Trump’s bellicose language at face value – including claims that the US wants “to take back the oil … we should’ve taken back a long time ago” – can cause us to miss some of the deeper dynamics at play in the US invasion. Oil is unquestionably key to understanding what is going on, but in ways that go far beyond the direct control of Venezuela’s crude reserves. A must-read analysis by Adam Hanieh
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51