Posted by Ken Waldron on January 12, 2026, 2:38 am
-Food for thought. Not sure what weight to put on some of these arguments, but maybe we need to see some positives?
America-China Watcher @PandemicTruther
The US Can’t Kick China Out of Latin America Anymore
Why Trump’s New Monroe Doctrine Is Already Too Late
When Trump talks about “taking back” Latin America, about restoring the Monroe Doctrine, around dragging Venezuela, Panama, Brazil, and the rest of the continent back under Washington’s exclusive jurisdiction, many people still interpret this as strength.
It isn’t.
It is exposure.
Only someone who has run out of cards flips the table. Only a gambler close to bankruptcy reaches for robbery.
If U.S. sanctions still worked, if dollar hegemony were still intact, if political pressure, financial warfare, and diplomatic isolation still delivered results, Washington would not need to personally step into the mud — threatening kidnappings, floating regime-change fantasies, or openly talking about seizing resources as collateral.
This is not muscle-flexing. This is imperial afterglow.
And the key misunderstanding in Washington is this: the outcome of this struggle does not hinge on whether Maduro survives, or whether a government falls. It hinges on something much more banal, much more material.
When the U.S. looks down at what it still calls its “backyard,” it no longer sees American soil.
It sees Chinese soybeans growing in the fields. Chinese cranes loading containers in the ports. Chinese power grids, telecom systems, roads, and railways quietly humming underneath daily life.
This is more powerful than ideology. That is infrastructure, the backbone of economy.
And infrastructure does not disappear on command. Removing China from Latin America is removing the infrastructure and collapsing the fragile economies.
The Real Endgame: Resources, Collateral, and a Dollar Under Pressure
Trump’s Venezuela obsession is not about democracy, human rights, or even oil in the traditional sense. It is about collateral.
The United States is cornered by its own balance sheet.
In the coming year alone, Washington needs to roll over and issue roughly five trillion dollars in new Treasury debt just to service maturing obligations. But fewer and fewer countries are willing to absorb U.S. debt at scale. Commodity trade is slowly de-dollarizing. If the U.S. is forced to monetize its own debt by printing money to buy Treasuries, inflation becomes uncontrollable.
That path cannot be allowed.
So the theory emerging in Washington is simple: secure massive pools of real assets — oil, gas, rare earths, minerals — re-peg them to the dollar, and restore confidence through material backing.
Venezuela. Greenland. Latin America.
On paper, Venezuelan oil reserves are worth tens of trillions. In reality, Venezuelan oil can't be monetized so easily.
Venezuela’s Oil Trap: Why China Cannot Be Replaced
Venezuelan crude is among the most difficult on Earth to monetize. It is extra-heavy, buried deep, and requires extremely sophisticated extraction, upgrading, and transport infrastructure.
Only two countries on Earth have the technical and industrial depth to build and operate such systems at scale: China and the United States.
China already did it.
China buys roughly 70% of Venezuela’s oil. China financed, built, and operates much of the infrastructure that makes that oil usable and exportable.
If China is pushed out, who replaces it?
American oil majors — Chevron, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips (COP) — have no incentive to sink one hundred billion dollars over five years into facilities that could be expropriated the moment political winds shift again. The risk profile is suicidal.
And even if U.S. companies did step in, who would they sell to?
China is the only buyer large enough, patient enough, and technically compatible with this type of crude. If China is expropriated and sanctioned out of Venezuela, retaliation is inevitable. Supply chains will be disrupted. Markets will close. Sanctions will travel both ways.
Washington’s Venezuela fantasy collapses under its own economic logic.
II/
Ports, Infrastructure, and the Chancay Pivot
Zoom out, and the problem becomes systemic.
China has not merely traded with Latin America. It has rewired it.
Ports, roads, railways, power grids, telecom networks — many of these systems are smart, automated, and remotely managed.
The Chancay Port in Peru is the clearest illustration of this shift. Once operational, it shortened South America–Asia shipping routes by weeks and bypassed U.S.-controlled chokepoints. Copper, lithium, agricultural products, and minerals can now flow east faster, cheaper, and with far greater autonomy.
