Foreign Digest: Venezuela and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization

Venezuela: The center-right Venezuelan opposition leader, Maria Cortina Machado, noted last week that the Socialist dictatorship of Venezuela is producing drones with Iranian technology. The South American State is thus the only State in the Western Hemisphere, other than the Unted States, that can produce drones. Venezuela’s could possibly reach Florida. Machado observed a growing threat from the Islamic Republic of Iran, the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism, which has signed 400 accords with Venezuela. Iran, which foments Islamist revolution around the Islamic world, committed two terrorist attacks in Argentina in the 1990s. Late last week, the ex-head of Venezuela’s military counterintelligence pleaded guilty to narco-terrorism charges in the United States federal District Court in New York after having been extradited from Spain in 2023. He funded the Colombian Marxist narco-terrorists. Venezuela’s relationships with Iran and the Columbian terrorists are examples of why I include it in what I call the Axis of Rogues, including Russia, China, North Korea, and their allies. North Atlantic Treaty Organization: The 32 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), including the U.S., pledged to increase the defense spending from 2% of gross domestic product to 5% within 10 years, with 3.5% for military spending and 1.5% for broader security (e.g. infrastructure, cyber, hybrid, and resilience). Although Donald Trump sought to take total credit for the increases in NATO spending during his times in office, the members had pledged in 2013 when Barack Obama was President to increase their spending to 2% which most of them had reached, and some members, especially those in Eastern Europe, had already begun increasing their spending in the face of the growing threat of Russian imperialism, more than Trump’s misleading claims that member States were not “paying” into NATO. Members, including the U.S., pay relatively little into the administration of NATO; their spending is independent of the organization. NATO was formed early in the Cold War to protect Western Europe against the Soviet Union. It has been the most successful defensive pact in history, having prevented the Soviets and their Russian successors, who are trying to restore the Soviet Union/Russian Empire, from any major military attack against its members. Ever since Trump travelled to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, he has complained that American allies supposedly have not spent enough for their defense, as if their increased spending would proportionately decrease U.S. spending. Moreover, he implies that American spending to defend its allies is a kind of favor to allies that only benefits them, instead of recognizing common interests and ignoring the many defensive benefits to the U.S. of having allies. The only time the NATO alliance’s defensive provision that an attack on one is an attack on all has been invoked was after the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks on America.