Five Facets of the Attack on Venezuela by the Rogue Nation the US Has Become

1

They are saying it baldly: this is an oil grab. There is a history of oil grabs going back to British imperialism in the middle east in the late nineteenth century and murders of Osage Nation tribal members in Oklahoma when oil made them rich in the early twentieth century, of a US-backed coup against the democratic government of Iran in the 1950s and the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq in 2003.

How Venezuela stole its own oil on its own territory is something I would love JD Vance to explain in a war crimes tribunal, but the short version is imperialism plus the habit of Republican administrations of regarding the fossil fuel industry as inseparable from government and making its interests the top priority.

2

The carnage associated with fossil fuel is why speeding the transition to renewables is good for international stability as well as everything else. Fossil fuel is inseparable from violence, and dependence on it it has created a brutal world order in which some states have corrosive outsize power due to their possession of oil and gas while others have corrosive dependency on these often-human-rights-abusing regimes.

This has been true so long it seems normal, but when it is over we will see it as a second cold war that sometimes became a hot war. Today is one of those days. (When Russia invaded Ukraine, it seemed to think European dependence on its methane gas/natural gas would subdue European reaction; one meaningful European response was to instead speed the energy transition.)

This is why the climate movement has always been a peace movement. A movement for peace with nature, since climate chaos is the result of a war against nature and life on earth, but also for the peace that could come after the fossil fuel era winds down. Oil Change International founder Stephen Kretzmann said this morning: " The fact that wars and lots of blood for oil are somehow an acceptable price to pay for energy has never ever been ok. This alone is more than enough reason to phase out fossil fuels asap." Sun, wind, geothermal, and hydropower are widely distributed across the earth and will not generate any such conflicts and corrosive geopolitics.

Bill McKibben already put it better than I could this morning. He writes at his newsletter, The Crucial Years:

What if we could, simply by supporting an environmentally and economically sound transition to clean energy, remove the reason for the fighting? I don’t know how to stop the bully from beating people up for their lunch money—but what if lunch was free, and no one was carrying lunch money? Not for the first time, and not for the last, I’m going to make the observation that it’s going to be hard to figure out how to fight wars over sunshine.

What I’m trying to say is, if you’re for peace and democracy, then a solar panel is a valuable tool (and a valuable symbol, a peace sign for our age). Every one that goes up incrementally reduces the attractiveness of the oil that underlies so much conflict and tyranny. Right at the moment treaties and charters and constitutions offer limited protection at best; we should work to restore the national and global consensus that makes them valuable, but we should also work to push out the kind of energy that can’t be hoarded or controlled. 

Why does Trump hate solar and wind energy so passionately? It’s because they’re somewhat outside his or anyone else’s control. A nation that builds its prosperity on oil makes itself a target; a nation that depends on imported oil to survive makes itself a vassal. A nation (say, China) that rapidly builds out its own supply of energy from the sun—energy that can’t be embargoed or effectively attacked, energy that is by its nature decentralized, energy so spread out that no particular bit of it is all that valuable—is a nation that can go its own way. 

America is, by any definition, a rogue nation this morning. It does what it wants, without effective constraint by anyone. It, in the image of its leader, is a bizarrely destructive and absurdly oversized toddler, unable to reason beyond its own wants and impulses. We should try to teach it some manners, but we should also childproof the planet.

3

This destabilizes both the rule of law and separation of powers at home and the global order, such as it is. It overrides or ignores the powers granted to the legislative branch – as in only Congress can declare war – and a number of people in Congress have testified they were not just left in the dark; they were lied to. This is part of the consolidation of (illegitimate) power in the president.

It is also an attack on international law. It undermines any US opposition to China seizing Taiwan, which appears to be a possibility this year, and normalizes the invasion of Ukraine by the Putin regime. Only corrupt right-wing nations will support this, and it makes the US even more out of alignment with its allies since the Second World War (a smart friend suggests there should be sanctions against US oil and maybe broader sanctions against the US as it becomes a rogue nation). When Trump is finished, this country will have immense repair work to do to reestablish the rule of law at home and rebuild international alliances. If we return to normal. If we remain a nation.

Meanwhile last night's attack is a return to the era in which the US asserted unlimited power over Latin America (toppling leftist regimes in Guatemala in the 1950s and Chile in the 1970s, backing murderous right-wing regimes through the 1980s right up through the kidnapping of Manuel Noriega, Panama's ruler, in the 1980s). The illegal seizure of Venezuela's head of state is happening within weeks of Trump's pardoning the former president of Honduras, who was imprisoned here for cocaine trafficking on an epic scale. The murder of people on boats in waters near Venezuela was a crime and apparently a warm-up. This makes the whole world more dangerous in direct and indirect ways. And it makes the US a rogue nation.

4

This is serious and important and we must pay attention to it. But we must not lose sight of what the Trump Administration would love us to lose sight of: a wildly unpopular president doing his utmost to harm the people of this country and enrich himself, his family, and his cronies while in rapid mental and physical decline and in an ongoing panic over what the Epstein files could tell us about him.

Harm the people by attacking the rule of law, the Constitution and the separation of powers, the rights of women and queer and trans people and immigrants and anyone who might resemble an immigrant or refugee, by sabotaging the economy from federal funding for childcare to foreign markets for farm crops, by encouraging the corruption and decline of the news media, but you know al; that already.

5

Peace means many things, and it exists or is sabotaged at many levels. It begins with the right of individual human beings to be free from violence at home or from the police or at the hands of child sex traffickers like Trump's best friend Epstein. It begins with the inalienable rights of every human being, including the refugees and immigrants and brown and Black people under attack at home by this administration, and also including women's right to bodily autonomy. It means the right not to die because your air, land, food, water were poisoned for profit. It means the right to a livable future for the young. Beyond that it means peace with nature and the rights of nature, which is why my year-end letter for Oil Change International (on whose board I've served since 2017) declared:

It's traditional to make the phrase "peace on earth" part of your wishes or greetings at midwinter, but maybe these days we should be wishing for "peace with earth." Because the climate crisis is a war against nature, a one-sided war against the natural world that has already stolen places, species, lives, landscapes, patterns, glaciers, and stability itself from us, the grand us that is all life on earth.

With that, I'm going to go get ready to go to a protest against this violently illegal and destabilizing crime by the criminal Trump Administration.