Recently, the New York Times published a pro-war propaganda article by Jimmy Story, the former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela from 2020 to 2023, who supports a regime change war against the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro.
Within the pro-war article, Story admitted that Trump’s seizure of Oil tankers leaving Venezuela is intended to deprive the country and its people of their revenue streams from its main export, in hopes that it will result in regime change.
Story admits in the article, that through illegally seizing oil tankers leaving Venezuela, “Squeezing this revenue stream would help force a tough decision by those around Mr. Maduro to recognize that life without him in power is preferable to him remaining.”.
He wrote in the article that, “Going after sanctioned vessels, stateless ships … is a more effective and acceptable way to start peeling back the funding the Maduro regime uses to remain in power”.
He went on to write, “Economic pressure coupled with clearly defined offramps for regime insiders, an appealing package to those clamoring for change within Venezuela, and the credible use of targeted force may all be necessary elements for a successful outcome”.
In other words, the Trump administration’s real goal is to seize oil tankers off the coast of Venezuela and “Squeeze the revenue stream” in hopes it will destroy the country’s economy and lead to regime change.
As journalist Michelle Ellner noted in Venezuelanalysis, “The loudest question in Washington right now is whether Donald Trump is going to invade Venezuela. The quieter, and far more dangerous, reality is this: he probably won’t. Not because he cares about Venezuelan lives, but because he has found a strategy that is cheaper, less politically risky at home, and infinitely more devastating: economic warfare.”
As she noted, “By preventing Venezuela from exporting oil, which is the revenue that funds food imports, medicine, electricity, and public services, the Trump administration is knowingly engineering conditions of mass deprivation” adding, “if this continues, we will see horrific images: empty shelves, malnourished children, overwhelmed hospitals, people scavenging for food. Scenes that echo those coming out of Gaza, where siege and starvation have been normalized as weapons of war.”
She noted that, “Trump’s calculation is brutally simple: make Venezuelans so miserable that they will rise up and overthrow Maduro.”
This- by Story’s own admission- is the real motive behind the Trump administration’s policy of seizing oil tankers: to deprive the country of its main export, therefore starving the economy and the people of Venezuela in hopes they will rise up and overthrow Mauro.
As economists Jeffery Sachs and Mark Weisbrot have documented, “It is important to emphasize that nearly all of the foreign exchange that is needed to import medicine, food, medical equipment, spare parts, and equipment needed for electricity generation, water systems, or transportation, is received by the Venezuelan economy through the government’s revenue from the export of oil. Thus, any sanctions that reduce export earnings, and therefore government revenue, thereby reduce the imports of these essential and, in many cases, life-saving goods.”
In his New York Times propaganda piece, Story writes that if this siege warfare campaign is successful in removing Maduro, U.S asset María Corina Machado should be installed “to game out how to quickly re-institutionalize the country in a way that represents all democratic points of view.”
In reality, Machado has openly boasted that if she is installed, she will sell out her country’s resources to American companies, boasting at the Miami Business Forum, “For the U.S., we will turn this criminal hub into a security shield in the heart of the Americas. We will open Venezuela for foreign investment, I am talking about a 1.7 trillion dollar opportunity, not only in oil and gas, … but also in mining, in gold, in infrastructure, power. We will open markets, we will have security for foreign investment, and a massive privatization program that is waiting for you”.
This is also Jimmy Story’s motive for pushing for siege warfare on Venezuela.
In a 60-minutes interview, Story admitted that the U.S. wants to remove Maduro because he is “sitting on top of the world’s largest known reserves of oil plus the critical minerals that will fuel the 21st century economy”.
By Story’s own admission, the U.S. is trying to “Squeeze the revenue stream” from Venezuela by illegally seizing the country’s oil tankers and installing a puppet government that will hand over, “the world’s largest known reserves of oil plus the critical minerals that will fuel the 21st century economy”.
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This is the tactic that the US has used to destroy the economies of various countries around the world. This is not Trump. This is the American system of exploiting the world, using our power in the banks to freeze the money of a given country and ruined their economy and reap suffering upon the people without expanding American lives. Of course, we are quite willing to expand American lives and spending lots of money on weapons to continue funding one of our corporate sponsors, the deaf, merchants, a.k.a. if you can believe it, the defense industry. We haven’t had a defend ourselves since World War II Trump was right on when he returned this department to its original name the department of war.
Why does our government feel compelled to crap on Venezuala? It is none of our business