ArcaMax

PARIS — U.S. President Donald Trump’s Venezuela obsession is about to trigger the kind of catastrophe that Washington normally creates for Europe and leaves it to clean up. If he doesn’t watch out, he’ll also end up kneecapping his own movement that voted for the exact opposite.

The Pentagon has been wargaming scenarios for Venezuela in the event that President Nicolas Maduro is overthrown — a result that Trump is clearly aiming for by parking the American military off the country’s coast and treating it like some kind of giant hostile aquarium. He’s been making a big song and dance out of bombing small motorboats off the coast like they’re nuclear submarines, acting like suddenly Caracas is the root cause of Americans taking drugs at home, and pretending that the Venezuelan government is basically a corner dealer with a flag.

Imagine if other nations used the drug situation in American suburbs to argue for U.S. officials’ removal from power. Wait — actually, don’t bother. Trump already beat them to it, having deployed the National Guard t o cities with drug and crime problems, then turning the whole spectacle into a campaign ad explaining why their leaders need removing.

But swapping out a disliked Democrat somewhere in America doesn’t create the kind of power vacuum that regime change in Venezuela would. Earlier this month, the press headlined en masse the fact that none of the outcomes are good — for Venezuela. But they’re also awful for America. Who needs war games to prove it when the last few decades already served as the beta testing?

The U.S.-backed regime change in Europe’s backyard— from Syria and Libya to Ukraine — is the primary cause of Europe’s current demographic disaster. Oh, but diversity is a blessing, right? Not anymore. Just ask Europe these days. The unelected European Union executive, that’s usually tone deaf to the citizens on whom it doesn’t depend to stay in power, has suddenly performed a stunning volte face.

“EU races to speed up deportations in migration crackdown,” according to a recent headline from Germany’s Deutsche Welle.

In other words, let’s say you’re a migrant fleeing to the EU because your country was turned into a giant political battlefield after a Western-backed coup. You make it to EU shores, and they tell you your claim will take a while. So they’ve set up a nice waiting room — in a different country. They load you onto a plane bound for Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, India, Kosovo, Morocco or Tunisia. Or maybe Turkey or Georgia, according to Euronews. Under the proposal, these countries could also be paid by the EU to take rejected asylum seekers and function as a holding pen between Europe and being sent back home. Everyone keeps their hands clean in Europe while paying others to mop up, all while hoping that no one notices the mess.

Too late already. Human rights groups are furious about the idea of essentially renditioning migrants to foreign countries they have nothing to do with — something that was controversial when it was done to jihadists during the War on Terror — but the European Union doesn’t care. Human rights are a luxury item they can no longer afford at a time when the anti-establishment right is gaining power across the bloc because migration has become so unmanageable that you can’t even hold a New Year’s celebration on Paris’ Champs-Elysées without rolling the dice on imported chaos breaking out.

Thanks for all this, Washington. Do you really want to try the same experiment in your own backyard now? Trump is already complaining about Venezuelan “criminals and prisoners” coming into the U.S. Does he seriously think this relative trickle wouldn’t become a tsunami once the country turns into a fully militarized playground for competing factions to fight it out?

And all for what, exactly? Because Trump is fixated on the idea that China is doing business with Maduro. What else was supposed to happen under American sanctions? It’s not like Maduro wakes up every morning wondering how to avoid trading with the U.S. Maybe try this one neat trick, first: just drop the sanctions and see if American companies suddenly look more attractive to Venezuela than Chinese ones.

But no, that’s probably not enough. The real goal is to install a puppet who won’t need convincing to hand over the country’s natural resources to establishment-friendly multinationals, all neatly packaged for shareholder value.

For all the lip service paid to the Venezuelan people, they’re dead last on the priority list. And the moment they flee their own “liberation” brought about through undemocratic regime change, they’ll be rebranded as “criminals,” too. What’s Trump going to do then? Blame the left? If anti-regime change populism can’t reel in regime change, then what exactly sets it apart from conventional neocon warmongers? He risks inflaming the very immigration problem that he promised to fix, all so some already rich people can get slightly richer.

Trump can’t even control America’s borders now without blaming Venezuela. If he unleashes a completely unnecessary humanitarian tsunami in Latin America, he shouldn’t act surprised when he ends up buried under the same consequences that U.S. regime change already dumped on Europe.