Editor’s Corner: Two big face-offs with dictators
President Trump probably didn’t think he would be facing the problem of communism and socialism together this soon in his administration, but that is the case.
In our own hemisphere, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has turned the government of his nation into a tin-pot dictatorship using a sham election and shedding the blood of his own people. His one goal was to continue holding office. To heck with the welfare of his people.
His people are starving, and stream over Venezuela’s border with Colombia to buy food and other necessities in that country which is playing the unfamiliar role of good neighbor.
Maduro is a socialist, but, as Ronald Reagan said, socialism works until you start running out of other people’s money.
His predecessor, Hugo Chavez, took Venequela into the realm of socialism using oil money, but when oil prices went down — oops! The population began to starve.
Meanwhile, across the Pacific, the communist dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, has ordered the firing of yet another missile, this one of the intercontinental ballistic variety, which he claims could reach American soil, or American shipping, if it turns out to be accurate enough.
One expert said that missile could hit Chicago.
If that should happen, it would be the fault of two American presidents, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, who have based their strategy against Korea on the hopes that China would use its influence with North Korea to get Kim Jong Un to put away his missiles and stand down.
Well, it would seem that won’t happen.
If China were going to exert its influence, it already would have done so.
The time for doing something about Kim that doesn’t involve a major American military force in China’s back yard already may have passed.
Did somebody say “second Korean War?”
Going back to Venezuela, the Trump administration has decided to impose sanctions against the Maduro government to try to prevent its being a cancerous state — did anybody say like Cuba — in the Western Hemisphere.
There would be nothing to stop Maduro from selling huge swaths of his country to China, or any nation seeking land and natural resources.
A model for this already exists, in Africa, where Chinese interests have invested heavily, and where Bejing has established a vast testing ground for peaceful, and not-so-peaceful takeovers of other nations.
This is indeed a new era of international relations.
