 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Professor Ajaz Ahmed and we'll discuss the recent developments in Venezuela and what it portends to the global picture and what I would say is a reemergence of a certain kind of aggressive regime change operations. Ajaz, there are many peculiarities in the Venezuela situation. The chief of this, of course, is that countries outside what I would call a settler colonial countries, the United States and Canada and ex-colonial countries like France, Spain and of course the United Kingdom, deciding who should be the president of an independent country, which of course in this case is Venezuela. Do you find this an attempt to re-contour the world back to a kind of a neo-colonial era? The most interesting part of it to supplement what you're saying is that this process has been going on for about two years and Canada has been a part of it since 2017. That is one major difference that the work for the US is being done was first done with a group of right wing Latin American countries and Canada fronting as the Lima group, which is very concerned about internal affairs in Venezuela and recognizes this, doesn't recognize that, that's all. So that is first layer of it. But what is very extraordinary in it, in my view just pertaining to what you were saying is that there is a global lineup, North America, right wing regimes of Latin America which are on the rise after the pink tide as it was called and virtually all of Europe, Western Europe, minus Italy and things like that, virtually all of it. So Europe's inability to stand up to the United States in this flagrant kind of thing and we'll come to the details of that, that's one side. The other side is Russia, China, South Africa, Turkey, possibly India. So the sort of a rising capitalist countries around the world are on the other side, as is the African Union, as are the left wing governments of Latin America. So it's a global divide. The unity, I mean, the NATO countries plus the Latin American right wing. That's one, you know, it's sort of a global divide like that. The other very great peculiarity in it is that in the former cases where constitutional mechanisms were used in Brazil and Honduras and so on, they actually were used as constitutional procedures. Here what you have is that within two weeks of this appointment of Agüedo by Trump and Pence, the whole story comes out in the Wall Street Journal how it was done, who attended which meetings, who made which phone calls to whom. And in this case, you have this young man standing up declaring himself president after Pence has called him to tell him that he should do so. Trump recognizes him immediately. He makes this announcement as president of the National Assembly, which constitutionally in Venezuela has a defunct organization. But anyway, this is there. He doesn't make that statement in that assembly. That assembly hasn't met. He doesn't have a cabinet. It's a self-magnitude, the great presidency. It's not to be seen anywhere. It's a complete self-magnitude. When they did it in Brazil, it was so spectacularly constitutional. Here the constitutionalist just absolutely in a fig leaf. Two years ago, they said, we don't recognize the constitutional assembly, which was an elected organ from Lima sitting in Peru. And so on. So it is very much like there in Vietnam. You just pick up the guy who will work with you. And then the National Assembly cannot meet because he's not the United candidate of the opposition. He did not even tell his own party that he was going to make this announcement. I mean, he's so very much transparently as too much. So that constitutional mechanisms that were used so blatantly, of course, in Brazil and elsewhere, they at least went through all the steps. This is just blatant. Well, I mean, Wall Street Journal breaks the story of how it was done disapprovingly. Of how you can do this. This Wall Street Journal telling the truth of what happened. It's bizarre. But structurally, what you're seeing is a global divide. But you also see a re-emergence of the confidence of, shall we say, the NATO powers to be able to do this in spite of the fact that there is opposition both within, of course, within Venezuela, resistance if they have an invasion, which I don't think is likely at this stage. But the fact is, if you talk about the media in the West, the NATO countries, if you talk about the civil society in the NATO countries, there is actually a conspiracy of silence. They are all a part of this larger, shall we say, offensive. Yeah, but there's not even a conspiracy of silence. The very strange, you know, sitting in the, when you read the American press and so on, the way they have shifted from one day to the next, it's extraordinary a month before it happened. New York Times was writing very unhappy stories about what is being planned. And as soon as this, it is done, Lido is the leader of the opposition. He can't call the General Assembly because the opposition is not united behind it. He comes from a fringe little party. And the, actually the opposition could not, they could not participate in the elections because it was so divided that it had no chances. It is equally divided about this ghetto boy. As somebody has said, Guaido is the Chalabi. If you take Iraq and Chalabi, that this is- Chalabi is a more recent example of that. My mind went back on the way to Vietnam to DN who was just picked up because he was the only leader of a tiny little thing and made president. But the other thing, sorry to interrupt you. The other thing what