Towards the end of WW2, after Germany’s surrender, the US Navy was still receiving a beating from the Japanese Army in Asia, with their Kamikaze warfare techniques.
So, the Americans approached the Soviets for help.
“Now that we have won in Europe, how are we to divide the spoils?”;
“We didn’t win”, Stalin said, “I did! And I want half of Europe”. Americans were in no position to bargain. Stalin was right.
They said: “ok, but you must help us in Asia. Stalin accepted with the same tariff: “I want half of it”.
So Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill met in Yalta to define the post-war world order, and there was born the idea of a “United Nations”.
“How many battalions will this outfit have? How many navies, how many aircraft”? Stalin asked.
They said, “oh no, it is just a ‘Kigali Talks’: A Think Tank group. No power”.
He said: “oh, ok, create it, I don’t mind”.
When they discussed its Security Council, Churchill wanted someone to serve as a buffer between him and the Germans, whom he still feared, so he suggested one of the defeated nations: France. That’s how France made it to the Security Council. Other than balancing German power in Europe, France’s role was to deal with all the French-speaking colonies in the Third World. For anyone wondering the purpose of the pen-holder at the UN, here is your answer; So is the answer to the sterile debates about “Reforming the talkshop that is the UN”: a Private property of Stalin and Truman, with Churchill as an extra, and Chiang Kai-shek and De Gaulle as accidental gate-crashers.
In China, Mao had just done his Long March with the help of Stalin and chased pro-Japanese Chiang Kai-shek. Kai Shek exiled himself to Taiwan and took with him the flag and international recognition, with the support of Americans who didn’t appreciate the advent of communism in mainland China.
Josephine Stalin delivered on his promise and helped America fight Japan. When they defeated Japan in Korea, Stalin took half of it, the same thing with Vietnam. They were to divide the whole of Asia half/half.
Fighting on two fronts: one against the Soviets and another against the Americans, Japan was soon exhausted, and it started negotiating the terms of its surrender.
As it turns out, all three superpowers, namely Germany, the USSR, and the USA, had been secretly developing the Atomic Bomb, when America made a breakthrough and conducted successful test of their bomb – mainly helped by the merging of their own research team, the captured Nazi researchers and fleeing Jewish researchers, who had brought with them their missing piece of the research puzzle.
And just like that, the power dynamics had just totally shifted in America’s advantage.
With FDR’s death, his Vice President, Harry Truman, who had taken over, then saw no point in sharing the spoils of war with the USSR, but he couldn’t threaten his main ally, Joseph Stalin. So America decided to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to let the Soviets know that the power had changed and America was no longer interested in sharing Japan with them anymore.
Truman even tried to retake the half of Korea that he had given to Stalin, so they armed South Korea, but Stalin called in his ally Mao’s help. The Chairman mobilized One Million men, and South Korea was defeated at the 38th parallel north (latitude 38° N), the beef between North and South Korea starts from there.
Anyway, WW2 ended like that, and four years later, Stalin discovered his own bomb, and the Cold War began.
I have told all this history of war to impress upon the reader that no one is interested in Venezuela, in Maduro, his wife, and their oil. Other than bombing the recalcitrant Latin American nation with an atomic bomb, the next thing with a nuclear effect was to arrest its sitting president and first lady and parade them on live Television. But the poor Latin Americans and their country are just pawns in the chess game between America and China.
America is telling China: “You have emboldened many countries, Russia is chief among them, to think that they can turn against us. We can destroy all of them and you next, and there is nothing you can do about it”. And to the rest of the world: “Listen, you all: Only Israel, our firstborn, can do as they please, at times annoy us. The rest of you are our slaves, China included!”
America has more untapped oil than Venezuela. It has access to oil from its ally, Saudi Arabia. Electric Vehicles (EVs) or New Electric Vehicles (NEVs), as China calls them, represent approximately 20% in comparison to Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles. But the NEV market share is increasing fast, projecting to completely phase out ICE cars in the next 10 years at most.
Venezuela’s Oil is only an accessory to the strike and a perfect alibi to galvanize the acceptability of the whole operation to the American public. Oil isn’t as important as it used to be since 1973.
In the era of social media soundbites and populist journalists, the quality of intelligence has dwindled, while analysis is absent, especially among big news channels. The Oil analysis is plausible, easily consumed by the public, but outdated by about fifty years, I am afraid.
Maduro, his wife, the drug charges, and even Venezuela itself are as subsidiary as was Japan to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombing, sadly. Trump’s operation in Caracas is an American power play against China, whose high-level officials were coincidentally in Caracas at the time of the strike.
Trump has just delivered on his campaign promise: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!