President Maduro of Venezuela
Although Donald Trump has been persuaded by his own staff and Latin American leaders from an invasion of Venezuela nearly a year ago, Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro is not taking the threat lying low. He is asking his security forces to be on alert. He thinks Venezuelan opposition influencing President Trump are still at work.
Speaking at a military event, the president has been quoted as saying the armed forces could not lower its guard for even a second because they have to defend “the greatest right our homeland has had in all of its history”. That, said the president, is to live in peace.
It emerged yesterday that US president, Donald Trump fancied an invasion of Venezuela last year until both his staff and, later, four leaders of Latin America told him it was not needed and persuaded him off it.
An Associated Press report indicated how the president of the US pushed for such a course of action as a way of pushing aside President Nicolas Maduro. The report spoke of how Trump’s top aides took turns trying to Persuade him away from that course of action as a way of stabilising Venezuela.
United States and Venezuela in the global space
The leak which has obviously come from the Central Intelligence Agency, (CIA) going by what some of the newspapers are saying attributed to an unnamed White House official how Trump first floated the idea at a meeting in the Oval Office, stunning “those present at the meeting, including US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster”, both of whom are out of government now. But the president did not stop at that. He went on to try to sell the idea at a speech where he contended the US had many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option, if it was necessary.
According to the report, the idea died only when Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, told Trump at a private meeting that it was not unnecessary. His position was echoed by leaders of four other Latin American nations during a subsequent private dinner said to have been held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
President Trump
The story to which The White House declined commenting on the ground that it doesn’t do so on content of private conversations had Trump saying that although his staff told him not to push such an idea because an invasion has its dangers, he wanted to be sure that the Latin American leaders at the table were sure they didn’t want a military solution. He got their reply: They said they were sure. This was followed by further persuasion efforts by Lt. Gen McMaster, to finally get Trump off the idea, reported the global news agency.
Many would find it interesting that, after all the that happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, a US president could contemplate invading anywhere else this century.
