The criminal kidnapping of compañero President Nicolás Maduro Moros and compañera First Combatant Cilia Flores occurred on the anniversary of the assassination on Donald Trump’s orders of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020. With every crime they commit, the US government and its European accomplices prove they are not worth negotiating with or extending a hand of peace. The attack on Venezuela demonstrates in the most forceful way possible the evil and falsity of the US system of government. The fact that one or another political figure of the US ruling class is president of the country does nothing to change its odious fascist essence. All US governments promote criminal militarism as foreign policy while domestically prioritizing corporate wealth over the legitimate aspirations of their people.

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The essential problem for the majority world is the enormous advantage enjoyed by the criminal collective West compared to the vast majority of the world’s governments that comply with international law, sincerely promote peace and seek to resolve disagreements through dialogue. The consistent practice of Western criminal governments, for decades, has been to feign willingness to dialogue only so as to gain space, time and opportunity to commit yet another barbaric aggression. This way of operating has been clear since the end of the Cold War and the war in former Yugoslavia. Later, it was perfected via the fraud of the Minsk Agreements on Ukraine and again during the negotiations with Iran before the Zionist and US attack in June last year. Now, while President Maduro was relying on dialogue, the US has attacked Venezuela to kidnap him and his wife Cilia.

Click here to read this article in Spanish/Español.

The aggression against Venezuela occurs in the broader context of global bad faith on the part of the US government and its allies in their offensive against the new international order. The assertion is false that the Donald Trump administration seeks peace in Ukraine and is splitting from Europe to focus its attention on Asia and Latin America. Now the CIA openly admits that it is supporting terrorist drone attacks against the civilian population and infrastructure in Russia. The US forces support the terrorist attacks in Ukraine with intelligence and satellite information for targeting. With the approval of their government, US companies continue to sell large quantities of armaments to European intermediary countries for the explicit purpose of their being delivered to Ukraine.

Poland’s Deputy Defense Minister Cezary Tomczyk recently announced that the US government is going to invest US$500 million for the development of infrastructure at US military bases in the country. It is part of a plan to modernize these military bases until 2035 with a counterpart investment from the government of Poland of US$250 million per year. So there is no intention on the US side to abandon its aggressive military posture in Europe against Russia nor the stationing of its nuclear weapons there. They are simply going to demand that the Europe’s peoples pay the cost of the US military presence. In addition, the recent imposition in Ukraine of Nazi sympathizer Kyrylo Budanov as deputy to de facto President Volodymyr Zelensky portends a deepening of the dirty war against Russia since Mr. Budanov is a recognized CIA asset with a military career in the special forces.

There is no limit to the falsehood and duplicity of the US ruling class and its European vassals in their efforts to reverse the development of a multipolar world. They lie to their peoples and lie to their international counterparts in such a way that it is impossible to trust even the most solemn, formal treaties and agreements. In fact, for many years US governments have ensured the expiration of all agreements on nuclear armaments without the least effort to negotiate an extension. The so-called New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the only remaining bilateral arms control agreement between Russia and the US authorities, expires on February 5th this year. Russia’s president has stated that it will always respect the provisions of that treaty if its US counterpart does the same. There has been no response from President Trump’s administration and it is unlikely there will be.

The US has withdrawn from nuclear arms limitation agreements because its armed forces and its industrial base, with or without its NATO allies, are no longer able to prevail in a conventional war against Russia or China nor probably against Iran. This reality means that by losing a direct conventional war against these powers, the US ruling elites and their allies, including Israel, will resort to nuclear war because they are so insane that they would rather destroy the whole world than ever accept losing their accustomed dominance and power. It is clear that Russia has not responded to the aggressive actions of the NATO countries, led by the US government, against its territory because doing so would very probably lead to an escalation spiral that will only end with an exchange of nuclear weapons.

Intertwined with this desire to avoid nuclear war is the imperative for Russia to respect the interests and opinions of other countries and maintain world peace, despite all enemy provocations and the great pressure of public opinion inside Russia itself. For the Russian government, the support of China and India and other countries such as Brazil and South Africa or the ASEAN countries and the Arab countries has been of great economic and diplomatic importance since the beginning of the extreme unilateral coercive measures applied by the collective West in 2014 and intensified in 2022. The US government and its allies have been ruthlessly opportunistic and cynical in taking advantage of this reality to carry out aggressions which, under other circumstances, Russia would have punished heavily.

