WILL U.S. STEP IN (IT) AGAIN?

Photo by Megan Phelps / the Advocate

If there is one thing our country (unfortunately) does from time to time, it’s to push regime change. To put it simply, if foreign relations with a country goes south, so does the person in charge of said country.

Historical examples have dated back all the way to the early 20th century; in some sense the two major world wars are the grandest examples of this, not just politically but also geographically. The most infamous examples, of late, were Iraq in the mid-2000s and the Arab Spring in the early 2010s. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of foreign policy knows that those events were detrimental to the region and, eventually, American foreign policy in general. So, you’d think that a new administration, which has criticized regime change efforts in the past, would learn from previous failures.

Venezuela is a country run by socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro. The nation’s main front of profit is its oil reserves, but worst of all, its citizens are impoverished, starving, or both. This could be due to a couple factors: U.S. sanctions against the country that the current administration levied, or it maybe because it’s run by a dictator who’s a radical socialist, like the news media says.

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In the midst of center-left policy ideas being mistaken for “radical socialism” here in America, news outlets such as Fox News and the conservative pundits on MSNBC are convinced that these policies are an embodiment of Venezuela-style socialism.

This has led to our president, an avid Fox News viewer, to move forward with a regime change plan in Venezuela…via Twitter. I find it a little strange that we make a socialist country the intentional boogeyman, while the definition of socialism and their respective policies become a hot topic in our media. Almost every day is a discussion about AOC (newly elected U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York) and her democratic socialist views, especially on Fox News where it’s a topic every hour. It’s no coincidence the president made a declaration that “America will never be a socialist country” in his recent  State of the Union speech.

In the context of the attempted regime change in Syria over the past decade, I think it’s safe to say that additional foreign intervention is a problem we can’t afford, especially if we’re not willing to accept the consequences of such (refugees, extremist groups, sanctions, etc.).

So, while right-wing media eggs on the president’s plan for a regime change in Venezuela, everyone should think to themselves, “Hmmm, maybe we shouldn’t go through with it, for the dozenth time,” or something similar. Not only does it look bad for America and reassert the notion that we are the “world police,” it’s also embarrassing if we fumbled on the issues that would come up afterward, like mass migration and power vacuums.

This is an issue so fresh from the last couple decades, there’s no way in our right minds we should be doomed to repeat it.

Advocate Staff