Trump and the Return of the Monroe Doctrine

Behind the neoliberal face of the Pacific Alliance, there is hidden a refined project of geopolitical engineering whose ultimate goal is to dynamite the political integrationist project represented by UNASUR and intensify the policy of isolation of progressive-populist governments in the region, in particular in Venezuela, after becoming an orphan of the alma mater of the Bolivarian Revolution, Chávez. As well as bringing to an end the integration economic project of MERCOSUR, a process of economic integration created in 1991 after the signing of the Treaty of Asunción between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay to which later Venezuela had been incorporated, leaving Bolivia, Columbia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Surinam and Guyana as “associated states”.

This absorbing strategy would have as its objective in the mid-range term to unite the Arco Pacífico in order to integrate in addition Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama and finally incorporate MERCOSUR (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay), following the Kentian theory of “the carrot and the stick” exposed by Sherman Kent in his book Strategic Intelligence for a North American World Politics (1949).

In this book, Kent affirms that “the war is not always conventional, in effect, a great part of the war, of the remote and the closest factors, has always been realized with non-conventional [....]arms [...] political and economic. The class of war in which these are employed [...] is the political and the economic war”.  The goals of these kinds of wars were described by this author as follows: “in these non-conventional wars one attempts two things: weaken the will and capacity of resistance of the enemy and strengthen ones’s own will and capacity to win” and later he adds that the instruments of the economic war “consists of the carrot and the stick”: ‘the blockade, the freezing of funds, the ‘boycott’ the embargo and the black list on the one hand; subsidies, loans, bilateral treaties, exchange and commercial agreements on the other”.

The uncertain future of democracy in Mexico

The journal Foreign Policy published in its January-February 2012 edition an analysis of Brzezinski titled “After America”, where he analyzes the decadence of the US due to the eruption in the global scenario of new geopolitical actors (China and Russia) and the possible collateral effects in international relations. With respect to Mexico, Brzezinski affirms that “the worsening of relations between one America (US) in decline and a Mexico with internal problems could reach levels of threatening scenarios”. Thus, due to the “constructive chaos” exported by the US and taking shape in the war against the narco cartels begun in 2006, Mexico would be a failed state in which the city of Juárez would be the paradigm (the most insecure city in the world with a number of violent deaths superior to the total of Afghanistan in 2009). In order to avoid the increase of anti-US revolutionary movements, they proceed to the intensification of internal instability to complete its total Balkanization and submission to the dictates of the US. Thus, the anti-immigration policy of Trump added to economic protectionism (the end of NAFTA) and the implementation of duties on Mexican products is leading to a severe constriction of exports of Mexican products to the US as well as the entrance of dollar remittances into Mexico, which could suppose an economic and social debacle and unleash frequent outbreaks of social conflict with a clear regression of democratic freedoms and a possible return to scenarios of the intervention of the army “as a guarantee of constitutional order”.

The end of Petrocaribe?

Petrocaribe was created in 2005 on the initiative of Venezuela with the objective of providing combustibles to member countries with advantage conditions of payment, a soft credit and low interest rates integrated by 18 countries (including Honduras, Guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic,Haiti, Belize and some ten islands of the Caribbean). According to the Venezuelan authorities, the county exports 100,000 barrels daily to the countries of the bloc that generates a bill of 4,000 million dollars, part of which is paid in cash and the rest is subsidized. 

The new strategy of the US would be to tighten commercial and military relations with the countries of Petrocaribe in the face of the danger of the mimetic contagion of the Chavist revolutionary ideals as they depend exclusively on the Venezuelan Petrocaribe for their energy supplies.

Beginning with the Dominican President Danilo Medina and in this context, the Obama administration celebrated a summit of Energy Security in the Caribbean in which they insisted on the countries of the region diversifying their sources of energy, to confide more in private investment and thus reduce their dependence on Petrocaribe. For another part, China had assumed the challenge of building the Great Interoceanic Canal in Nicaragua  to get around the straight of Malaca (this straight is vital for China, being the principal route to supply petroleum but which had become “de facto” a maritime route saturated and affected by pirate attacks). Due to this, the US will proceed to destabilize the government of Daniel Ortega within their global geopolitical strategy of drying up Chinese energy sources.

