[Salon] Fw: Chas Freeman: "The Strategic Implications of the Attack on Venezuela" (SPEECH) -

To: Subject: Chas Freeman: "The Strategic Implications of the Attack on Venezuela" (SPEECH) TO: Distinguished Recipients FM: John Whitbeck As people around the world wake up every morning wondering whether the United States or Israel has attacked yet another country while they slept, transmitted below is the latest wisdom from my exceptionally wise distinguished recipient Ambassador Chas Freeman. Remarks to an Emergency Roundtable The Strategic Implications of the Attack on Venezuela Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.) By Video, 12 January 2026 We are here to avert a tragedy – the apparently inexorable unfolding of foreseeably terrible events. As German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has just warned us, we are in the midst of a “breakdown of values” that is turning the world “into a den of robbers, where the most unscrupulous take whatever they want” and where entire regions or countries are treated as the property of a few great powers. My country, the United States of America, is the most powerful in the world. It has now followed its Israeli protectorate into protracted war on the truth, repudiation of the rule of law, and shameless bullying and violations of the sovereignty of all who oppose it. The already wealthy once again feel free to rob the poor with impunity. We are back to the law of the jungle and aggressive imperialism. Ever more governments emulate the Mafia’s protection racket practices and intimidation techniques. If this is not stopped, we are headed for a second Dark Age. The purpose of international law has always been to ensure that the strong could no longer victimize the weak. Insistence on this principle, even if imperfectly respected, is what has separated civilization from barbarism. If the law is no protection, nations will be forced to rearm against potential attack by others. If they face the threat of nuclear, chemical, or biological attack, they will build their own weapons of mass destruction to deter this. If alliances are no longer reliable, nations will hedge or simply abandon them to combat or cut their own deals with adversaries. This is not speculation. It is the visible trend of our times. As we have seen in the case of the Gaza genocide, words alone cannot halt atrocities. Nor can unenforced decisions of the United Nations or international courts. Intensifying citizen protests have failed to wean allegedly democratic governments from tolerance, complicity in, or support for increasingly blatant crimes against humanity and brutal efforts to subjugate or curtail the freedom of independent nations and peoples. The collective West continues to profess that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, [and] that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. But this now has no credibility. We support Israel’s ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, its efforts to dismember Syria, its depredations in Lebanon, and its preparations for renewed aggression against Iran and Yemen. To defend this hypocrisy, our democracies now emulate authoritarian regimes by suppressing freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and academic freedom. We have abandoned due process to punish anyone who effectively refutes the official narrative. Evidently, we believe that it is necessary to betray Western values to save them. This is a disastrous misjudgment. In the new world disorder, neither the norms of international law nor public opinion constrain the behavior of great powers. They have learned how to manipulate their citizens’ perceptions of reality to assure public support and achieve impunity for their amoral abuses of power. Mass media faithfully echo official propaganda, journalists self-interestedly amplify it, while corporate media platforms treat anything that challenges it as seditious and ban it. Western media refused to consider or report the strategic anxieties that prompted Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. They portrayed the U.S. effort to exploit Ukraine’s distress to requisition its rare earths as compassion, not greed. Unconcealed vanity and hubris have now brought about U.S. naval acts of piracy against Venezuela and murders of its citizens in its near seas, the decapitation of its government, the theft of its natural resources, and its proposed reduction to an economic colony of the United States. So much for the respect for national sovereignty that is the foundation of the United Nations Charter and international law! The United States now unabashedly presents itself as an untrustworthy expansionist power that substitutes unilateral diktats, intimidation, and the use of force for diplomacy. This gangster logic is contemptuous of the interests and honor of other countries. It now menaces Greenland, a self-governing part of Denmark, a member of NATO and a loyal ally of the United States. The transformation of the U.S. from protector to predator threatens not just to splinter the core of Western civilization but to unravel the transatlantic alliance. Washington seems to have decided to abandon Europe to its fate in order to impose a tyrannical monopoly on the political economy of the Western Hemisphere. It aims to expel the influence of competing great powers and keep them at bay, especially China, without regard to the interests of those the United States proposes to dominate. This brutal reinvention of the Monroe Doctrine seems less likely to bring the nations of South America to heel than to encourage them to seek Chinese and other foreign protection against North American control. The kickoff was military aggression against Venezuela, but Washington has made it clear that this was merely an opening move, with much more belligerence to come. Meanwhile, Israel continues to defy international