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{"id":41922,"date":"2022-02-04T08:46:19","date_gmt":"2022-02-04T14:46:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occasionalplanet.org\/?p=41922"},"modified":"2022-02-04T08:46:19","modified_gmt":"2022-02-04T14:46:19","slug":"venezuela-ukraine-comes-home-to-roost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occasionalplanet.org\/2022\/02\/04\/venezuela-ukraine-comes-home-to-roost\/","title":{"rendered":"Venezuela: Ukraine comes home to roost"},"content":{"rendered":"
Ukraine, for many Americans is way out there \u2013 somewhere in the nowhere land of Uzbekistan or North Korea. Ukraine is very far away from our daily lives.<\/p>\n
And yet, it may be worth our while paying a little attention to what\u2019s going on in Ukraine right now. It might just have consequences for all of us down the line.<\/p>\n
A friend went home to spend Christmas with family in Venezuela – a much closer geography. He tells me that the dollarization of the Venezuelan economy is to all extents and purposes done. Motorcycle delivery guys can now make change for a $20 US bill with 20 US $1 bills. The bolivar is history. The surprise was that, in addition to paying for goods and services in dollars, in Venezuela my friend could now also pay with Russian rubles.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a small, but pertinent, detail.<\/p>\n
Venezuela, along with the rest of Caribbean, Central and South America, were once unequivocally considered to be under the umbrella of US purview. Let\u2019s not forget the Cuban Missile Crisis as an earlier attempt to disrupt that way of the world. And yet, quietly, and somewhat menacingly to a distracted US, Russia has in recent years again begun to spread its tentacles into the economic heart of one of our neighbors immediately to our south.<\/p>\n
How many rubles go about their daily lives in Venezuela? Nobody knows.<\/p>\n
Food is once again abundant in Caracas, at least and perhaps not only, in its better neighborhoods. There are whispers of hope in the air. The dollar is now king. If you have dollars, you can not only just get by, but also even live well. The caveat, of course, is that you have dollars. Those millions of Venezuelans who had, out of necessity, to flee Venezuela in recent years are not in that column. After you force the poor, the needy and the undesirable out, you can aspire to a thriving society, apparently. Regrettably, we\u2019ve seen attempts at that scenario before in our history. When you muscle any segment of your population out, you are veering far away from accepted norms of decency.<\/p>\n
Almost suddenly, after years of waste, destruction and damage to the lives of its citizens and the infrastructure of the country, Venezuela is now signaling an economic shift. By the end of December 2021, the country had doubled its petroleum output from just a year before – not back to when Venezuela was a major force in petroleum production worldwide, but a long way toward a surprising and flag-waving celebratory candle cake for the Maduro regime.<\/p>\n
Money is once again flowing, if not into Venezuela – at least not from the known Western world, then definitively round and about within its borders. What kind of money, again we don\u2019t entirely know. So many Venezuelans have been sanctioned by the United States that now those very same Venezuelan citizens may just have decided to keep their enormous wealth home and plow it back into their country\u2019s economy. Sanctions are flawed, and in this case, perhaps, counter-productive to US interests. Money needs a sanctuary. And just maybe, Venezuela is now a sanctuary for its own and odd money in general.<\/p>\n
And in this repositioning of Venezuela, the ground has shifted.<\/p>\n
Russia and China are now firmly ensconced, along with Iran, as Venezuela\u2019s allies, protectors and supporters.<\/p>\n
Why is that important?<\/p>\n
Because this is happening in the Americas, just a little less than 2,000 miles south of Key West. This is not some distant Ukraine, Belarus or Uzbekistan.<\/p>\n
For better or worse, for decades after WW2, it was taken as a given that the Americas were within the United States general sphere of interest and influence. We had sometimes benign and at times harmful relationships with nations within that domain.<\/p>\n
Russia, on the other hand, had all of Eastern Europe, and not coincidentally, Ukraine and the Stan<\/em> countries at its southern borders, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan et al <\/em>to do with whatever it wished.<\/p>\n
East was East, and West was West.<\/p>\n
Except that many of the countries under Russian overview weren\u2019t happy with that division. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, those nations grabbed at the chance of change. Ukraine wanted autonomy from its overseer, Russia. Ukraine wanted to shift its essential values westward. As did Poland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Estonia and many of the former Russian affiliates.<\/p>\n
And Europe opened its bosom.<\/p>\n
Europe said, Come on in!<\/em><\/p>\n
Ukraine was a big fan of the EU, and Ukraine said, Let\u2019s do it.<\/em><\/p>\n
And all was good, for a while.<\/p>\n
Then came Putin, a Russian ultranationalist, a man obsessed with Russian power and superiority, a man with an exaggerated ego rarely seen in history \u2013 Thump not withstanding, a man focused on a Soviet-style view of the world as a greater Russia reinvigorated, a man who feels Ukraine\u2019s aspirations as somehow a threat to his nationalistic manhood.<\/p>\n
Cuba means nothing to Putin. He has done nothing to alleviate Cuba\u2019s pain. Venezuela, on the other hand, sitting atop the world\u2019s largest oil reserves -greater even than Saudi Arabia\u2019s, means a lot.<\/p>\n
And if Ukraine can be European, maybe Venezuela can be Russian, if you will.<\/p>\n
Welcome to Putin\u2019s worldview.<\/p>\n
In Venezuela, Putin gets to mess with America like never before.<\/p>\n
Almost overnight in the Ukraine crisis now upon us, all bets are off.<\/p>\n