Why I Distrust Trump’s Takeover of Venezuela

3 January 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Did Eisenhower’s coup-grab of Iran in 1953, overthrowing the progressive elected Mossadegh for the benefit of private oil companies, help the Iranian people, or did it instead rob them and subject them to 26 years of the fascist U.S-imposed Shah’s torture chambers?

Did Eisenhower’s coup-grab of Guatemala in 1954, overthrowing the elected Arbenz for the benefit of America’s United Fruit Company, help the Guatemalan people, or did it instead subject them to an unending succession of, first, unelected fascist dictators, and, then, elected fascist ones, ever since then?

Did Lyndon Johnson’s still-covered-up-by-Wikipedia extremely brutal coup-grab of Indonesia in 1965, overthrowing the progressive general Sukarno for the benefit of America’s and UK’s corporations, help the Indonesian people, or did it instead subject them to an unending succession of, first, unelected fascist dictators, and, then, elected fascist ones, ever since then?

Did Nixon’s coup-grab of Chile in 1973, overthrowing the elected progressive Arbenz for the benefit of ITT and other U.S. corporations, help the Chilean people, or did it instead subject them to an unending succession of, first, an unelected fascist dictator (Pinochet), and, then, elected ones, ever since then?

Did Obama’s coup-grab of Ukraine in 2014, overthrowing the democratically elected internationally neutralist Yanukovych for the benefit of U.S. corporations that want to control Russia next door, help the Ukrainian people, or did it instead subject them to, first, a civil war by the newly imposed fascist U.S.-controlled Ukrainian regime bombing its rebelling region, followed ultimately in 2022 by a defensive invasion of Ukraine by Russia itself, to stop — block completion of — the U.S. regime’s plan to decapitate the Russian Government from within Ukraine and so to take over Russia?

All of those were just some of the U.S. coups, but the U.S. Government also engages routinely in “gunboat diplomacy” (such as Trump just did in Venezuela) to achieve by purely military means what it has repeatedly failed to achieve by sanctions, subversions, coup-attempts, and other ‘kinder’ means.

In NONE of the instances did the people in the taken-over-by-the-U.S. captive nation benefit from what the fascist U.S. Government had done to it; and none of those nations has recovered from it; and ALL of this fascism by the American Government started on 25 July 1945, which was when the U.S. Government became taken over by what we call its “Deep State” or the billionaires.

U.S.-and-allied billionaires’ corporations will now be sucking the life’s blood out of the Venezuelan people, who will be ruled first by Trump’s appointees, and then by giving the Venezuelans elections between political contestants all of whom will have passed muster by the U.S. regime as being suitable to serve as the U.S. regime’s stooge-leaders there.

According to a January 3rd Reuters article “Explainer: Was the US capture of Venezuela’s president legal?”, it was illegal, but, “given the lack of enforcement mechanisms in international law,” Trump has nothing to fear from that. This “lack of enforcement mechansims in internationnal law” is referring actually to the lack of enforcement mechanisms in the U.N., and is the huge difference between the U.N. that FDR, the U.N.’s inventor and initial designer, was designing, versus the one that his immediate successor Truman delivered. All of the talk during the past few decades, about producing “a multipiolar world,” misses the point: Unless there will be a world government that possesses all three parts of a Government — Executive, Legislative, and Judicial powers — each of which includes its own and effectively unchallengeable enforcement mechanism — we are heading straight into World War Three, which is EXACTLY what FDR had begun, on 11 August 1941, to plan his U.N. so as to PREVENT. He was right about that — that BOTH of the world wars had started as competitions between competing empires, and so ALL empires and imperialisms MUST BE REPLACED BY A FULLY FUNCTIONING WORLD GOVERNMENT — but even today the historians seem to be blitheringly oblivious not only to this reality, but to the fact that FDR was devoting the last five years of his life to planning such a U.N., a U.N. which would BE the world’s federal Government of nations and be responsible for ONLY international laws and NOT for ANY merely NATIONAL laws. For example: even today, there is, in international law, no clear definition for the two most crucial terms in international law, “aggression” versus “defense.” When FDR died, his planning died, and even that he was planning it — and so, too, WHY he was planning it — is still being ignored.

What Trump did today is simply to continue, as all U.S. Presidents except JFK after FDR have BEEN DOING, to assert THEIR dictatorially imposed “international rules-based order” as replacing the farce that exists today of ‘international laws’. And America’s billionaires benefit enormously from this. But all the world’s peoples suffer enormously from it.

Obviously, China and Russia, if not ALL of the BRICS nations, should pick up and continue on from where FDR had left off, on this, because, certainly, the U.S. won’t — and none of its many colonies (‘allies’) can. Because, otherwise, there WILL be a WW3.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.