Category Archives: Foreign Policy

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, May 29, 2019:

From a distance the gathering of some 130 wealthy and influential people in Montreux, Switzerland, starting tomorrow looks benign enough. The website of the Bilderberg Group says it’s just “an annual forum for informal discussions, designed to foster dialogue between Europe and North America.… It’s a forum for informal discussions about major issues.… There is no detailed agenda, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken, and no policy statements are issued.”

The group even posts its agenda items, which include “informal discussions” about Brexit, climate “change,” and the future of capitalism. All designed to put any seeker of the truth to sleep.

But a closer look reveals a much darker, more insidious and more dangerous agenda. First,

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, May 16, 2019: 

Following Communist China’s reneging on a pending trade “deal,” President Donald Trump backed away, saying that any deal had to be in America’s best interests or there wouldn’t be any deal: “It must be a great deal for the United States or it just doesn’t make any sense,” he declared. He followed his rhetoric by raising tariffs further on some $200 billion worth of Chinese imports into the United States, and he threatened to place tariffs on the remaining $300 billion worth of imports from China.

Last Friday, Trump upped the ante further by signing an executive order banning the import of telecommunications gear from “foreign adversaries” [read: China]. This was followed by the Commerce Department declaring that it was adding Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, to its list of companies engaged in activities “that are contrary to American interests.” These moves were a belated recognition that, under Beijing’s command, every Chinese entity — individuals and companies — in the United States is tasked to conduct espionage for the homeland. These moves predictably elicited anger from the Chinese communists. One of its mouthpieces, Global Times, roared:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, April 8, 2019:  

During his speech to Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston on Friday, Vice President Mike Pence announced additional sanctions against the rogue Maduro regime running Venezuela: “The United States will continue to exert all diplomatic and economic pressure to bring about a peaceful transition to democracy…. The time has come to liberate Venezuela from Cuba.”

Immediately following his speech, the U.S. Treasury Department levied sanctions on 34 oil tankers owned or operated by PdVSA, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, along with sanctions on two international shipping companies involved in shipping oil from Venezuela to Cuba. Said Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin: “Treasury is taking action against vessels and entities transporting oil … providing a lifeline to keep the illegitimate Maduro regime afloat. Cuba continues to profit from, and prop up, the illegitimate Maduro regime through oil-for-repression schemes as they attempt to keep Maduro in power.… Cuba has been an underlying force fueling Venezuela’s descent into crisis.”

Up until Friday, U.S. sanctions on Maduro and members of his Marxist regime have had little impact. Despite international pressure from more than 50 countries supporting Maduro’s opponent, interim president Juan Guaidó,

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Sunday, March 31, 2019: 

After earlier threatening to end foreign aid to three Central American countries whose citizens make up a large percentage of the caravans overwhelming U.S. border security services, on Friday President Trump directed State Department Secretary Mike Pompeo to cut direct aid to the three countries making up the Northern Triangle: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. At stake is about $500 million in aid.

Said the State Department: “At the Secretary’s instructions we are carrying out the President’s direction and ending FY 2017 and FY 2018 foreign assistance programs for the Northern Triangle.” It noted that it would coordinate these actions with Congress.

The announcement followed a tweet from the president that morning:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, March 13, 2019: 

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made clear exactly what his intentions are: that the closing of the American embassy in Caracas now removes “constraints” that have until now reined in U.S. policies there. Said Pompeo on Tuesday: “Decisions you make are always encumbered by the fact that you know there’s real risk to your own people, people that you’ve sent into harm’s way. We wanted to get them out of the country so that we could move forward in a way that provided that opportunity.”

He added that

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, March 8, 2019: 

In this space on Monday, this writer noted that Venezuela’s Marxist dictator Nicolas Maduro “had a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Month.”

It just got worse.

For the second time in a week,

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, March 7, 2019: 

At 6:40 a.m. Wednesday, four heavily armed agents from Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s military counterintelligence service arrived at U.S. journalist Cody Weddle’s apartment in Caracas with a search order. They arrested him and his assistant, Carlos Camacho, put them in a blacked-out military vehicle, and took them to military headquarters for questioning. The agents ransacked his apartment and removed all of his video-recording and related equipment.

Both were masked and hooded for hours before being questioned about their work. Upon his release afterwards, Weddle said: “They wanted to know about the work I did, who I worked with. They wanted to know what kind of military people I’ve spoken to, what type of opposition politicians I know … who were the opposition politicians I spoke to in the past few days.”

They tried to pressure Weddle into generating some pro-Maduro propaganda as well, guiding his answers while they videotaped his responses. They sought, he said, to get him to say “that Juan Guaido is not the president, and that the [awful] situation [here] is a result of [U.S.] sanctions.”

The New York Times reported that

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, March 4, 2019: 

Nicolas Maduro learned that his vice president came away empty when she went, hat in hand, to see Russia’s president Putin about getting another loan. This was on top of learning that China was negotiating with Juan Guaido’s people about how his new regime would repay the estimated $70 billion they have sunk into Maduro’s failing government.

He suffered a black eye a week ago when he ordered his military to stop humanitarian aid from coming into his country, by force. It fired on unarmed citizens, killing as many as eight and wounding hundreds more. As a result some 600 or more of his soldiers went over to the other side.

He learned that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, sensing a moment of opportunity, called Putin’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Saturday for a “consultation” over Maduro’s rolling catastrophe. He no doubt got angry when he learned that Juan Guaido, the head of the country’s legitimate National Assembly, had somehow escaped the country despite being banned from leaving by his packed Supreme Court.

He must have been frustrated upon learning that

This article appeared at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, March 4, 2019: 

Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro sent his vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, to Moscow last week to see if she could arrange some more financing for Maduro’s failing and cash-starved Marxist regime. She came away with warm words but no cash. Russian president Putin was just too busy to see her and handed her off to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who told her: “We think the best way to help the Venezuelans is to expand practical, pragmatic, and mutual advantageous cooperation.”

Translation:

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, February 25, 2019:

This writer noted last week that the war raging in Venezuela isn’t about oil and it’s not really about the Marxist thug Maduro. It’s about the increasing influence of Cuba and Russia in Venezuela. That article explored Trump’s DNI (Director of National Intelligence) Dan Coats’ unwillingness to recognize that influence:

Coats delivered a presentation before the Senate Intelligence Committee reviewing the “2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment” put together by U.S. intelligence agencies. In that 42-page presentation, all he had to say about Cuba was this:

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, February 18, 2019: 

Why hasn’t Nicolas Maduro performed an “Idi Amin” and moved to Saudi Arabia or Libya or even Russia where his talents as a Marxist thug would be more greatly appreciated? When things started going south for Amin, he fled into exile via helicopter in April 1979, heading first to Libya (where he stayed for a year) and then on to Saudi Arabia (where the royal family not only allowed him sanctuary but paid him a generous subsidy in return for staying out of politics).

He suffered from kidney failure in 2003, and his family pulled the plug on the murderer after being on life support for several weeks. His remains were interred in a tiny cemetery in Jeddah, on the coast of the Red Sea. Few attended the ceremony and fewer still lamented his passing.

Maduro’s Marxist regime should have disappeared months ago for all the sanctions, pressures, and criticism his neighbors have applied to him and his people. For two years, the United States has leveled a steadily increasing campaign against him, starting with sanctions against him and a few of his inner circle.

Those sanctions ratcheted up over time to the point where