law and norms of human decency with impunity. It seeks to annihilate those Palestinians it cannot subject to apartheid. It treats the scheduling of negotiating sessions with its opponents as opportunities to murder them, not to make peace. It signs ceasefires only to violate them. Its armed forces and security services routinely invade the sovereignty of its neighbors. It has no plan for peaceful coexistence with them. It aims instead to consolidate a US-backed Israeli sphere of influence in West Asia within which it can continue to expand at will. This is a formula for the ongoing destabilization of the region in endless, escalating warfare and resistance to maltreatment through terrorism. It promises even greater insecurity not just for Israelis but for their Western backers. The world cannot permit a continued descent into a moral and legal abyss. If governments do not counter lawless behavior with concrete actions, the precedents now being set in Europe, West Asia, and South America will be replicated elsewhere and life everywhere will be increasingly nasty, brutish, and short. Rhetorical resistance to lawlessness is not enough. We have come to a tipping point. If we cannot now persuade our governments to take effective action to punish and deter further crimes against the Westphalian order of sovereign states, it and the rules-regulated international order it birthed will surely perish from the earth. We must now acknowledge the reality that the structures we created to promote peace and progress after World War II have finally failed. Their failure is mirrored not only in the absence of effective statecraft to resolve conflicts, but in domestic constitutional crises and the erosion of democratic freedoms everywhere. It is past time for a fundamental reappraisal of institutions and policies that have manifestly failed by the governments responsible for their failure. In this regard, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is entirely right to make the commonsense argument that peace in Europe demands that Europeans talk to Russia, not just among themselves and to Ukraine. Like it or not, Russia is part of Europe. Without dialogue with Russia about the warfare that threatens Europe and is consuming Ukraine, Europeans cannot resolve the conflict or protect their long-term security interests. The United States is no longer able or willing to do this for them. It is surely anomalous that Europeans should entrust the crafting of a peace that is central to their subcontinent’s stability to amateur envoys of an American president who says he regards them as competitors and who seems to have little interest in them except as wealthy purchasers of American weaponry. Recent U.S. efforts to subjugate Venezuela underscore the dangerous unrealism of the argument that “every country [including Ukraine] has the right to choose its international alliances” without regard to the impact of their alignment on others. Unscrupulous predators now take what they can; their prey yield what they must. Might may not make right, but it is foolish to ignore it. Whatever Mexico may think about past U.S. aggression, it is careful not to align itself against the United States. Vietnam prudently avoids military alliances aimed at China as Bangladesh does against India. There is no future for a less circumspect approach by Ukraine to its mightier Russian neighbor. Russian statecraft is dominated by memories of foreign invasion from both the east and west. Moscow’s security anxieties are not irrational. Both France and Germany have invaded Russia. Any peace in Europe must address both Russian anxieties about another Western attack on it, especially as Germany rearms, and Western concerns about Russia. Europeans need to take charge of defining their own destiny. They – non-Russian and Russian alike – are the parties directly at interest in composing a mutually reassuring security architecture for their subcontinent. Prime Minister Meloni deserves the support of other European leaders in a joint effort to engage Russia in dialogue about how peace in Ukraine might help bring forth such an architecture. Peace in Europe would benefit the entire world, but it alone would not cure the manifest infirmities of our legacy global institutions. If the United Nations Security Council cannot regulate world peace and development or enforce the decisions of the International Court of Justice, we must explore work-arounds and alternatives to it. There is nothing to prevent countries from gathering in ad hoc conferences to agree on the application of collective rules and actions that address common concerns. There is nothing to prevent members of the crippled World Trade Organization from recreating its functions at the regional level. There is no reason to allow the ideal of universality to preclude action at less than universal levels to address and resolve problems that most members of the international community regard as urgent. If the U.N. system, like that of the League of Nations, has failed, it is time to discuss how to repair or replace it. The breakdown in values to which German President Steinmeier referred has engendered a disastrous collapse of international law and institutions. It took a devastating disintegration of global order in two world wars to give birth, respectively, to the League of Nations and the United Nations. The current world disorder could well produce another global war, this one nuclear and possibly fatal to our species. Surely, it is in our collective interest to forestall this by taking action to reconfigure the dying 20th century system to create something better. I sense that our governments are beginning to understand that, in the newly anarchic circumstances, they cannot continue business as usual. We must demand that they meet the challenges of the day and no longer allow them to silence those who insist they do so.