrine to a dictator who evokes Simon Bolivar’s vision of a united region along the Caribbean from two hundred years ago to justify a plundering raid on his smaller neighbour.
Maduro’s regime survives on drug trafficking to fund its armed loyalists. Like Saddam a generation ago, Maduro now sees seizing oil wells next door as the solution to impending bankruptcy. Putin’s Russia sees more chaos as grist to its geopolitical ambitions.
American oil assets are at stake, but more importantly another pillar of global stability and respect for small nations is wobbling.
It says a lot about how distracted the Biden Administration is at present that it was Brazil’s Left-wing President Lula da Silva who mobilised his armed forces to try to deter Maduro from invading a neighbour while Washington stuck to words, not action.
The Left here turns a blind eye to the reality that it is Venezuela’s Left-wing neighbours who are acting to back up their warnings to Maduro to back off, not their Yankee bugbear.