These are not docks that can simply be seized and reassigned.
They are deeply integrated Chinese-built ecosystems. Remove China, and the system does not change owners — it stops functioning.
This is the core problem Washington refuses to confront. It is not trying to block trade. It is trying to uninstall an operating system.
Doing so would paralyze Latin American economies. Ports would fall silent, power grids would falter, telecommunications would degrade, and without functioning infrastructure, Latin American resources would cease to be monetizable.
Twenty Years Too Late
Twenty years ago, China’s presence in Latin America was close to zero. Walk into a supermarket in Santiago or São Paulo in the early 2000s and you saw American brands stacked wall to wall. Back then, if Washington sneezed, Latin America caught a cold. Today, the data tells a different story.
China is now the largest trading partner of Brazil, Chile, Peru, and several other countries. Bilateral trade has surged into the hundreds of billions. This shift did not happen overnight. It happened container by container. Railway by railway. Port by port. Chile’s cherries, Brazil’s soybeans, Ecuador’s shrimp are staples on Chinese dinner tables. This is demand gravity.
Lithium, Energy, and Strategic Chokepoints
If agriculture is flesh, energy and minerals are bone and blood.
The Lithium Triangle — Chile, Bolivia, Argentina — controls more than half of the world’s known lithium reserves. But reserves alone are meaningless. What matters is refining. China dominates lithium processing.
The United States talks about electric vehicles, green transitions, and technological leadership, yet the refining capacity and supply chains that make these ambitions possible remain firmly in Chinese hands.
This is the structural asymmetry Washington cannot escape. If China ever tightens refining exports, Western EV and battery supply chains face immediate disruption. This is not just a trade dispute. It is leverage over future industrial standards.
A Buyer’s World
We now live in a buyer’s market. Whoever controls the largest consumer base controls pricing power. Latin American farmers, miners, and exporters understand this perfectly. Anger Washington, and life may become uncomfortable. Anger China, and the market itself disappears. That is survival. China’s presence in Latin America looks like commerce. In reality, it functions as armor. When interests are bound tightly enough, any attempt to tear them apart becomes self-destructive. The Monroe Doctrine was written for a world of gunboats. This is a world of supply chains. And in that world, China is already embedded — too deeply to remove without tearing the system apart.
Posted by Mark Doran on January 12, 2026, 9:35 am, in reply to "Tweet of the Week..."
... *the psychiatry*. Trump, like every clinical narcissist, lives mainly in his own head. In his savagely disordered mind -- and quite apart from the clearly apparent dementia, which is only going to worsen --Venezuela is already fixed: he did it easily, immediately, almost magically, because that's how amazing he is, and now it's done, achieved. A single blow; declare victory; and on to the next one.
It's not a psychology that admits either planning (we now know there wasn't any to speak of) or ongoing supervision and review of even a basic sort. In short, insofar as he and creatures like him continue to have fabulistic policy input into the 'Venezuela operation', we can expect to see it fall apart in the real world.
The trouble with that analysis is that we aren't psychiatrists and to work Trump needs to be seen as master in his house, not the proxy of the finance capitalists. Kidnapping an old bloke isn't the same as defeating the Russian army.The last working-class hero in England. Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ??? - 4 November 2021 Georgina the cat ???-4 December 2025
It was quite striking when the Israelis bombed Iran and the next day or so Trump was strutting about declaring that he had actually defeated Iran etc. Consequent events of course proved otherwise: his victory was never there, even as he was speaking it was turning to dust... that one seems to have disappeared down the media memory hole, interestingly, but it illustrated his modus operandi well: an instant gratification guy.
He's married to a purchased porn wife because he hasn't got the social ability to develop a real relationship, he eats nothing but a diet of endlessly unvarying "instant" takeaway food, he has no real skills because developing such takes patience and effort and even on the one thing he has spent time on and yet again tells everyone he's great at: golf, he's a shameless cheat known to the fraternity as "Pele" due to his penchant for actually kicking the ball.