I'm seeing actually is not so much confidence. As just pure, you know, aggressivity to grab the oil. You know, you're doing it in such a way that you are dividing the globe and uniting so many people against you. You know, and without a real plan. So far as one can see. Just while that is true, that it doesn't seem to be a long-term successful plan because they don't seem to be in a position to invade Venezuela. I think that would be something they're not willing to do as yet. I don't think Brazil and Colombia are willing to be a part of a military invasion also. So it seems that physically ceasing Venezuelan assets, even the oil assets is going to be not that simple. And we don't see what they expected. They thought with this there will be really a pricing on the streets. That doesn't seem to have happened. And it seems that more people have come out in favor of Maduro. In spite of the fact that the global media is very silent on this. But what I am actually interested in looking at and I just wanted to have your sense of this, that there is no also upsurge against this or in spite of the fact of Wall Street Journalists laid bare what the conspiracy was. But there isn't really the what used to be called a liberal opinion which would take to streets or take to the media saying this is not the right way. Appointing a president from the United States and by colonial, ex-colonial powers and settler colonial powers is not really the right way to go about international relationships in international law. This voice doesn't seem to have been raised. Is that correct or am I mistreating the situation? Well, I mean, I didn't think there I don't think there was any great liberal upsurge of opinion in any public way about when they invaded Libya or when they invaded Syria. There was one before they invaded Iraq but once they invaded it fitted away. You know, this business of Europe what I find new now is that Europe got lined up behind it as the conspiracy was being hatched out. That seems to me to be new. Other than that, in the last 40 years Europe has never defied any decision that the United States has made to overthrow any country. The United States has attempted 68 regime changes in the last 70 years. Europe has never been known to oppose any of them. You know, so that doesn't surprise me but that they lined up behind the United States and then they've been doing absurd things. You have a week within which to announce elections otherwise we'd recognize the other guy. I mean, they made themselves ridiculous but the Western, and I must say not only the Western popular, liberal, whatever classes are politically so quiescent now. There are no demonstrations against anything the hegemon does. There's an incredible amount of dissatisfaction. So if you start, you know, taking opinion polls you would get expressions of that or you go to dissident capturing media. But it's the extreme political passivity, virtual destruction of the public sphere in these countries is very alarming. That's really the point I wanted to focus on that in the context of the Iraq war and the fact that the WMDs were shown to be bogus, the fact that this entire dodgy dossier, et cetera, all this which came out later does not seem to have damaged the credibility of shall we say the state, the United States in this particular case and its regime change operations of the future that there's still all that damage seems to have been very, very transient and it is solidifying again behind the as you said the hegemon. Credibility, I don't know if there is much credibility of this particular kind of government the United States now has it doesn't have credibility about anything at the moment whether in the United States or anywhere else. So, but so I see it as a sort of a political cynicism and withdrawal from politics. As if the setback of the that happened in 1989 and thereafter has wiped out the political sphere in the West. The political parties no longer represent anything. They no longer are left wing parties, right wing parties, social democrats, Christian democrats and so on. So there's a kind of a, so far as that is concerned. But about Venezuela, the lot of the other political media is actually very much up in arms. The, you know, and not only the media that National Lawyers Guild has condemned it, the United Nations Secretary General has said that the UN only recognizes the Maduro government and so on, you know, those kinds of things have happened. But yes, they seem to have a complete license and a complete control over the global media narrative because that is really controlled by Western news agencies and the news feeds. So, you know, you know, you see, I look at all of this and the discussion is not whether what the Western governments are doing is right. The discussion is how legitimate is Maduro's government. So that is the narrative that's playing out, not that whether they can in today's day and age declare themselves as the Roman or the British shall we say vice-roy's or pro-consuls in different parts of the world. But the Senate used to appoint or in the term times of Rome or Britain used to do it, as we know in India. So this kind of imperial overreach is not the narrative. Even in Indian press, the narrative is how legitimate is the Maduro government. The Indian press, you know, that narrative hasn't been there. You know, I mean, when the Iran boy started the Indian press, newspapers used to run pictures of all the fencing equipment that the U.S. was using, various aircraft, this, that and the other, very admiringly of what great technology the United States had, et cetera. So this is very old stuff. I don't think it's very different now. Of course, you know, it has been sort of... Yeah, it's a change in the media, for instance, 50s, 60s, 70s. Actually, global presence of even third world countries media representatives used to be there. We had it from India, we had, for instance, correspondence in different parts of the world, including South Africa, including other parts of Africa, including even in Latin America. But that has completely changed. Now, entirely, the feed comes from Western agencies. 