Venezuela as a collateral victim of the US-Russian Cold War?

In Venezuela, we encounter an impossible political cohabitation and almost symmetric division of Venezuelan society that the US will take advantage of to implant the “constructive chaos of Brzezinski” through a systematic and intense destabilizing campaign that includes the selective deprival of articles of prime need, the amplification in the media of the growing insecurity of citizens, and later a petition to the army that it rise to become “Savior of the country.” This is the plan designed by the CIA which, counting on the inestimable logistic help of Colombia (converted into a continental aircraft carrier of the US), could come to finish the post-Chavist regime. Thus, the China-Venezuelan agreement through which the Chinese state petro-chemical enterprise Sinopec would invest 14,000 million dollars in order to achieve a daily production of 299,000 barrels per day from the Orinoco Petroleum Belt (considered the most abundant petroleum source in the world) would be a missile in the flotation line of the global geopolitics of the US (whose unequivocal objective would be to dry up the energy sources of China) for which it would not be out of place for a hand blow of the CIA against Maduro to finish the Chavist legacy.

Brazil and Argentine: The new neoliberal gendarmes of South America

Brazil forms part of the so-called BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and although it is not in the cards that these countries form a political alliance such as the European Union or the Association of Nations of Southeast Asia (ASEAN), these countries have the potential to form an economic bloc bigger than the present G-8 (it is estimated that in the horizon of 2050 they could have over 40% of the world population and a GDP combined of $349,51 billion). The unequivocal objective of Putin was to neutralize the expansion of the US in the southern cone of Latin America and avoid the possible induction of Brazil into the role of “gendarme of the neoliberals” in South America, since Brazil plays a fundamental role in the new geopolitical board designed by the United States for Latin America, since they consider it as an allied power on the global scene on which they could count on support in the Security Council of the UNO as a permanent member, with the consequent increase of the specific weight of Brazil in world geopolitics.

Let us recall that the decision of the Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to postpone her state visit to Washington (a decision backed by the principal advisors of Rousseff, among others her predecessor and mentor Lula de Silva) brought with it the risk of a dangerous confrontation between the two great powers of the American continent. According to Lula: “the Americans cannot support the fact that Brazil has become a global actor and in the end, the maximum that they can accept is that Brazil be subaltern, as it already was”. Thus, Rousseff, after affirming that “illegal espionage represents a violation of sovereignty that is incompatible with democratic cooperation among friendly countries” demanded that the United States provide convincing explications for the reasons of the National Security Agency (NSA) to presumably violate the computer network of the state petroleum company Petrobras and after her energetic discourse at the opening of the 68th General Assembly of the United Nations (UN), she had provoked the enemy status of the Obama Administration that preceded to incite “constructive chaos” in Brazil to destabilize her presidential mandate (impeachment). A military coup was not desirable  nor was implementing a Military Presidential State on the horizon of the next quinquennium.

With respect to Argentina, in the private encounter in Cannes between CFK and Obama in the framework of the G-20 , the Argentinian mandate had not been friendly to the thesis of Obama and had not accepted the resumption of military exercises together with the United States on Argentinian territory coordinated by the US. In fact, this would have involved the rupture of the new military doctrine designed for the region by the governments who signed UNASUR, whose first General Secretary was none other than Nestor Kirchner, through which CFK was converted into an incommodious element for the strategy of the United States. Thus, after the victory of Macri, we encounter Argentina’s entry into the Pacific Alliance, leaving only Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Bolivia as countries unfriendly to the thesis of the US that will proceed to apply the policy of the “big stick” (whose authorship is attributed to the President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt. This is a system that since the beginning of the 20th century has ruled the hegemonic policy of the United States in Latin America, following the Monroe Doctrine and “America for Americans.”