The Shield of the Americas thing reminds me of a classic World War I poster.
Those were simpler times. Anyway, Trump hosted a Shield of the Americas summit today in Florida. Leaders from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay and Trinidad and Tobago attended, as did a bunch of Trump’s people. The Gnome was there also, as she’s supposed to head up this thing, whatever it is. And I have questions.
As near as I can tell from news stories the Shield has two purposes. One is to use military operations to smash drug cartels in Latin America. The other is to take over Cuba somehow or another. Putting Cuba aside for now — smashing the drug cartels would be a good thing, but I don’t know enough about drug cartels to know whether this is an effective way to do it.
According to a Pentagon spokesperson, the U.S. already is doing great things in Ecuador.
The U.S. military carried out a “successful” operation against a “narco-terrorist” supply complex in Ecuador as part of the Trump administration’s push to dismantle drug-trafficking networks in the Western Hemisphere, according to defense officials.
At the request of Ecuador, a U.S. military joint force executed the targeted action against a suspected drug-smuggling facility inside Ecuador on Friday, Pentagon’s chief spokesperson Sean Parnell said.
It is unclear if there were casualties and which drug-trafficking group the military was referring to.
Who knows what they’re doing in Ecuador? And if I were some Latin American leader I would think twice about letting a bunch of U.S. troops gain a foothold in my country, at least while President “all the Western Hemisphere are belong to me” Trump is in the White House. Is he thinking of putting military assets into a position to take out any Latin American leader he doesn’t like? Or because it’s Tuesday and he’s bored of blowing up boats?
Here are some of Trump’s remarks from the Summit:
Trump also addressed the U.S. military’s ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, calling the operation “18 minutes of pure violence.” He commended the South American nation’s interim leader Delcy Rodriguez for “working with us.”
“I mean, she’s doing a great job because she’s working with us,” the president said. “If she wasn’t working with us, I would not say she’s doing a great job. In fact, if she wasn’t working with us, I’d say she’s doing a very poor job. Unacceptable.”
So, Latin American leaders, if you know what’s good for you you’ll play ball like Delcy. Capiche?
He added that U.S. companies are “taking out tremendous amounts of oil” from Venezuela.
The claim is a tad exaggerated. As near as I can tell from web searches, the only U.S. company that is actually extracting oil out of Venezuela right now is Chevron, which was already in Venezuela when Trump took out Maduro. They’re producing roughly 240,000 barrels per day, which may sound like a lot but doesn’t qualify as a “tremendous amount.” It’s actually more of a “trickle.” Saudi Arabia, for example, produces 10 million barrels a day, or at least they were before the war started. There are a couple of other U.S. oil companies buying Venezuela crude and refining it, but they aren’t in Venezuela taking it out of the ground. Most of the big U.S. petroleum companies like ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips are hanging back and monitoring ongoing events to see if it’s worth investing in Venezuela. So far, they haven’t.
So the question is, does Trump understand that there really isn’t much oil being extracted from Venezuela? And if he does know that, does he think the Latin American leaders he’s addressing don’t know that? Because I’m sure they do. Or was the comment just for U.S. media, which will dutifully report the quote without explaining it’s a lie?
Regarding Cuba, Trump claims that there are some kind of negotiations going on.
President Donald Trump told CNN Friday morning that Cuba “is going to fall pretty soon.”
“Cuba is gonna fall pretty soon, by the way, unrelated, but Cuba is gonna fall too. They want to make a deal so badly,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash in a phone interview when touting US military success in his second term.
“They want to make a deal, and so I’m going to put Marco (Rubio) over there and we’ll see how that works out. We’re really focused on this one right now. We’ve got plenty of time, but Cuba’s ready — after 50 years,” he added, explaining that Iran is the current priority.
This may be nothing but a fantasy in Trump’s head. Who knows? Anybody want to take bets the current government of Cuba will still be in place when Trump is gone? Greg Sargent writes that Donald Trump’s Presidency Is in Free Fall. This is worth reading all the way through, but I’m just going to quote the concluding paragraph:
That supreme hubris is now breaking up on the shoals of Trump’s malevolence and incompetence on tariffs, his undisguised white nationalist brutality on immigration, and his sociopathic warmongering amid an obvious lack of any real war rationale. In 2024, Trump coasted on (undeserved) GOP strength on the economy, immigration, and national security, but those pillars are now crumbling. Americans are seeing the real “America First” agenda up close—militarism, imperialism, malign nationalism, unabashed authoritarianism—and they’re recoiling. Though this is small consolation amid all the darkness enveloping us, it’s nonetheless a heartening development indeed.
I also recommend a couple of pieces at The Atlantic (gift links). See Tom Nichols, Operational Excellence, Strategic Incompetence and Rogé Karma, The Economy’s Warning Light Is Flashing Yellow.
Let me tell a few stories and link them together in a theory about the "Shield of the Americas." I don't think it is what anybody says it is.
