US has done covert and overt regime changes in over 100 nations since 1947: Jeffrey Sachs

There is a joke doing the rounds that American regime-change initiatives produced the Taliban in place of democracy, which the US had promised before the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan, just like the White House’s famed ‘wars on drugs’ actually led to a staggering rise in fentanyl addiction in the US compared with weed and heroine earlier. Now, referring to the US military action in Venezuela in which the Americans have captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and kidnapped them to the US, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Columbia University professor and acclaimed economist, says that the US is no longer run by a constitutional order, and that the total number of US acts of toppling governments overseas over a raft of reasons has touched 100 since the end of World War II.

In an interview with Open, Sachs states, “There are 70 documented regime-change operations between 1947 and 1989 (see Lindsey O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 2018).  Since then, there have been dozens of further regime-change operations (coups, wars, colour revolutions), both overt and covert.” He cites some examples, “These include Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Ukraine, Georgia, Haiti, Venezuela, Granada, Panama, Pakistan, and others, and some on several occasions. I think if we had a comprehensive account of all attempts and all case types, it would probably reach around 100, but I caution that there is no definitive study of the post-1989 period since much of the record is secret, denied by the US, and highly contested.”

“We are in an order led by a military state which doesn’t obey the US Constitution,” he said in a recent chat show with Norwegian academic and political commentator Glenn Diesen. Sachs also said that the military intervention in Venezuela, which has the largest known reserves of oil, was a blatantly illegal act, in a line of illegal American actions prior to that.

Venezuela is home to over 17% of global oil reserves, equivalent to more than 300 billion barrels. Although it produces fewer million barrels a day now compared with the 1970s, it has the capacity to drum up production.

Sachs adds, “Trump has been threatening a new country every day. He bombed Nigeria last week. He said that the US would intervene in Iran if the government acts against the protesters in the way Trump doesn’t like. Now he has intervened in Venezuela. He has also created a special envoy for Greenland – it is a threat against Europe which they don’t even acknowledge.”

The highly vocal academic said that the world has become extremely dangerous thanks to Trumpism. He also noted that the whole history of US regime-change operations has been a record of violence, bloodshed, deliberate creation of instability, coups, assassinations, civil wars, thuggery and so on.

Sachs, who formerly directed Columbia University’s Earth Institute and has advised three United Nations Secretaries-General, also rued that in the US, where the Congress doesn’t exist in any operational sense, he was shocked to see that the mainstream media has not raised a single question against this “illegal” military action , an action not okayed by the Congress.

An alumnus of Harvard University, where he earned his BA, MA, and PhD, Sachs is the author of several bestselling books and a widely sought-after commentator on geopolitics. Of Jewish origin, Sachs has long been a vocal critic of the Israel Lobby, which he believes has manipulated American politicians for far too long. 

Notably, the January 3 American action on Venezuela comes after months-long preparations and intelligence gathering and years after the country began listing the price of its oil in the Chinese yuan. Interestingly, speaking to the media hours after Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were captured in what the US called “Operation Absolute Resolve”, Trump declared his business goals stating that “very large” American oil firms would spend billions of dollars to fix what he claimed was a “badly broken infrastructure” in the South American country.

That American interventions for regime changes across national borders have resulted in chaos, death and destruction besides instability is evident especially in Afghanistan where its war on the Taliban ended two decades later with the dreaded Islamist outfit returning to power. In Syria, the American intervention led to the rise of a former Al-Qaeda leader becoming the country’s president.