Going Nuclear

With the United States government now shut down for a full month while Republicans take away food assistance and medicare from vast swaths of the American population, Donald Trump has a new distraction: nuclear weapons testing.

Through the noise, you may have missed the announcement that the United States intends to restart nuclear weapons tests for the first time since September of 1992, on an “equal basis” with other countries. It isn’t really clear what that means, given that no other countries have detonated a nuclear weapon in nearly a decade.

The announcement of the resumption of nuclear tests was made minutes before meeting Chinese President Xi Jin Ping at this week’s APEC summit in South Korea. Testing weapons would put an effective end to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which has been in force since 1996.

While there, South Korean president Lee Jae Myung gave the gold-addicted American president a replica of a gold crown from the Silla dynasty. For the symbolism, SubStack Entangled Curiosities has an extensive explanation, worth reading in its entirety. The key bit:

You should also know how the Silla dynasty ended. For all that gold, the dynasty eventually collapsed from internal rot. Peasant uprisings driven by escalating wealth inequality. Aristocratic infighting. A ruling class too busy hoarding power to notice the ground shifting beneath them.

It is hard to imagine that the Koreans gave this gift without considering its history.

In Trump’s first mandate, he portrayed himself as the only recent president not to start a new war, but in his second he seems eager to push every conceivable button to achieve the opposite.

On his orders, we are now up to at least 14 boats that have been attacked by the United States military in the eastern Pacific and southern Caribbean, resulting in the deaths of over 60 people. It has resulted in an unprecedented condemnation by the United Nation High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, who demanded that the United States end its “extrajudicial killing.”

Rather than ending it, though, Trump has sent an entire carrier strike group off the coast of Venezuela. The fleet, according to the Miami Herald, consists of the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R Ford, the largest warship ever built, a cruiser, severn destroyers, several submarines, and a series of ships specifically designed for in-shore combat and amphibious invasion.

Venezuela announced a few days ago that they claim to have broken up a CIA plot to attack an American ship as a pretext for war.

Whether or not the false flag accusation is true, the United States is clearly marching toward war with the apparent objective of installing Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado as president of Venezuela.

The Nobel Peace Prize's Big Miss

Why war? It is not likely that Donald Trump actually gives the faintest hoot about drugs or drug smuggling. In his generous handouts of presidential pardons and clemency to a wide range of his supporters who objectively belong behind bars, drug kingpins feature fairly prominently.

Venezuela has something that Trump wants a lot more than to quash a few pounds of fentanyl — the largest proven oil reserves on the planet. The country has considerably more oil than Saudi Arabia.

Venezuela, governed by a left-wing autocrat amidst a rise of right-wing autocrats also offers a convenient adversary that fits his narratives on politics, drugs, and illegal migrants. Wars have a habit of unifying countries, or at the very least consolidating power. To wage a war on Venezuela provides him a pretext to round up more people, especially Venezuelans, and take away further domestic rights for everyone else.

If that doesn’t work out, he is also open to war with Nigeria, who he threatened with military attack yesterday over their insufficient protection of Christianity. War with anyone will do, really.

Trump learned in 2020 that not going to war was not a winning strategy for winning re-election. After losing, he launched his first war, this one against his own country, on January 6th, 2021, in an effort to hold on to power.

Now that he is back, he wants a war, foreign or domestic. Starving his people and depriving them of health care, sending untrained masked officers through city streets to arrest people, sabre-rattling on nuclear weapons, and threatening Venezuela and Nigeria are all part of an effort to force violence to take place under the guise of being started by someone else.

Once he gets someone to take the bait, he will have what he needs to justify the final push toward martial law and seize total power for himself and the dangerous people around him. What few shreds of the American constitution still apply will disappear into the mushroom cloud he hopes to demonstrate.

Unless nobody takes the bait, of course.