Then of course there's his other "achievements" like the "eight wars" he brought to a close...whom no-one can find, and the mess of tasteless gold sticky-on appliqués glued to the Whitehouse, which will make someone with a scraper a fortune when he's gone.
His lasting achievement will be his "Ballroom"...an embarrassingly overblown pre-redundant worthless space expressing all you need to know about the equally empty man and his legacy.
The trouble with that analysis is that we aren't psychiatrists
You don't need to be a psychiatrist to know that Trump is a man with a serious mental debilitating condition. Certainly neurotic, possibly psychotic. The main symptom, glaringly obvious to even a layman, is that he has no awareness of his condition. This has nothing to do with being intelligent or stupid; it is as a result of, and integral to, his mental illness.
Professor Sam Vaknin has Trump down as not merely a malignant narcissist, but as *the most perfect example of a malignant narcissist he has ever seen*.
The malignant narcissist, ICYMI, is a delectable combination of psychopath, paranoic, sadist, and clinical (compensatory) narcissist.
Psychopathology is an American myth. QEDThe last working-class hero in England. Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ??? - 4 November 2021 Georgina the cat ???-4 December 2025
It's a myth concocted to replace Schizophrenia as the miscellaneous file.The last working-class hero in England. Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ??? - 4 November 2021 Georgina the cat ???-4 December 2025
No, that's you, that is.The last working-class hero in England. Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ??? - 4 November 2021 Georgina the cat ???-4 December 2025
Just an afterthought to the above. It's interesting and revealing (to me anyway) to compare Starmer with Trump. Starmer is the total opposite. Whereas Trump inhabits his own world, ignoring or dismissing anything which disagrees with his own constructed vision (hence he dubs such offensive data as "fake news"), Starmer is painfully aware of the outside world and agonisingly aware of his own inadequacy. He knows he is crap at being prime minister, but hey! -- that's what he fought for and achieved, `and now he's stuck with it -- for the time being that is.
Starmer must wake up every morning and survey with dread the mountains of problems facing him -- to which he has no solutions. Lacking any ethical principles and with no moral centre, he has nothing to guide him or point him in the right direction. All he can rely on is the opinion of the outside world, principally his own backbenchers, other politicians, the corporate media and the public at large. Even when he tries to correct wrong decisions he and the government have made, due to outside pressure, he still loses because he is accused of flip-flopping, of being weak, of making endless U-turns (13 so far in this parliament). So he's in a triple bind. If he sticks to unpopular decisions (cutting the winter fuel payment for pensioners, stopping 2-child benefit payments) he gets a roasting from his own side and threatened with rebellion, but then when he relents he gets little thanks from them plus an almighty battering from the right-wing media.
I meant, what is a chap to do? Trump of course is totally different. Inhabiting his own world, he can even make a joke or two and snigger about his own weak humour. He's actually enjoying himself. Starmer daren't do that. He hasn't the nerve. If he permitted even a tiny fraction or sliver of emotion or human feeling to emerge, the plaster facade of his face would crack and disintegrate before our eyes. That's why he's so useless in interviews and public gatherings. He is a hollow, terrified man, frightened of his own shadow. As someone said, he has all the personality and charisma of a speak-your-weight machine. The poor chap is drowning in his own mediocrity and can't see a way out. One has to feel sorry for him.
As for pitiful dementedTrump, the final word has to be that the only thing that will rescue his legacy is a major medical (not mental) emergency -- a stroke or heart failure. When this happens ( when not if) sometime in this presidency, he will be relieved of office and placed somewhere safe and warm to dribble away his remaining days. It will be a sort of semi-dignified exit, sparing us the sight of him standing before a microphone babbling incoherently. But it's touch and go -- he's not far from that now.
Remember when Broon sold the British gold reserve to the Seppoes during a price slump? I got the same queasy feeling when I heard that the British are third in line when it comes to ownership of US debt after Japan and China....The last working-class hero in England. Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ??? - 4 November 2021 Georgina the cat ???-4 December 2025
on January 12, 2026, 2:38 am