Back in the 70s, I was in Restricted Men's Barracks at Treasure Island in San Francisco, CA. I was getting out of the Navy, thought the brass hadn't quite reached the conclusion that I had. It was a contract dispute that would evenutally each the USSC and the Navy would lose. I wasn't waiting around. I'd gotten in trouble with care and deliberation – my last AWOL of forty-five days got me off the ship's books. I'd either be reassigned or discharged when I went before a Navy judge when my file caught up with me. Meanwhile, I was in limbo. I wasn't in so much trouble that I rated the brig, but they didn't want me to get lost. The building was an old open-bay barracks, a long room with two rows of bunks and a locker for each. The windows had bars, and the entrance was guarded by unarmed Navy cops (SP for Shore Patrol)
We were farmed out for menial work Monday to Friday, but hung out with little to do on weekends. I smelled mariajuana on the weekends – a lot. Inside a low-calorie prison. I heard that anything was available, cocaine, heroin. I didn't need to complicate my departure, so I passed without asking why I was in the WalMart of illicit drugs. The answer came to me – one of the guards was weeks away from his discharge. He'd been selling for years to people in lockup but he wanted to make a killing before he went home. He did everything to promote his business short of an ad in the Navy Times. And he miscalculated – he was arresteded days before he would have gotten out. Bear with me – this ties in with Trump's project.
Forty years later, I was in federal prison in Miami. The scariest guy I met was in for "assaulting Leo." I asked him who Leo was. He looked at me with disdain and explained, 'Law Enfocement Officer.' OK. He'd been a smuggler, and the cops raided a barn with a buffet of illicit herbs and spices, a few meth lab kits, some military-grade weapons. He got busted and resisted arrest – he was a big dude. He hired a lawyer who beat the rap – some flaw in the warrant. The assault on the arresting officers stuck. So he was in for a short time. And he was psycho.
He told me he'd bought a military-surplus boat, 25 or 30 feet long, put four 200-HP Evinrudes on it, and made regular runs from Central America to the US. He was proud of how he got in the business. As I recall, after he got out of the military he was working for DEA, which got him the names of the people he could buy from in Middle Ameica. I can't prove that part of the story is true. I think it is. But he said he was on a run at night, without running lights and he became aware that he was being overtaken by a boat, also without running lights. Smugglers do worry about pirates. Anyhow, when the boat got close, he used a shoulder-held missile system to blow the bow of the boat off. And he circled back to put bullets in the floating bodies. He was very proud of that. File that away. I'll come back to it.
My cell-mate was a chronic offender. We got along, but he was no boy scout. He'd been in and out of state and fedeal prisons. He told me he did a year of solitary confinement because he was "accused of stabbing someone" while in prison. He wasn't selling where we were, but he'd been dealing drugs at a different jail some time before. I broke a self-imposed rule about minding only my own business until I was out and asked, "How do you get it?" The answer should have been obvious. "From a guard." We talked about payment, because inmates have zero cash. But it's not hard.
In December, Trump pardoned the Honduran ex-president who was in a West Virginia prison for narcotics trafficking. He used his office to protect the cartels that were his clients and to use the power of the government to take down the cartels that were not his client base. The money was huge. After his conviction, Henandez bought a pardon through Roger Stone.
Take that business model and make it international. The illicit drug trade is estimated at 500 billion annually. If you could control the border crossings to restrict unfriendly cartels, facilitate crossings for clients, get a cut from the client countries, and from organized crime in the US that does distribution, the revenue would dwarf anything Epstein considered.
Yeah, it's a shield for crime from Maine to Ecuador. Tell me where I'm wrong.
A lot of things make sense when you look past the facade and see the hidden agenda. Milo Minderbinder is a fictional character in Catch22 but do not doubt the existence of such real people in institutions of all kinds. I must caution that the movie is near worthless. The characters are only revealed in the book.
I have similar stories and agree with Doug's view that the shield is probably a cover for some illicit and/or grey area activities. The late Dick Cheney spoke of it as the dark side. It has always been a part of the federal government which only a select few representatives knew details about. Now it may be running rouge or close to that with ties to similar international organizations. Then again, it could be running things, as we the citizens of a supposed Democracy certainly are more and more out of the loop on major decisions. Some quite aggressive major decisions too, I must say.
Remember. BiBi almost certainly knew Oct. 7th was coming having the intelligence service he has. He who needed a casus belli had the option, in all probability, to prevent it or minimize it but did neither. In doing neither he has managed with the aid of our government and Putin to make international law almost totally impotent.
That is very bad news for most of the earth's inhabitants, but good news for a powerful few. You have a window into the powerful few of some years ago with some of the highly controlled and highly redacted Epstein files. We know only some about a few of the hidden agendas of that international racket even with a rare act of congress. The current dark side seems to have mutated and become even more aggressive and resistant to any known controls. Many of the controls we previously had, have lost both power and independence. That is by design. You know that as a fact.
Trust can disappear so fast it seems. Or is that just an illusion caused by our tendency to deny it just slowly fading away. Some of us remember when we had an announced war on drugs. Now we are dropping bombs and demanding an unconditional surrender to actions we seem reluctant to call war. Did we surrender to drugs on that earlier war. I'm sure we did not win. We did not hesitate to call that a war as I recall. We even had a war on poverty. Now this shield thing? Odd?
"Remember. BiBi almost certainly knew Oct. 7th was coming having the intelligence service he has."
There is paperwork warning about Hamas "practicing" war crimes for a year prior to the real attack.
All Bibi had to do was to watch Cheney and his bois ignore published (June 2001) warnings that ISIS was going to hijack up to ten commercial aircraft. They literally did nothing to make us more secure, even to having the president throw a fit when presented with secure information (first week in August).
After 2001 happened Cheney and his bois took it as they had no restrictions on what they could do.
I could only laugh when two years later "they" said, but "we didn't think they would fly the planes into buildings", like ISIS had been doing for decades with suicide bombers into buildings and our ships (naval included).
I think americans can be stupid to not pay attention.
I think that's very plausible. I don't doubt that the real reason he's trying to get U.S. troops into these countries so that he can control them. I doubt he's all that interested in stopping the drug cartels, especially in South America and not just Central America.