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As bitter adversaries, the Trump administration and Maduro regime didn’t agree on, well, anything. Except for the fact that the US government wanted Maduro gone.
After that UN meeting, the Trump administration amped up its efforts around the world to isolate and depose the Venezuelan leader, including by levying additional punishing sanctions against his regime. Much of that diplomatic maneuvering played out in public. But the administration also put into motion another, very much secret prong to the US’s regime-change campaign: a covert CIA-run initiative to help overthrow the Venezuelan strongman.
That campaign would pull off at least one disruptive digital sabotage operation against the Maduro regime in 2019. But the CIA-led initiative—alongside the Trump administration’s wider efforts to get rid of Maduro—would fall well short of its ultimate goal. The story of that secret anti-Maduro effort also lays bare the tensions between an administration with hardliners laser-focused on deposing the Venezuelan autocrat and a CIA deeply reluctant, yet nevertheless obligated, to follow White House orders. It shows the limitations of covert, CIA-assisted regime change schemes, particularly when they are not aligned with larger US foreign policy objectives. And it provides new insights into how a second Trump administration—or a Harris presidency—might still try to dislodge the Venezuelan strongman, whose latest sham reelection in July 2024 has again thrust his country into chaos.
The details of that covert CIA-assisted campaign, told exclusively to WIRED by eight Trump administration and former agency officials with knowledge of the anti-Maduro operation, are reported here for the first time.
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The nuance is that American policy since the end of the cold war has been to use soft power to promote democracy. Offer pro-democracy propaganda to oppressed people, and sanction human rights violators. There is no evidence of the US funding insurgents in South America, Ukraine, Russia, or the PRC post-Cold War.
In contrast, Trump ordered the CIA to return to cold-war era coups and just straight-up invade Venezuela.
The first one is admirable and how foreign policy should be conducted, the second one is dangerous and is how America is portrayed in Russian propaganda.
Delusional
You’ve got to be kidding. Two Iraq wars and over a million dead is admirable soft powers to you?
The imperialists in the bush administrations were the exceptions. There was a clear difference in American foreign policy between Bush Jr. and Obama.
It is important to recognize that countries do not have a foreign policy, presidents do. We can only describe trends that the presidents tend to follow. Iraq was not some shadowy CIA cabal, it was George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who had power at the time. If you want to characterize US foreign policy by public polling for support in the war, it is very clear that public support for the Iraq war has evaporated since 2003, which is why the US didn’t intervene in Syria and let Russia and the Kurds duke it out. Fatigue from the Iraq War has also been used by Trump and his supporters to limit military support to Ukraine, NATO, and Taiwan.
Also, the Gulf War is not a good comparison. The Gulf war was a UN-directed intervention in response to the invasion of Kuwait. It was not a invasion coup like 2003.
Relevant video essays regarding American foreign policy post Cold War and the Russian propaganda depicting the US as “coup happy imperialists”:
https://youtu.be/FVmmASrAL-Q?t=1916
https://youtu.be/7OFyn_KSy80
The US didn’t intervene in Syria?
And twelve years of administration out of 35 don’t count because reasons? FFS
Jesus fuck you people are brainwashed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_intervention_in_the_Syrian_civil_war
Obama did not do anything until the airstrikes against daesh, and even then it was very controversial for Obama in the US News. Less than 10000 us special forces have been in Syria, and Assad is still the dictator of Syria. Compare to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc. where the US was in direct conflict with another state.
12 years of administrations don’t count because they’re not Biden, the current president. What the US does right now has nothing to do what it did in 2003. The US foreign policy cannot be 80 years of regime change in South America, because the current US regime didn’t exist before 2021.
Its not brainwashing to defend peaceful democratic opposition to dictators. Who are you going to complain to about imperialism if the US and EU give up on democracy and everybody lives as serfs under the thumb of some warlord?
Also, the entire coup in Ukraine is funding an insurgency against Russia. Venezuela’s narco gang paid protestors both for Guaido and this year’s opposition is insurgency funding. ISIS-K are US allies, FFS. takes a lot of money.
The democratic government of Ukraine is not an insurgency, and the US did not give them weapons until after their neighbor 10x bigger than them, invaded them in an act of pure imperialism in 2014. Are you saying the US should not fund anti-imperalism?
One of Trump’s impeachment was based on a weapons gift for Ukraine, that eventually went through. Merkel/Zelensky faked their anti-nazi reforms of Minsk accords in order to give time for Ukraine to get armed in order to provoke the current war. Ukraine is absolutely a puppet insurgency to diminish Russia as part of US’s pure imperialism. It is the saddest most extreme level of disinformation in history that anyone has an opposite impression of reality.