 Hello and welcome to NewsClicks International Roundup. This week, we discussed the latest U.S. coup in Venezuela against the government of Nicolas Sotirou. To talk more on this topic, we have with us, Prabir Prakash, the editor-in-chief of NewsClick. Hello, Prabir. Prabir, so let's look at the facts, basically. First of all, we do know that the U.S. and the Western countries are trying to say support a coup, saying that the elections are unfair and therefore guido. One guy, guido, is actually the legitimate president. Although other Western experts, including Jimmy Carter himself, have certified that Venezuela is one of the most fairest electoral processes ever. And this is after Nicolas Maduro has taken power after a free and fair election. And there's been large amount of popular support and popular participation. Rallies are happening all over the country in his support. The military has also expressed support for Maduro as well. So on the face of it, it seems yet another provocation, yet another attempt by the U.S. just to stir things up in the region. But if you go a little more deeper, we have the protagonist of this coup, Juan Guido, who, if we look further into his record, turns out to be part of a long-time program, basically, to establish regime change in various parts of the world. So how do you see this in the context of earlier U.S. attempts? And there have been other U.S. support to other coups before also in the region, as well as to dictators in Venezuela. So how do you see the emergence of this almost unknown figure, Guido, as part of this larger politics of the U.S. in the region? Guido, if we subtract Venezuela internal politics out of this, and as you said, Guido was a part of a violent right-wing attempt for the last three, four years to overturn the legitimate government of Venezuela. If we take that out, let's look at the external part of it, which is really what the U.S. and its allies have been doing. U.S. regarded Latin America as its backwater, and that was the Bondardoctrine. They didn't really want anybody to come in over there. It supported military coups earlier. Of course, the most bloody of this was the Pinochet coup. So all of this history is now known. And it's also true that the left had made in the few years before significant advances in Latin America, Bolivia, of course, Venezuela, and also other Brazil itself under Lula, and even in Argentina. So there have been a set of left-wing or, shall we say, more radical governments which came in to replace what would have been earlier oligarchies or fairly right-wing subservient governments to the United States. Now, we could argue that West Asia took the U.S. attention away from the region, which has now come back. So you have a stirring of the pot. You have had constitutional coups in different places. Brazil, of course, we had the constitutional coup in that Lula was not allowed to contest. So this is a part of the larger unfolding of the process in which, instead of direct military coups, we are seeing attempts at what I would call constitutional coups in the region. Now, when you come to Venezuela, the attack was always from Colombia. If you remember, Colombia and Venezuela, it is standoff under Chavez. Of course, we had the 2002 coup attempt by the United States. But if you see, Colombia was always being used against Venezuela. And we had, again, a more right-wing government taking over in Colombia. And we have Bolsonaro in Brazil. So this is a mold in the United States to set the process of an attempted coup in Venezuela at the moment, of which Guaido is really the cat's paw. I mean, he is clearly a creature of the United States, programmed, and his entire policies are laid down essentially again from the United States. Very much an American creature. And therefore, seems to, doesn't seem to have too much credibility, even within the right in Venezuela. But the point is really not that. The point is that you have this entire constellation of international forces, which under the leadership of the United States, even today, feels emboldened to try and unseat an existing government. And if we accept the principle that the US and its allies will decide what is legitimate government or not, I think we are in for, shall we say, abandoning completely the United Nations, the law of international law. And all of the paraphernalia, which the United States claims to uphold, unless it comes to its own actions. And of course, as we know, its own actions in the region, in different parts of the world, have always violated the United Nations, shall we say, rules as well as international law. But when it comes to others, the international laws have to hold. But when it comes to United States, you have the US law of exceptionalism, that it is above all of this. And I think Venezuela is again an unfolding of that kind of a process. And it's interesting you mentioned this because the UN has refused to, of course, sanction Guaido's so-called attempted power. Even the OAS for that matter, which is long been a play area for the US, has also refused to do so. And even the Lima Group, which consists of the most conservative governments in that region, refuses to condone a military intervention. At the same time, we have all these, say, civil society institutions, institutions for promoting democracy, the liberal media in the US, which have all jumped to the support of what do you call Guaido and this school. And this points to a much more larger set of forces it worked to, for instance, forces which have for the longest time been promoting democracy, color revolutions in many parts of the world as recent reports have indicated. So, and even the New York Times, for instance, today has Guaido penning an oped talking about freedom and democracy. So we see a wide establishment of forces both in the governmental and the non-governmental sectors working with this agenda. It's also interesting when you talk about what are the kind of forces that the Western powers have been able to master today. And I think it's important to register that they have reworked how to hegemonize the global public opinion by a number of instruments. And those instruments are of course the Western news agency, the primary one. These new agencies today function essentially at the behest of the US government. And you have basically the Reuters, the AP, the AFP, which carry out the ideological war, shall we say, against the opponents of the erstwhile imperial and the current imperial power, which is the United States. So this is one part of it. The second part of it, let's talk about the constitutional coup that we earlier talked about. Guaido doesn't have any constitutional basis for his attempted declaration of himself as a president. So this is purely a paper strategy. Even the specific provision of the constitution, which he refers to, is only applicable if the president is not available or the president is completely incapacitated. So all of this shows that the instruments of legitimization of imperial hegemony, imperialist hegemony has regained some of the powers it had lost, say in the last 20, 25, 30 years. And in the last 10, 15 years, they seem to have regrouped. And