Retired U.S. Gen. Laura Richardson, infamous for her constant refrain as head of the U.S. Southern Command (2021-2025) that the natural resources of Ibero-America and the Caribbean should be for the exclusive use of the United States, heartily endorses the Trump administration’s attack on Venezuela and kidnapping of its President. This story is not about oil, but about U.S. national security, she declared Jan. 8. Venezuela, which falls within the “1st and 2nd island chain” of U.S. security interests, had been “allowed” to harbor U.S. rivals and adversaries, the “axis of aggressors” of Russia, China and Iran, as she calls them. But no longer.
Richardson spoke on an online forum organized by the Establishment war party’s U.S. Council on Global Security (USGLC), in which the other speaker was Council on Foreign Relations President Emeritus Richard Haass. Haass, a Kissinger-type, who rejects the premise that Ibero-America is all that important to history anyway, was more reality oriented. His skepticism about the military operation and what comes next included rejecting the idea that the U.S. is running Venezuela. You can’t run a country offshore, he pointed out. He raised the question also: Are we proposing to roll back history to before the 1970s energy nationalism, when nations’ oil were controlled by Western concessions? He was blunt: Some people won’t accept that in Venezuela—and they have guns.
Richardson is obsessively focused on driving out the “axis of aggressors” that had made unacceptable “inroads” into Ibero-America and the Caribbean, “in particular,” through China’s Belt and Road Initiative. She charged that the BRI targets “critical infrastructure,” and decried that China already has its “first megaport,” just north of Lima—a reference to Peru’s beautiful Chancay deepwater port. Is China going to leave, she menaced, and answered her own question: “No.”
