Martin Pastor

It took nine months for the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to destroy Libyan society. In such a short time, the richest country on the African continent became a failed state plunged into a civil war that has continued since 2011. Faced with the new imperial offensive against Venezuela, this case should be seen as a warning for the future of the region.

Although oil seems to be the casualty of the intervention, and not the ‘humanitarian’ justifications that characterize the U.S. government, this reading of the situation remains superficial. In both cases the motive for intervention involves more than simply appropriating resources, the modus operandi of traditional U.S. imperialism.

This model was based on the concept of nation-building, through which Americans appropriated resources and with ‘guided’ institutionalization satisfied their private and political interests. One example is Chile in the 1970s.

In 1973, the United States financed and led the coup d’état against Salvador Allende and then tutelage the nation toward neoliberalism based on the interests of private companies and geopolitical strategies for the region. This model, and many others in the region and the world, were based on false values such as order, justice, progress and development.

However, everything changed after the attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York. Under the administration of George W. Bush, the neoconservatives, a little-known faction of the U.S. right, took control of foreign and defense policy, ushering in a new phase of imperial rule.

After gestation of their global strategy for decades, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 marked the end of the traditional model and the beginning of neo-imperialism. Order, progress, and development are replaced by security/militarization; internal division based on ethnic, religious, and/or historical differentiators; and especially chaos.

A strategy that was not born in the Pentagon but in the classrooms of the University of Chicago with the writings of Leo Strauss. As Professor Shadia Drury explains, the Jewish philosopher (1899-1973) reintroduced the notion of chaos as a tool of domination of a “chosen elite” to subdue uncultivated masses on the basis of the “natural” hierarchy; ergo his obsession with classics such as Plato and Aristotle and contemporary Nietzsche and Heidegger.

But what does a 20th century political philosopher have to do with 21st century imperialism?

First of all, straussianism is the main influence of the neoconservatives, who include among their ranks figures such as Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, Arthur Cebrowksi and John Bolton, current National Security Advisor to Trump, among others.

It was Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense (2001-2006), who incorporated the doctrine of Cebrowksi, Vice Admiral of the Navy, on a network-centered war, which restructures the strategy of full spectrum dominance with the information age in order to achieve hegemony in the social, linguistic, cognitive, informational and physical fields.

For this purpose, one of the most used tools is the use of lies (currently fake news or alternative truths) through the media and communication networks, with the aim of manipulating the collective feeling. This instrument of social engineering was something Strauss considered necessary to protect the upper elite from the persecution of the ‘vulgar masses’.

The use of language and lies was seen with the supposed weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq, the supposed terrorist connection in Afghanistan, the discursive construction of Muammar Al-Qadhafi as a bloodthirsty dictator, the media’s ‘Axis of Evil’, and now a replica to present Venezuela as a failed state, including it in the ‘Troika of Tyranny’ with Nicaragua and Cuba.

Another of the key elements of Strauss’s theory applied in US military strategy is the aforementioned chaos. In the new imperialist model, the aim is not to ‘build nations’, not even under neoliberalism, but to bring down dominated societies.

The Department of Defense geopolitical strategist and Cebrowski’s assistant, Thomas P. M. Barnet, imparted the model to the military High Command at the Pentagon in 2003, summing it up in a new world map. The map divides the globe into what it calls “functional core” and “non-integrated gap” countries.

The nations in this second group are no longer seen as independent and sovereign, but as a homogeneous bloc without the possibility of integration. This is how Bush called the Arab nations of North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Persian, Sub-Saharan and Caucasian countries from the Greater Middle East, with the aim of justifying systematic and parallel wars.

In these territorial blocks the wars become endless and recurrent. A controlled transition with a friendly dictator or a submissive government is no longer necessary; disorder and misgovernment are the objective.

As analyst Thierry Meyssan explains, this idea does not consider access to resources to be crucial for Washington, but rather that the “functional core” states would only have access to those resources by resorting to the Americans. In order to do so, it is necessary to destroy the state structure and institutionality of the invaded countries, in such a way that when these resources are needed, they are easily accessible.

In this sense, the fact that Libya and Iraq, today, produce fewer barrels of oil than they did with the deposed governments and many wells passed into the hands of organizations alien to U.S. interests is not an unforeseen effect. Nor is it that the conditions of the population are far below international standards of welfare and security; with civilian casualty figures in the hundreds of thousands.

Thus, in the face of Juan Guaidó’s self-proclamation as interim president of Venezuela on January 23, and almost two decades later, the time seems to have come for a similar intervention in Latin America. The script was revealed by Argentine journalist Stella Calloni, with a SouthCom document signed by Kurt Tidd, former commander-in-chief until November 2018, under the name ‘Masterstroke’ detailing direct and indirect actions to destabilize the country and plunge it into chaos. Masterstroke: The US Plan to Overthrow the Venezuelan Government

Among the plans, they suggest “increasing internal instability to critical levels, intensifying the decapitalization of the country, the flight of foreign capital and the deterioration of the national currency, contributing to make the situation of the population more critical, causing victims and holding the Venezuelan government responsible”.

With the justification of ‘humanitarianism’ the text proposes “to establish a military operation under an international flag, sponsored by the Conference of Latin American Armies, under the protection of the OAS and the supervision, in the legal and media context, of Secretary General Luis Almagro”. Actions identical to those carried out in Libya eight years ago with NATO and members of the European Union.

This is no coincidence or disconnected acts, since with Bush, Obama and Trump the neoconservatives continue to exercise their influence and power in the White House and the military spheres of the United States; something that should concern all Latin Americans.