Bolton Is Ready to Build “Fortress America”
The US plans to institutionalize its international coalition against Venezuela.
National Security Advisor Bolton spoke about the need for a “broad coalition” that would help the US create a “completely democratic hemisphere”, even going as far as proudly embracing the Monroe Doctrine by saying the Trump Administration “is not afraid to use that phrase”. He also provocatively recalled that the US has been interested in this objective since the times of Reagan and the proxy wars that he supported in this part of the world to that supposed end. The US already has the basis for its planned coalition through the so-called Lima Group, but taking it further by turning this collection of countries into a formal platform for carrying out regime change against Venezuela would amount to transforming it into a pan-hemispheric NATO-like structure for policing Latin America per the US’ “Lead From Behind” stratagem aimed at creating “Fortress America”.
To elaborate, the aforementioned concept refers to the US’ grand strategy of regaining full and unchallenged hegemonic control over the Western Hemisphere after the chain reaction of constitutional and other types of coups that began in Honduras in 2009 under the Obama Administration succeeded in rolling back the “Pink Tide”, culminating in the largest geostrategic prize thus far of Brazil after Bolsonaro’s election. At this point, however, the US’ covert subterfuge seems to have reached the limits of its success in the three remaining holdout countries of Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, which is why direct military intervention or the threat thereof against them (including through the support of armed proxies) might represent the next phase of “Fortress America’s” implementation, bearing in mind that the other socialist country of Bolivia is much more easily manageable by dint of its landlocked location.
The end game that the US is aiming for is to remove all multipolar governments from the hemisphere as part of its New Cold War “counterstrike” against China and Russia, which would therefore give Washington full control over the hemisphere’s resources and markets while enabling it to leverage its hegemonic influence to deprive its rivals of the same or at least strategically control their access to them. This is understandably an enormous undertaking, which is why the US wants to have its vassals do the “heavy lifting” in order to also mask the revival of the Monroe Doctrine, anticipating that the final outcome would then see them playing a role in creating a complementary US-led economic structure to pair with the NATO-like one that it’s in the process of assembling.
Part of the genius behind the “Fortress America” concept is that it gives the US the ultimate geostrategic redoubt upon which to rely in the event that its divide-and-rule machinations in the Eastern Hemisphere blow back against it and eventually result in diminishing the Pentagon’s presence in the other half of the world. The conceivable, but nevertheless long-term, scenario of the Russian-Chinese Strategic Partnership somehow succeeding in the dismantlement of the US’ numerous proxy structures in their part of the globe and replacing them with genuinely multipolar ones wouldn’t necessarily lead to the US’ collapse if it replaces its presence in those markets and dependence on those resources with the new ones completely under its control in the Western Hemisphere.
In fact, the US wouldn’t just survive, but might even thrive in that “worst-case” scenario.
By Andrew Korybko
Source: Oriental Review
