Rob’s comments below are in italics.Derek’s comments below are in normal font.
We were originally going to cover entrepreneurship, sales and marketing in this conversation. That is coming next time, but we felt compelled to comment on some goings-on. So what are those goings-on that we need to talk about?
Right, well, there are five that are worthy of comment. Obviously, one is the ongoing situation in Venezuela. The second one was a speech from the Iranian representative to the UN Security Council. The third one is Trump’s latest soundings on Greenland. The fourth is Trump having done another U-turn over who he says is responsible for failing to reach a peace treaty in Ukraine. It’s now gone back to being Zelensky’s fault.
The fifth is a speech Putin gave to ambassadors from 32 other countries in Moscow. As far as I can see, it hasn’t received any media coverage. So let’s dive straight in.
1. Venezuela
It’s still a mystery how they pulled off the arrest of Maduro….
It could all be theatre. It smacks of theatre, doesn’t it?
It does. Having got him to New York, he’s now going to wait two and a half months until he gets the next bit of his trial. I don’t know what conditions he’s been kept under. It seems like a very high-risk move without it being at all clear what outcome they want.
It’s clear that the United States would like to simply steal all of Venezuela’s oil and any other mineral resources it has. But it doesn’t appear to have been thought through. It wasn’t clear what they were going to have as a result of the immediate abduction. The vice-president, who is now acting president, has made it absolutely clear that they’re not turning themselves into a vassal state. They haven’t got an alternative government plausibly lined up. The ridiculous opposition leader who was given the Nobel Peace Prize for no noticeable reason and has now donated her medal to Trump is in no position to form a government.
It’s not at all clear that if American oil companies sent in their executives and technicians to improve the infrastructure and extract the oil, they’d be safe, or that their safety could be ensured. So it’s difficult to know where it goes from here.
This is actually the fifth attempt to destabilise Venezuela and bring it under US control. They started off by imposing sanctions a few years back. They then attempted to have a regime change, putting forward Juan Guaidó. Having said that, the 2024 election was invalid; elections seem to be getting less and less credible everywhere in the world.
More and more people are realising that we’ve been given a plastic steering wheel to try and steer the car with.
It looks a bit like it. Then they tried diplomatic isolation. Finally, they had a system of conditional export licences for Venezuelan goods, none of which was enough to pressure Venezuela into falling in line. It does seem that the major impetus for feeling they had to do something comes back, yet again, to dollar hegemony in international trade, specifically in oil. Once again, Venezuela had made it clear that it was about to start accepting alternative currencies and to use the Chinese financial settlement system to conduct the deals.
Then, of course, we’ve had the blatant piracy of attacking and capturing oil tankers on the high seas. It seems that if the United States wanted to destroy any credibility it has as an honest operator on the international stage, it couldn’t be going about it more rapidly.
I saw a Pirates of the Caribbean AI-generated meme with Trump’s face on it. There’s a lot of banter going around the internet at the moment.
Yeah, replacing Johnny Depp’s face with Trump’s. It’s almost too easy, isn’t it? Okay, so that’s a question of ‘watch this space’. Any attempt to invade a place which is three times the size of Vietnam and similarly mountainous and jungle-covered would obviously be catastrophic for any forces that the United States could bring to bear. Bluntly, it seems like yet another failed attempt to rerun the playbook, which has worked so well for the last 50, 60, 70 years: drum up some protest, work behind the scenes to get a disgruntled opposition group with enough power, weapons and training to rush in and take over, then provoke some triggering event. This also appears to be what is happening in Iran.
I was going to say that. That sounds very similar to what we’re seeing in Iran. We’ve had open admission from certain people in power that there are Mossad agents on the ground.
2. Iran
Yeah. This is extraordinary. Once again, there are broadly two... There’s no doubt that there have been a lot of demonstrations in Iran. In the Western media, they seem to have been portrayed as protests against the government in general. The alternative narrative is that the first wave of demonstrations was a protest demanding that the government address the rapid inflation caused by the rial’s devaluation.
They just circulate photos of protests that may or may not even be in the correct location or the correct time. You can’t believe anything you see.
The reports I find credible from Iran say they were entirely peaceful. Then there was a flare-up of violence, which included the burning of mosques, which doesn’t seem likely to have been instigated by Iranian anti-government protesters, bearing in mind that it’s a very solidly Islamic country. As you say, there have been actual honest admissions by people in the West that Mossad agents were involved. That seems highly plausible.