even after the Iraq war, which was exposed as completely fraudulent, there were no WMDs in Iraq, that you can still get again and again this kind of myth making, whether it be Libya, whether it be Syria and now Venezuela, all of this myth making masquerading as alter reality. And when you talk about fake news and the kind of fake news that we are supposed to be fighting against. And you see the West and its new agencies are the biggest pervaders of fake news when it comes to their imperialist interest or their imperial interest, and that's an interesting observation. All the organs that of shall we say subversion that we talked about. We know they're funded by National Endowment of Democracy. They're funded by the State Department of the United States. They're funded in various ways by institutions which are closely linked to the US state and its external policies. So all of that, and there's been a detailed report in Grey Zone project, various other places. All of this really spell out that the US imperialism and its ability to control the global narrative has not weakened after the Iraq war was exposed as fraudulent, the WMDs as fraudulent. But still is as powerful as it was because the institutions which created the hegemony still remains hegemonic, still remains very strong. The planning behind this coup actually takes us to another key point, that's oil. So a lot of reports have talked about what the US strategy was. And there seems to be no strategy because it seemed to be install Guaido and let's see what happens or try to push Guaido and let's see what happens. And a lot of reports indicate that maybe it was the lure of oil that prompted Donald Trump to actually sanction this venture because Trump has earlier gone on records saying that we should have asked Libya for its oil for intervening as well. And Venezuela is the largest oil reserves in the world. And of course, John Bolton openly declared that it would be great for the US economy if international companies could invest in, say, Venezuelan oil reserves. So we see that the politics of oil which sometimes people criticize for saying everything you consider to be something issue about oil, but it's very much still there right now. In fact, the issue is really before what happened when the Venezuelan economy really crashed. And one of the reasons Venezuelan economy crashed is earlier, it was very much based on petrodomers. It has a huge reserve of oil, it's one of the largest reserves of oil in the world. It is also quite close to the United States, so it exports oil for certain refineries in the United States. And it's not really true that US is as self-sufficient in oil as it is claimed. They still require crude oil to be brought to United States. And this has meant that if the oil prices crash, the Venezuelan economy is vulnerable. And with the economic war against Venezuela, the loss of the oil inflows because of the price of the oil crashing made the Venezuelan economy did weaken. And the economic war by the US and other powers did take a heavy toll on Venezuela. So their understanding was if we can create a situation where the government seemed to be legitimate because it cannot control its own economy. So the economic war will lead to this growth of unrest and then to an uprising, which then will be called a color revolution. It was also called a green revolution in Iran, if you remember. And it was exactly the same lines that would stifle Iran's economy with sanctions. And then this is what will happen, the people will rise up and overthrow. And they were expecting, given the fact that the economy, Venezuelan economy is in deep distress, they are expecting an upsurge. But that upsurge happened in 2016-17. It doesn't have any steam today. And Guaido is probably a very unpopular representative of what happened in 2016-17. So that's an internal part. But the external part, their ability to sink the Venezuelan economy in through this economic war is something that that power the United States and its allies still have. And the fact that after this, the UK has seized gold reserves of Venezuela and the UK banks and the United States is now seizing its oil resources. The refinery and whatever money it owed the Venezuela, it's also seizing. Saying this now belongs to Guaido, who is the legitimate president. This is downright robbery. And if you remember the Iran case, this is exactly what the US did with Iran as well. The point was at the time there did not seem to be much more, very many alternatives for countries like Iran. Today, for all countries will take lesson of Venezuela. The issue will be after Iran and Venezuela, where should these countries keep their reserves? Should they keep it in dollars? Should they keep it in yuan? Should they keep it in a mixture of currencies? Should they use only the ruble and yuan to trade? Are questions that the world economies have to actually address? But I do think that increasing use of these measures mean that long-term stability of the dollar as the primary instrument of global trade is also going to be threatened. And I don't think this is going to be one in which the US is going to come unscathed because of the financial pain it's going to inflict on Venezuela by these measures. And since you mentioned the ruble and the yuan, the situation has also seen Russia and China take a strong stand in support of Maduro. So in that sense, there is still some hope as far as multi-polarity is concerned because the United States is not able to push its will entirely, especially in the United Nations, which is a key forum for deciding all these factors. You know, it would have been much easier for other countries if it was not Venezuela. Venezuela's largest trade is the region. So therefore, for others to help with trade is not going to be that simple. Secondly, if you see the map, it's closest neighbors of Brazil and Colombia. So therefore, that also puts extra pressure on Venezuela. And therefore, the Venezuelan economy has been more vulnerable to such pressures and the fact that do not have a diversified economy. You see, Iran diversified heavily under sanctions, but Venezuela hasn't managed to do that level of diversification also because its links are largely in the region. And therefore, it didn't really have the kind of, you know, flexibility that Iran had. And that makes Venezuela's economy more vulnerable. And I think that's what we're really seeing. But I don't, as I said, I think the real issue is that how will oil be in the future traded and how will countries who see the hostility of the United States, if they cross the United States in some way, how will these countries react in terms of looking at dollar itself is I think a big question we are going to see with what has happened. And of course, we are going to see does the international law have any sanctity today, given the fact that the Western powers and of course, led by the United States doesn't give any credits to it if they want to make either do a regime change, invade a country or do illegal seizure of financial resources of another country. Right. Thank you, Prabhupāda. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching NewsClick.