Murat Sofuoglu
Venezuela election sparks geopolitical feud between US, China and Russia
Whether incumbent President Nicolas Maduro holds on to power could very well depend on his allies, and the result could have global ramifications.
MURAT SOFUOGLU
One week after Venezuela held its presidential election on July 28, the United States and its rivals China and Russia are taking sides in the debate over who actually won power in the South American state, which has had an anti-Western socialist leadership under President Nicolas Maduro.
The US contests the official results declared by the National Electoral Council (CNE), the country’s election oversight authority, which said that Maduro won 51 percent against opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia’s 44 percent.
Meanwhile China and Russia are standing by the incumbent president.
According to the US-backed opposition, Gonzalez won the presidency with a large margin. He has called for protests against Maduro, and anti-government demonstrations have been raging across Venezuela since the CNE’s declaration of election results. Maduro described the unrest as a far-right conspiracy against his government.
Venezuela’s election has also divided Latin America, where pro-Western governments from Argentina to Peru, Panama and several other states rejected the official result. Countries like Cuba, which have socialist leaderships, have backed Maduro’s reelection.
“At present, Maduro’s victory has received congratulatory messages from left governments in the region including Cuba, Nicaragua, and Bolivia and critical reactions from the US and European countries,” said Richard Falk, a leading international relations expert.
Meanwhile, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, the three critical Latin American countries with leftist or left-leaning governments, have distanced themselves from the US position. These nations have important interactions with both Russia and China, and oppose external interference to address the Venezuelan impasse.
But the three states also called on Caracas to release details of election results, urging an internal “institutional solution”. Caracas says that a hacking attack prevents the electoral oversight body from releasing detailed outcomes as its website continues to be down.
History of tensions
Venezuela has seen at least two failed coup attempts against anti-Western governments since the Bolivarian Revolution in 1999, which was launched by Venezuelan socialist leader Hugo Chavez, who passed away in 2013 which brought his protege Maduro to power.
The Bolivarian revolution refers to Simon Bolivar, a 19th-century Venezuelan leader who was instrumental in achieving the independence of some South American states from Spanish rule. Like Bolivar in the past, Chavez and later Maduro along with their allies have aimed to form an anti-Western socialist bloc across the region.
“The natural stance of the opposition and of countries (Western powers) is to oppose Madurismo-Chavismo,” said Juan Martin Gonzalez Cabañas, a researcher at Moscow State Linguistic University (MSLU) and a Eurasia specialist at the Argentine-based Center of Studies “Soberanía”.
Madurismo-Chavismo refers to the ongoing leftist governance in Venezuela since the Bolivarian revolution. So far, at least two failed coup attempts were launched against the Venezuelan socialist leadership.
In 2002, US-linked forces ousted Chavez for a brief time from power, but in a dramatic reversal, much of the military loyal to Chavez restored him to power after a tense 47 hours. In 2020, there was another failed coup attempt against Maduro’s government. This one was orchestrated by Jordan Goudreau, a US Green Beret, who was recently arrested by the US in New York for arms smuggling.
“More or less impartial commentators believe that the political outcome will depend on whether the Venezuelan armed forces continue to back Maduro and whether the opposition is militant and organised enough to threaten the survival of the Maduro government,” Falk told TRT World.
Cabanas assesses that Western powers’ antagonist relationship with Maduro and their approach to his reelection bid are clearly related to their political interests. “A [Venezuelan] government opposed to Chavismo would be more functional to their objectives,” he told TRT World.
Russia and China weigh in
On the other hand, the Kremlin is on the side of Maduro, “firmly” backing him and the outcomes of elections that recognised him and his government as winner of elections, according to Cabanas.
China, which has already congratulated Maduro on a third term following the release of election results, also reiterated its support for the socialist leader.
“China will, as always, firmly support Venezuela’s efforts to safeguard national sovereignty, national dignity and social stability, and firmly support Venezuela’s just cause of opposing external interference,” President Xi Jinping said last week.
