The galloping US national debt had reached $37.5 trillion, according to the US Treasury site, which was last updated on September 30, 2025. At 123% of the GDP, the debt has doubled since 2015, when it was slightly over 18 trillion, showing an incredible rate of expansion, which pushes Washington to accelerate reckless plans of plundering other countries.

Borrowing is a Wedding, Repaying is a Funeral (a Swahili Proverb)

 

The connection between Threats on Venezuela and attempts to recover Bagram Air Base

Simon Chege Ndiritu 
The soaring US debt has attracted the attention of the highest politicians, who propose ways of addressing it through currency manipulations, essentially theft.

 

In 2024, candidate Donald Trump, who is now the US president, stated that Washington’s adoption of cryptocurrencies would give it the possibility of writing “a little crypto check” to the world to repay its debt. His suggestion that Washington’s huge debt can be paid in a “little check” shows how the then-former president was unwilling to allow his country to repay the commensurate value of its debt, despite consuming a disproportionately high volume of global resources. This attitude is reminiscent of the British Empire, which wanted to continue receiving quality Chinese goods, including tea, porcelain, and silverware, from China without paying for them in silver but instead with proceeds from opium sold to the Chinese.

Both Venezuela and Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan are central pillars in Washington’s calculus of maintaining the opioid epidemic at home to justify the plunder of Venezuelan oil 

Like the British strategy of pushing opium on the Chinese, the US establishment seeks to push opium from Afghanistan to American citizens to create an excuse for looting Venezuela’s oil, which shows that Trump’s ratcheting up threats against Venezuela is related to his push to obtain Bagram Air Base as a cover for reoccupying Afghanistan and remaking it into an opium-producing powerhouse. Opium and its derivatives produced in Afghanistan during the US occupation greatly increased the supply of opioids and fueled the opioid epidemic in America, which has given Trump a justification for policies to antagonize China, Canada, and Mexico in early 2025, and to threaten Venezuela, as will be discussed later.

Imperialist Entitlement

The sense of entitlement to other people’s land and resources that once dominated the British Empire is now driving the US government. Cecil Rhodes, the chief architect of British colonialism, who was described by some as having “Megalomaniacal Imperial Ambitions”, argued for Anglo-Saxons to occupy and dominate all strategically located and resource-rich regions globally, including Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, the Malay Peninsula, and Chinese and Japanese seaboards in 1877. Later, the British colonial machine proceeded with this land grab before it was beaten back. Trump is not any different, as he has already demanded that Washington take over countries and regions, including Panama, Canada, Greenland, and Gaza, because they are strategically located and have critical minerals he feels the US should own, despite falling within other countries’ borders. This sense of entitlement drove the US and UK to launch wars of aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya under phony justifications, but the victims’ oil wealth was never accounted for during the occupation. If oil interests informed the West’s invasion of Libya and Iraq, as some Western sources admit, Venezuela has twice the size of oil reserves as Iraq, making it a more fruitful target for plunder to reinvigorate the debt-ridden US empire. The imperial war of plunder being prepared against Venezuela will be justified using some tales, including the threat posed by illegal drugs, which makes it necessary for perpetrators to increase Afghanistan’s opium production to reinvigorate the opioid epidemic, noting that the production of poppy had declined significantly after the Taliban rose to power.

While Trump’s sudden naval deployment to the Venezuelan coast starting in August 2025 has been promoted as being meant to fight narcotics, Washington’s failure to point out which specific illegal drug is being targeted constitutes hypocrisy. Worth mentioning, Trump had never, either during the campaign or after his election, named Venezuela as significantly contributing to the opioid epidemic in the US. Additionally, his White House in March 2025 explicitly listed Mexico and Canada as harboring networks that trafficked precursor materials for fentanyl, which was responsible for the largest percentage of deaths related to drug overdose. He even levied tariffs against these countries, meaning Venezuela is now being targeted for other reasons. Also, the illegal drug produced in South America is cocaine, which has a lower rate of use in the US and is linked to a lower risk of overdose-related death as compared to natural and synthetic opioids. Therefore, Trump’s move against Venezuela in August, just over a month after the US-Israeli bombing of Iran in June, failed to bring down the oil-rich Persian nation, showing that the US empire is prowling the world looking for oil-rich countries to plunder and resolve its massive debt. As of writing, Washington was positioning its refueling tankers in a pattern that preceded the June bombing of Iran, showing an attempt to retry collapsing Iran to steal its oil. Washington recognizes that attempts to plunder Venezuela and Iran have low probabilities of success, which pushes the aggressor to attempt both.

Oil, Venezuela, and Afghanistan

Oil is a crucial resource that is the backbone of the world economy, and the US gaining hold of Venezuela’s crude would constitute Washington adding the total value of the latter’s output to its Gross National Product (GNP) overnight. This move would give Washington a “productivity miracle,” enabling it to easily repay its debt and control the global economy. The US Empire’s preference for expanding GNP as opposed to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is that the latter would require increasing productivity and incomes of its citizens, which can allow them to participate in social and political life, an unacceptable proposition for the power-hungry elites in Washington. Therefore, Washington thinks it is beneficial to make and steal more money abroad while maintaining a large poor population, grappling with high college dropout rates, homelessness, hunger, and drug addiction, to politically disenfranchise this population. To buttress the point that Washington seeks to regain control of and expand Afghanistan’s opium production, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has noted a continuous year-on-year decline in opioid overdose deaths in the US over 2022, 2023, and 2024, a period coinciding with the Taliban’s fight to reduce opium poppy production.

Before, studies by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) had revealed that the supply of opiates and overdose-related deaths had risen by 500% coinciding with the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan from 2001 through 2016, which had exponentially increased opium poppy cultivation. While all decent people should celebrate a reduction in opioid-related deaths, imperialists in Washington may be mourning this decline, which denies them a justification for waging wars. Therefore, Trump’s move to return to Bagram Air Base is a justification for the US to return to occupying Afghanistan and promote opium production, elevating the opiate crisis at home, which will, in turn, make the invasion and long-term occupation of Venezuela justifiable. Therefore, both Venezuela and Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan are central pillars in Washington’s calculus of maintaining the opioid epidemic at home to justify the plunder of Venezuelan oil.

https://journal-neo.su/2025/10/05/the-connection-between-threats-on-venezuela-and-attempts-to-recover-bagram-air-base/

 

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         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.