In other words, it’s the same thing we’ve seen in all kinds of things, from the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle years ago to the student fee rises protests when the Conservative government came in about 10 years ago in this country. You get a few people in there who are not actually part of the protest group, but they’re there to stir up trouble and create violence.
Yeah, I suspect that stage name ‘Tommy Robinson’ falls into that category.
Yep.
So then there have been very large demonstrations. The agent provocateur factions seem to have quietened down. Incidentally, there are again two narratives about the jamming of the Starlink signals in Iran. This is being portrayed as an attempt at censorship to prevent the protesters from getting accounts of the demonstrations out to the wider world. The alternative explanation is that they were shut down to prevent coordination of the agent provocateur factions. Anyway, be that as it may, the violence subsided.
There have then been very large demonstrations, which again are portrayed as anti-government. But there seems to be a strong case that they were actually pro-government demonstrations, demonstrations of support and solidarity. At the UN Security Council, the Iranian delegate made a very forthright and clear statement about the entire thing. Once again, this doesn’t seem to have been widely reported, though it’s easy enough to track down on YouTube. It’s well worth investing 10 or 20 minutes in listening to.
It’s important to actually listen to people and form our own assessments of their integrity and their plausibility.
Otherwise, your worldview gets hijacked by powerful interests.
Yep. So there’s no doubt that the United States is genuinely rattled by the amount of Chinese infrastructure being installed in South America, including ports, railways, and energy facilities. There seems to be very little they can do about it. Again, over time, we’ll find out whether this can be taken at face value as Chinese support for improving the lot of those countries and for building a mutually beneficial relationship, or whether claims of some underhanded motivation can be justified. But it’s worth watching.
3. Greenland
Trump’s been nattering about Greenland on and off ever since he was inaugurated. It seemed to me totally implausible that they could actually act on this. It seemed like empty rhetoric, but all the indications are that he’s fairly serious about this. The thing that I am continually puzzled by is wondering how many of these things that Trump comes up with are, first and foremost, his own brainstorms, and how much of it is him putting the public rhetoric on the surface of decisions that have been made behind the scenes by other actors.
As this is an audio-only podcast, I can tell the listeners I have a large grin on my face at this question!
Of course, we now know that the Europeans have protested about this because they say Greenland really belongs to Denmark. Although Denmark, of course, has no more claim on it than the United States does, and they haven’t behaved particularly supportively or generously towards the island’s native population. Nonetheless, this has led to greater fragmentation between Europe and the United States. We had a suitably unimpressive speech about it this morning from Keir Starmer.
4. Trump’s n’th U-Turn on Ukraine
Then, fourthly, the latest on the Ukraine situation is that Trump has now been saying that the obstacle to peace is Zelensky. I would say that’s fair comment, but yet again, it’s a bit like a weathervane in a whirlwind. The fact that he says this today doesn’t mean it’s what he’s going to say tomorrow, and it certainly wasn’t what he was saying yesterday. I’m sure the Russians have just decided that they did their best to engage in some dialogue.
I thought back at the time of the Alaska meeting that this was really the dawn of a more sane opening of dialogue, normal diplomatic exchange, and communication and cultural exchanges between the West and Russia. But clearly there’s no sign of it. Once again, the best way to put it is that it was pure theatre.
5. Unreported Putin Speech
Finally, there was a speech by Putin, which if you rely on mainstream media, you wouldn’t know about. But once again, it was delivered to a meeting of the ambassadors and some supporting staff from 32 countries in the Kremlin. He gave a very forthright summary of the background to the Ukrainian situation, noting that they have made an offer to extend the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which is set to expire. They’re waiting for a response from the US regarding that.
It reviewed again the point that they were very firmly promised in 1991, when they dismantled the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, that NATO would not advance towards them. That has been honoured in the breach continually since then. They’ve made it clear that... So once again, it’s really worth tracking that down and listening to it, deciding how it corresponds with any estimate you make of the realities on the ground and where that leaves us for moving forward.
So everything is still in flux. It’s difficult to see where we’re going to end up.
P.S. Our comments on the WEF meeting in Davos will come next week.
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