40 years ago, yes, that is true. So this is... This is not recent. So the global narrative, they also is something they are able to control. They've been able to control it now for a long time. They've controlled the narrative of, you know, all the regime changes in the 21st century. They've controlled it completely. So that has not changed, with even the de-legitimization of the U.S. president, Mr. Trump, has not dentered that part of it. This is a state-controlled media. So it doesn't matter who is the president at any given time. It's part of the national security state. You know, there's no media left in India or in the United States. And what is also for, what may be of surprise to a lot of the other people who don't really, who see this, the other part of it is the social media, the big social media platforms are also very much a part of the security establishment or the security state. Yeah, yeah. Yes, most of them, yes. And there is a slow destruction of the European media. There's a gradual destruction of the European media. There's still some decent newspapers in Europe, but the television and so on are going to American media. What is the long-term prognosis, given the fact that there has been at least resistance, as you said, in terms of countries like China, Russia, Turkey, this kind of lineup that is taking place. Do you think that the long-term is going to make a difference to what happens in Venezuela? This lineup is not going to make, I think that much difference because the regime of sanctions and appropriations, something like $13 billion of Venezuelan money has been appropriated already. The UK put, I mean, basically took over the gold deposits of Venezuela two months before this round. So it's not as if they even are, there's any ground, et cetera. So the economic hardship is going to be immense. This is a very classic, in my view, I think the mood is very classic. They will stop the population, they'll break the population, they will break the economy, they will be low-intensity warfare. It's quite possible that all this money that they're appropriating, some of it will be given nominally to Guido. And maybe a lot of that money would be used to pay for the weaponry, et cetera, et cetera. And there might be some sort of ragtag mercenary army in Venezuela to start. And it would be supplied from Colombia, Brazil, et cetera. Informally, many of their officers may join them without announcing it. So there will be a long, slow destruction of Venezuela. How slow? I'm not very sure, but that's the sort of scenario I see, partly because the opposition is still, is not united behind this joker. And the US has to put all of them together and pretend to bring up a general assembly, form an alternative government, this that and the other. So my sense is that what has been usual with the United States in this century for the last 20 years is not to risk too many of their own soldiers. There won't be invasion of that type. If the fighting develops to a certain point, then the US advisors may go in for 5,000 trainers and advisors, that sort of thing. The Syrian scenario, that I think is in the cards. The problem with China and Russia is just the physical distance, that breaking an embargo of that magnitude in which Western Europe itself is participating would be just logistically very not feasible. So they won't be able to do much. They'll do what they can, but they won't be able to do much. Inside Latin America, the only major country that's on the side of Venezuela is Mexico. And that, for them, things are very precarious. Also, I mean, the Trump administration will do anything it can to undermine that government. So my sense is that you are in for two or three years of low-intensity warfare. I don't see an American invasion. Americans are not going to risk their troops in a country in which about there are six million or so people who want to fight for their lives. So it's not the Iraq scenario. This will be very serious. This is not Iraq or Syria, I was going to say. This is not the Iraq scenario, but... About 40% of the population will fight. So this is not the Iraq scenario, but the Syrian scenario of low-intensity war supported from arms from the side. From the side of the Americans. Americans. But you see, none of these Arab countries was the population going to fight. Unlike in Venezuela. Venezuela, 40% of the population will fight for their lives. So the Sylvester's, in that sense, are the difference. Yeah, that is a very, you know... So Americans are not going to put there, as they call it, boots in the ground. Thanks Ajaz for being with us, explaining to us the larger context with which this is taking place and the differences between Venezuela and the other countries where regime change has been in operation or has been practiced. We will continue to discuss with you this and other issues. Thanks very much. This is all the time we have for NewsClick today. Do keep watching NewsClick and our other programs.