Latin America, as the late Venezuelan author Carlos Rangel once wrote, has always had a "love-hate relationship" with the US. The love is expressed in its purest form: imitation. The hate -- more akin to resentment -- boils down to a frustrated desire to get Washington's attention.
Cuba's Fidel Castro pulled it off in the 1960s, torturing the Kennedy brothers with his cigar and his Marxism; and now, in Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez is giving us a rerun. At least, this is the refrain of Nikolas Kozloff, a British-educated American who has written Hugo Chavez: Oil, Politics, and the Emerging Challenge to the United States.
Kozloff apparently believes that Americans have much to fear from Venezuela. His admiring study of Chavez, an up-by-the-bootstraps lieutenant colonel who tried and failed to take power in a coup and subsequently succeeded at the ballot box, is peppered with phrases like "in an alarming warning sign for George Bush," and, "in an ominous development for [US] policy makers."
Why does Kozloff think, as stated on the book jacket, that Venezuela represents a "potentially dangerous enemy to the [US]?" Caracas is the US' fourth-biggest oil exporter, so maybe some day, the implication is, it could cut us off.
And Chavez, with his friend you-know-who in Cuba, has taken to taunting the US and lobbying other Latin American countries against the brand of free-trade liberalism that Washington has advocated. Chavez has even been trying to form an energy alliance with Argentina and Brazil, for the ostensible purpose of using oil as a "weapon" against the gringos, and he has refused to permit US overflights in the war against cocaine.
Is this really worth getting all steamed up about? I lived in Venezuela during the 1970s, also a period of high oil prices and, not coincidentally, a time when the government was strutting its stuff as a regional (and vaguely anti-capitalist) power. Getting the US to worry -- or minimally to care -- was a high priority, as I realized when a friendly Venezuelan reporter eagerly asked me which of two left-wing political parties Americans "feared the most."
One of these parties was known by the acronym MIR and the other as MAS. The truth was that no Americans I knew had heard of either. My own relatives could barely distinguish Venezuela from Colombia or Peru. I didn't say that, of course. The local journalists were unfailingly kind to me, and I had no wish to hurt their feelings. I allowed, "I guess we fear each of them about the same." Anyway, in a few years, the price of oil collapsed, and the posturing from Caracas went with it.
Kozloff will perhaps appreciate the personal anecdote because his book is replete with them. He lets us in on his travels, Kerouac-style, so we are with him when he is hiking in the Andes, observing rural poverty, or acquainting himself with indigenous tribes.
Then the author is back in England, where he joins an "anti-capitalist May Day protest," at which one of his confreres defaces a statue of Winston Churchill. Then he is watching Chavez on TV, then protesting against globalism, then, in 2000, doing research for his dissertation in Caracas. He watches Al Gore and George Bush on the tube, cannot see much difference between them and casts his lot with Ralph Nader.
As for Chavez, the author portrays him, convincingly, as a soldier indignant about the moral flabbiness and corrupt ways of the career politicians he replaced. We learn that Chavez's antipathy toward American culture stems, in some measure, from his partly Indian blood lines. So it is that Chavez, a phrase maker to be sure, has rechristened Columbus Day "Indigenous Resistance Day." Resistance to what? He is no fan of liberal economics, free trade, cross-border investment, the prescriptions of the IMF nor, indeed, of capitalism itself.
This is all well and good with Kozloff. His analysis is essentially Marxist -- he sees trade as a one-way street that helps the rich and hurts the poor. His book is filled with the sort of new-lefty rhetoric I had thought went out in the 1970s. He applauds the Venezuelan president's idea for an alternative trade association -- meaning one not aligned with the US -- that, in Chavez's tedious phraseology, would be a "socially oriented trade bloc rather than one strictly based on the logic of deregulated profit maximization."
But neither Kozloff nor Chavez can escape the fact that the 1970s are over. Socialism hasn't worked; it's kaput. Free-market medicine (which Kozloff refers to by the more sinister-sounding "neo liberalism") hasn't always worked, but it's worked better than anything else.
And in fact, Kozloff's fantasy of a US threatened by left-wing Latinos is a vestige of a world that was dominated by a Moscow-Washington rivalry -- a world that no longer exists. The only way Venezuela could truly stop supplying the US with oil (which trades in a global market) would be to stop selling it to everyone, which isn't in the cards.
The right question to ask is not what the US has to fear from Chavez, but rather what Venezuelans have to fear from Chavez. The answer would seem to be plenty. He has militarized the government, emasculated the country's courts, intimidated the media, eroded confidence in the economy and hollowed out Venezuela's once-democratic institutions.
Chavez's rhetoric has provided a pleasing distraction to the country's poor, but it has not eradicated poverty. The real riddle of Venezuela today, as it was a generation ago, is why, despite its bountiful oil reserves, its fertile plains and its democratic traditions, it has been persistently unable to make an economic leap similar to that of Chile or of the various success stories in Asia. And writers who serve as cheerleaders for the failed idea of blaming the US are anything but Venezuela's friends.
As Taiwan is facing global crises from the COVID-19 pandemic to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is again time to take stock. In terms of public health, Taiwan has made it through the COVID-19 challenge quite well. By combining masking, vaccinations and border controls, it has achieved a sufficiently protective herd immunity and is expected to end quarantine requirements for incoming travelers by the end of the summer. What about Ukraine? Here, Taiwan must assess four key players in its region. The first is Russia, which must be seen as a developing enemy. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Ukraine declared
During an online keynote speech on June 12, Legislative Speaker You Si-kun (游錫堃) said that when he was premier, he already knew that the Yun Feng (雲峰, Cloud Peak) medium-range supersonic land-attack cruise missile developed in Taiwan could reach Beijing. If Beijing were to attack Taiwan, Taipei would respond by firing the missiles and China would regret its aggression, he said. You’s comments were met by immediate criticism from political commentator Lai Yueh-tchienn (賴岳謙), who said that the Cloud Peak relied on guidance from the US’ Global Positioning System (GPS) to find its target. If war broke out in the Taiwan Strait,
China’s third aircraft carrier, the Fujian, was launched on Friday. With a total displacement of more than 80,000 tonnes, the vessel is the largest of China’s three aircraft carriers. According to reports, the Fujian is about 300m long and 78m across at its widest point. It is conventionally powered, with a maximum speed of about 30 knots (55.6kph) and can carry 60 aircraft — including about 40 fighter jets, helicopters and airborne early warning and control aircraft. The deck of the carrier is equipped with an electromagnetic catapult system, which can speed up the take-off and landing of fighter jets. Once it
Two awards for contribution to the study of Sinology were announced on Monday. The first was for British art historian Jessica Rawson, named this year’s winner of the Tang Prize in Sinology. The Tang Prize was established in 2012 by Taiwanese entrepreneur Samuel Yin (尹衍樑). The second was for Slovenian Sinologist Jana Rosker, who won the Taiwan-France Cultural Award — established by the Ministry of Culture and the Institut de France’s Academy of Moral and Political Sciences — for her work introducing Taiwanese philosophy to Europe. Rosker said that Taiwan has integrated Western philosophy and Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism into a