Both Chavez and Maduro have been long aligned with the anti-Western camp, ranging from Russia to China and regional leftist states like Cuba to counter US influence in Venezuela.
But Caracas faces a serious economic recession under US-led sanctions, which has led more than 7.7 million Venezuelans to migrate to other countries, particularly the US, since 2014.
It’s difficult to present a fair assessment of the elections because “they are being undertaken in a country that operates in a state of economic siege and hostile relations with the United States,” said Alexander Moldovan, a researcher on social movements and security in Latin America at York University.
“Democracy and national security are difficult to balance,” Moldovan told TRT World, referring to the Venezuelan political dilemma. He sees that the country’s post-election process will be difficult as both pro-government and opposition forces have been entrenched into their firm positions.
Prior to the election, Maduro has shown his flexibility and held talks with Washington to address the two countries’ differences, aiming to reach an agreement to ease sanctions.
“Although Maduro’s victory is a win for the counter-hegemonic powers that counterweights the West, this fact should be measured in its proper context: Venezuela is facing an economic recovery after very hard years, and Chavismo is no longer an ideological ‘export brand’ as it used to be, at least in its region (South America/Latin America),” Cabanas added.
Madurism and regional socialist trends
Falk said he believes that Madurism’s future might depend on how “governments with progressive credentials, such as Colombia, Brazil and Mexico, will influence” its perceptions outside Venezuela if the socialist leader’s reelection is “sustained in a future period that is bound to be turbulent.”
The three countries are part of BRICS, a non-Western alliance, and have not sided with the Western stance, as Brazil’s leftist President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva said he found “nothing abnormal” in the election process.
“If Maduro manages to hold on, and especially if he gains support from Brazil and other moderate governments, it will be interpreted as a setback for ideologically motivated US coercive diplomacy, including an effort to exert political influence by imposing sanctions unilaterally,” Falk said.
But if the opposite political scenario becomes a reality, then Maduro’s exit and opposition success could be perceived “as allied with the right and the beneficiary of US intervention,” according to Falk. This perception would essentially empower leftist tendencies in Latin America, “not so much for the sake of socialism or electoral integrity, but to assure sovereign rights and resistance to foreign intervention, especially on behalf of capitalist vested interests.”
The professor also drew attention to the media’s use of political language when it comes to internal settings and processes of anti-Western states like Venezuela.
While pro-Maduro forces describe María Corina Machado Parisca, a leading opposition leader, and Gonzales, as the leaders of “right-wing” or “far-right” groups, “the liberal media never uses this language, painting the struggle as between “autocratic” and “democratic” tendencies,” he said.
On the other hand, “Maduro describes his movement as one on behalf of the people, especially the poor and marginalised, rarely speaking of ‘socialism’ as the inspiration or goal,” he added.
SOURCE: TRT WORLD
Murat Sofuoglu
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
Denouncing Socialism, Practicing Fascism
8 FebDenouncing Socialism, Practicing Fascism
With Trump the silences are usually as expressive of his intentions as the incoherent dogmas. Indeed, his Second State of the Union Address (delivered in Congress on February 5, 2019) gives a clear insight into the political mentality of tormentor in chief when it comes to the human condition. The speech contains many tensions, but none more illuminating than his denunciation of socialism and his silence about the resurgence of fascist tendencies throughout the world, and not least in his own country, which he several times anointed that night as the best the world has ever known. He not the first leader to make such a claim, of course, but he is undoubtedly the least qualified, and his own two years of faulty leadership has contributed to making America far less admired, and far more feared, than previously.
His diatribe against socialism had at least two targets: First, the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party now personified by the more radical recently elected women in the House of Representatives, especially Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as the declared female presidential aspirants, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Tulsi Gabbard. And secondly, the Madura elected government in Venezuela, which he alleged failed because of its ‘socialist policies.’ Trump contends that these policies transformed Venezuela from being a wealthy example to the rest of Latin America into a society of ‘abject poverty and despair.’
