Trump’s re-election and Venezuela strike reveal a president driven by resources, not diplomacy.
“He is a president who can’t think properly and wants to plunge the world into a holocaust… all for oil… the US has no moral authority to play policeman of the world.”
Anyone who woke up on Sunday and came across these words would be convinced that they were about Donald Trump.
These were the words of former SA president Nelson Mandela over three decades ago, when then US president George W Bush defied the UN and invaded Iraq.
The truth in the words rings true today because another US president has “captured” the president of another sovereign state, President Nicolas Maduro, of Venezuela. Many have chosen to label this action a kidnapping, a sanitised “capture”, which the US prefers.
These are the actions of a man who, in a short year in office since his re-election, has campaigned for the Nobel Peace Prize for having ended “seven wars”, claiming: “If my name were Obama, I would have been given the Nobel Peace prize already”.
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Not only is this president beyond the levels of doing cringeworthy things like campaigning for a humanitarian award like the Nobel prize, he believes his own hype – while dropping bombs in Syria, Iran and Nigeria – that he is a peacemaker.
Was Mandela correct in asserting that the United States has no moral authority to play world policeman?
For more than a century, many presidents of the United States have authorised the invasions of many countries to “restore democracy” or for “peacekeeping purposes” in those countries.
A pattern that has emerged with most of the countries that the US has invaded over the years is that they are rich in natural resources.
Venezuela, the country that Donald Trump has vowed to “run temporarily” and “get the oil flowing”, owns the world’s largest oil reserves.
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No need to guess why the country’s president, Maduro, was kidnapped.
It is easy for the US and Trump, in particular, to weave a story about how Maduro is a dictator, which he might well be, and use that as a premise to kidnap him and hijack Venezuela.
When Bush invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein because he was “a dictator who was building weapons of mass destruction”, he roped the then gullible United Kingdom prime minister Tony Blair into pushing this story of non-existent weapons.
And took over Iraq, getting the oil-hungry US economy up and running, as well as major contracts for US firms in “rebuilding Iraq”, which they had bombed to smithereens in the first place.
In an age where social media is all one needs to weave a fabricated tale to convince the gullible that a seven-headed monster lives next door to the United States, Trump did not need any other country to back his tale in his quest for oil.
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Trump owns a whole social media platform, Truth Social, which might as well be aptly renamed “Trump’s Truth”, because that is what it is.
China’s president Xi Jinping has condemned Trump’s action. He has called on the US to refrain from reverting to the Monroe Doctrine style of politics of the 1800s, where they expected the world not to intervene in their affairs.
In truth, no one wants to go to war with the US, because no one has built 800 military bases across the world as the US has.
But it would be a big mistake for the US Congress and its citizens to let this slide, allowing a megalomaniac to create enemies for the US that will last another century.
