Guardian, November 12 2025
My previous post was a whistlestop, first call Venezuela. On empire’s need, always easily met, for a comprador elite inside a targeted country – “ideally with one of its own as head of state” – I made one of my rare forays into sarcasm by describing María Corina Machado …
… as one of the most gas-lightingly Kafkaesque recipients to date of a Nobel Peace Prize. Perish the thought that intense lobbying from the US State Department swayed the Oslo panel! Who more worthy than one calling for armed invasion of her own country by a foreign power – and promising the mother of all paydays when its newly privatised assets are turned over to the big oil and other interests which, behind a fast thinning veil of democratic accountability, must now decide whether to rein in or urge on the 47th president of said foreign power?
To which I attached this footnote:
As Trump’s stock plummets – both with east coast liberals who fled a Democrat Party tainted by Ukraine and now wonder why they bothered; and a MAGA base to whom Mr Tangerine Man had promised less overseas meddling, more rust belt jobs – America’s real rulers may conclude that, yet again, regime change in Caracas is off the menu for the foreseeable. Me, I wouldn’t want to call it either way at this juncture.
It’s the footnote, not the sock puppet in waiting, which leads this post. Washington motives for regime change in Caracas have featured in recent posts (and I won’t insult readers’ intelligence by mansplaining on why “fighting narcoterrorism” is for the birds) so my focus here is that last sentence. The question is not will he/won’t he invade? – ‘he’ being President 47 – but whether or not the US ruling class will allow him to do so.
Given this, my choice today is on the face of it odd. My recent flurry of posts wholly or partially on Venezuela featured John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton. While only that last comes close to my own perspective, all have useful insights on what is happening and why. So it is with Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou at the Duran. To my mind they attribute too much agency to the Oval Office, but we can factor that in when the pros and cons for America’s elites aren’t significantly different, in this instance, from those for the Donald. To put it another way, whether or not Trump calls the shots here, the calculations remain much the same.
Two points before I hand over. First, there’s been talk, even by level-headed folk of Sachs and Mearsheimer stripe – and for that matter yours truly – of superpower confrontation given rising levels of Chinese, Russian and Iranian presence in Venezuela, and given the poetic justice thereof …
… in response to which I find the Duran convincing. The logistics for Russia of taking on the US in Ukraine (or should push come to shove, in Iran) are one thing; doing so on the far side of the Atlantic in America’s back yard quite another. The stakes for any axis of resistance state would have to be existential for them to try such a thing. While Beijing and Moscow stand to lose by Maduro’s criminal removal, their interests fall well short of that stratospheric bar.
My second point also arises from Trump’s falling stock with Democrats who jumped ship over Ukraine, and a MAGA whose blue collar wing is incensed over a promise – bringing American jobs home – it was never within his power to make good on. Missing from that equation is the snowballing toxicity, if you’ll pardon the mix of metaphors, of the Epstein files. Today WSWS ran a piece – Trump, Epstein and the Democrats: A criminal ruling class – well worth the few minutes its full reading demands, but cited here for this paragraph in particular:
The entire financial aristocracy subscribes to the goals of the Trump administration, but there is growing fear that Trump is too widely hated and too erratic, or too oblivious of the dangers, to successfully carry out his class war program. The seemingly unstoppable rise in government debt, the gyrations in the financial markets and the rise in both layoffs and inflation are all symptoms of an onrushing economic crisis of global dimensions.
On a more parochial but hardly insignificant note, the Epstein impact on Trump’s Christian Zionist base can only add to his woes, hence to those of said financial aristocracy.
And so to the Duran, for a podcast short – at just under twenty minutes – by their standards.
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