College of William & Mary Professor Lawrence Wilkerson describes the current effort of the Donald Trump administration to overthrow the Venezuela government and oust Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro as a continuation of the United States effort begun in 2002, when Wilkerson was chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell in the George W. Bush administration, to overthrow the government of Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez. Over those 17 years, Wilkerson asserts, the real reason for the US intervention has been to help the rich, not the oft-repeated excuse of seeking to promote democracy and freedom.

Interviewed this week by Paul Jay at The Real News, Wilkerson explains that “no move in our hemisphere that I can recall in our history has ever been about democracy and freedom, though we use those words quite loosely to describe our motivation because it makes the somnolent American people feel good.”

US intervention in the Western Hemisphere, Wilkerson says in the interview, is “usually about commercialism, whether it’s Guatemala and United Fruit Company and bananas and land or whether it’s some other country, like today Venezuela, where it’s oil and the five percent that we have relations with.” Elaborating, Wilkerson, who is an academic board member for the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, notes that “US commercial relations with South America, Central America too to an extent but mostly South America, have always been that we try to maintain the wealthiest five percent, usually the corporate leadership in that country, in power because they’re allied with our corporate leadership in profit-making.”

Watch Wilkerson’s complete interview regarding US foreign policy here:

Reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.