When it comes to the United States, to contend that there is an incipient ideological war between the Democrats as the party of socialism and the Repuiblicans as the party of capitalism, Trump seems to be launching a more virulent version of the Cold War than what existed during the period of rivalry with the Soviet Union. It also overlooks the persistence of the toxic ‘bipartisan consensus,’ that owes its zombie-like persistence to the Faustian Bargains struck with both political parties that merge support for global militarism with that of capitalism as reinforced by the dysfunctional ‘special relationship’ to Israel. There is no current intimations that the Democratic Party will field a ticket for the 2020 elections that will challenge this consensus.
The media liberal mainstream, as might be expected, ignores the bipartisan consensus that has by now inscribed anti-socialism in its digital DNA. A typical reaction is that of Chris Cuomo, the unabashedly anti-Trump CNN news program host who warns the Democrats not to fall into the supposed trap set by Trump. Cuomo advises the Democrats that they would be making a potentially fatal mistake if they would be so foolish as to try to defend ‘socialism’ as a desirable option for American voters.
Of course, the more progressive views articulated by these Democratic presidential hopefuls, as well as by Stacey Adams who the DNC wisely chose for a formal response to Trump’s speech, is not socialism in any meaningful sense. It does not propose shrinking the private sector by shifting the ownership of the mainsprings of production and services to the public sector, that is, to government control. Trump, knowingly or more likely unknowingly, confused ‘socialism’ with a politics of empathy for the American people. Empathy under current conditions means such humane policies as affordable health care for all, highly subsidized higher education and student debt relief, equitable taxation, environmental and climate change sanity, drastically reduced military spending, and vastly increased infrastructure investment. I would add to this list an end to regime change geopolitics, a reduced global military profile, and an upgrading of respect for international law and international institutions, especially the United Nations.
To denounce socialism as unamerican is something never done even during the ideological hysteria of McCarthyism that disgraced the nation at the height of the Cold War. Trump’s language seems intended to brand those who espouse socialism by name or even by their platforms as subversive adherents of a faith alien to American values and traditions: “..we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence — not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free.”
It may be helpful to recall that during the Great Depression the Socialist Party under the leadership of Norman Thomas was a respected and formidable presence on the American political landscape, widely praised by many non-socialist for pushing New Deal Democrats to adopt more compassionate policies toward the poor and unemployed precisely to weaken the appeal of socialist alternatives. For those of us old enough to remember, there are few active in American political life then or now more imbued with American values and our better angels than Normal Thomas. To assert, as Trump did, that socialism is unamerican is to insult the memory of this great American.
Perhaps, most serious of all, was the seemingly deliberate misidentification of the ideological threat actively undermining authentic American political, economic, social, and cultural traditions, institutions, reputation, and morale. It is the fascist threat that is real, and the socialist alternative that is contrived by Trump for inflammatory and insidious purposes. The celebration of militarism, bonding with autocratic oppressors around the world, the demonizing of immigrants and asylum seekers, war mongering toward Iran, challenging the rule of law, and ultra-nationalist versions of patriotism that are threatening the future of America, not fascism. The perversion of values and the neglect of the real interest of the American people was notably symbolized by several striking silences in Trump’s long speech: he found no time to include a sentence about climate change, gun violence, and predatory warfare in Yemen.
If we are to restore humane republicanism in America it will require not only a repudiation of Trump and Trumpism but also a rejection of the bipartisan consensus and deep state geopolitics. This means we must hope that the next American president will be a truly progressive female candidate who breaks free of the consensus and is not embarrassed by an ardent embrace of social and political justice for allAmericans and a global outlook that is responsive to urgent long-term challenges (climate change, nuclear disarmament topping the list) and to the immediate crises calling for international cooperation of an unprecedented scale, a move in the direction of moral globalization(migration, famine, crimes against humanity).
Tags: 2020 elections, Americanism, fascism, Norman Thomas, Socialism, State of the Union, Trump, Venezuela