The same applies in the case of China in relation to blatant Western support for the rebellious government of the Chinese province of Taiwan. China, India and Russia are countries which in contemporary history have promoted peace, avoided provocations and sought to resolve their disputes through negotiation with due recognition of international law. This is a point that the statements of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS+ group of countries always emphasize. Their position contrasts sharply with the collective West’s invocation of its spurious formula of a “rules-based order” which is never defined for the simple reason that the rules are invented and changed from one moment to the next at the whim of the US ruling elites. The clearest example of their cynical, sadistic opportunism is their support for the Zionist genocide of the Palestinian people.

This reality is also clearly evident in the violation by Western pirate countries of the principle of free navigation to the detriment of ships with different cargoes, but mainly oil tankers, from Russia, China and Iran. In response to the attacks on commercial ships carrying Russian cargo, the Russian government has recommended that these ships should sail under the Russian flag and not those of third countries, which may give a measure of protection against arbitrary seizure by the coastguards of Western nations. At the beginning of December, President Vladimir Putin also warned that his country could respond to aggressions against Russian ships, ostensibly committed by Ukraine, with attacks on ships of countries that support Ukraine militarily.

Towards the end of December, China’s coast guard began more intensively patrolling its territorial waters around Taiwan. It is reported that China in the course of this operation has confiscated a ship of a Taiwanese company which was carrying US Himars missiles to Taiwan. On December 25th, Iran seized a foreign oil tanker which it accused of transporting around 25,000 barrels of smuggled fuel. This action followed the seizure of another boat in similar circumstances last November. So, it remains to be seen how the response of Russia, China and Iran to the attacks and seizure attempts against commercial vessels carrying cargoes from their countries develops.

This issue is of especially high importance now in the Caribbean in the context of the US attempt to impose a maritime blockade against Venezuela. In fact, the offensive against Venezuela is just one of several theaters of aggression promoted by the collective West from the genocide of the Palestinian people and the aggression against Iran to the NATO war in Ukraine and the deliberate provocations against China. The U.S. government has ordered its lackey governments in Japan, South Korea and the Philippines to increase their military spending and offensive posture so as to harass China. Against the desperate aggression of the fascist Western elites and their terrorist attacks, Russia, China and Iran have maintained an extraordinary restraint in their foreign policy.

As China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi explained in a year-end address,

“Faced with a turbulent world where peace is threatened, China has acted as an anchor for stability. As the once-in-a-century transformations accelerate, international relations are being reshaped amid turbulence and the risks of conflict or confrontation between major countries are clearly on the rise. China, as a key major country and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, remains committed to upholding world peace.”

In May of this year, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also highlighted the commitment of Russia, China and India to world peace and explained the fundamental problem of the new order of international relations,

“If we are serious about ensuring stability in the system of international relations, we must realize that much depends on the West renouncing efforts to impose its destructive principles and illegitimate ideology so as to begin to abide in good faith by the principles established in the Charter of the United Nations.”

While China and Russia affirm the importance of defending the UN and complying with international law, the collective West acts with increasingly desperate criminality to block the developing new world order. Against strategic allies of Russia and China, such as Venezuela and Iran, it resorts to full-fledged war. While the great powers of the majority world try and work out the best way to act in this new international context of extreme US aggression, the countries of the majority world have no alternative but to unite in defense of Peace.

As our government here in Nicaragua has declared,

“As Brothers and Sisters of this Brave and Noble Our America and Caribbean, we join the Outcry of the entire World, and out of deep rejection we affirm that we will continue to strive for International Law and Sovereignty to prevail. Peace has been deeply wounded and as the Human Family, the Community of Nations, the Peoples of the World, we all urge that it be reinstated as an absolute reflection of the Dignity of the world’s Peoples. We wholeheartedly accompany the call of Venezuela’s Vice-President, Compañera Delcy Rodríguez, to defend Truth, Justice and Life, and demand the immediate release of President, Compañero Nicolás Maduro and Compañera Cilia Flores.”

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This article was originally published on Tortilla con Sal, translated from Spanish.

Stephen Sefton, renowned author and political analyst based in northern Nicaragua, is actively involved in community development work focussing on education and health care. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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