There is a lot going on in Venezuela right now. From economic crises to a presidency dispute to being the current litmus test for how right-or-left-leaning a nation foreign to it is, Venezuela is all over world headlines, especially after today.

There is much to be explained, a multi-week history lecture's worth, even, but it can be more or less summed up as such: the current president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, is having his presidency's legitimacy questioned by the opposition to the government, led by Juan Guaido, who has declared himself interim president, despite Maduro being the elected official in charge of the state.

Many countries, including the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Colombia (all right-leaning nations) have decided to throw their support behind Guaido, claiming that Maduro being inaugurated for a second term is illegitimate and that Guaido, due to his opposition support, has a right to declare himself interim president because Venezuela's National Assembly invoked the country's constitution to host an interim election.

Maduro has not left office, however, as rightfully according to the nation's supreme court, the National Assembly (their legislative branch of government) had no right to declare Maduro's presidency illegitimate, when he was democratically elected.

And yet, in this supreme-court-ruled illegitimate election, Guaido, with support from outside nations and his own opposition party, has won, hence his false claim as interim president. Let me say that again, because of support from outside nations, Guaido won an illegitimate election. Sound legit to you? Sound familiar?

We in the United States thought Russia had interfered in our election and it was a panic cycle all over the news for nearly a year! And yet here we are, with us and other countries having thrown vocal support and potential interference into a political party staging a coup against the Venezuelan government (one of Guaido's associates, Leopoldo Lopez, had been arrested in 2014 for starting a series of violent protests to overthrow Maduro's presidency) and claiming that we are in the right for doing so, simply due to Maduro's political platform.

This leads to a tricky situation in Venezuela, with an internationally-recognized revolutionary "government" with no power and the actual government on the verge of being overthrown due to other nations' influence.

This vocal support, with the added economic pressure of sanctions against the nation from the United States, has led to Maduro, who is still president of Venezuela, to give the States' diplomats 72 hours to vacate the nation, as Maduro, understandably, sees no reason to still have ties with a country that directly supports an impending military coup from a radicalized right-leaning opposition. Trump, however, refuses to remove the diplomats and claims to not recognize Maduro's authority.

So that's where we are now, and here is where I stop recapping current events and start analyzing why these events are so fucked up. First of all, sanctions are inherently and historically an act of war or a signal of impending war.

Secondly, the multi-national support of an outside power that plans to take down the government is 100% a form of imperialism and an overstepping of all boundaries. Third, Trump's refusal to leave the country and direct diplomatic disobeying of Venezuela's wishes is criminal, even if there are allied nations that support his refusal.

Trying to police the world and their political ideologies is what has led to almost every war in human history, and yet this is what the current administration is doing. Venezuela's military supports Maduro, and has threatened the US, and Russia also supports the current president, which means that in our provocation of Maduro by supporting Guaido, not only are we being imperialist, but we are putting ourselves at risk of a great war that involves us fighting against Russia.

Let's take a step back for a second and analyze a different aspect of the political conflict at hand here. We, as well as most other right-leaning nations, are very capitalistic systems. We offer some socialist ideas like public services, welfare, social security, etc. to our own country as well as international support and negotiations with other countries in terms of healthcare, subsidies, trade deals, etc., but as a whole, we are capitalists through and through.

Maduro's Venezuela is socialist, this is pretty common knowledge given that Venezuela is typically used as the "but what about ____" scapegoat in any arguments about socialism. Maduro's economy is failing, so our capitalistic ideals may tell us this means that socialism is bad and so we should support the militaristic opposition. This is false, however, because Venezuela is only failing and only at such high tension because just about every major power in the world has stripped all aide from them and increasingly made it harder and harder for the Venezuelan economy to grow throughout recent history.

We even provide aid to nations with much stronger economies than ours, just look at our own history. Venezuela has also provided aid to the US in the past, but we declined to get involved in Venezuela up until now, because they are socialist.

This is no surprise, it has happened throughout the world nearly constantly since socialism first emerged as a principal. Socialism threatens the existence of a capitalistic free market, or at least according to the States' political landscape throughout history it does, and so any time the word is even mentioned, the entire world is up in arms in fear, instilled within us by our nations' biases and versions of history.

Along with this, it would be greatly beneficial to the United States, and to any other nations involved, for Venezuela to collapse in on itself, especially if we are part of that collapse, because then and only then will we decide to provide aide to the struggling nation in order to rebuild, in a very classic neo-imperialistic way, because Venezuela has the world's largest reserves of crude oil and we as a nation love oil.

Of course, if history has anything to tell us, we will only stick around in Venezuela until it isn't profitable anymore, then we will pull all funding and support, and watch the nation fall apart again in a deadly cycle that has been going on since the discovery of The New World. We will be repeatedly ruining innocent peoples' lives for the sake of money and power because the United States likes to think of themselves as the World Police.

On our own homefront, our government is shut down, 800,000+ government workers aren't being paid, all federal assistance programs are being greatly affected, our own people are starving and dying because they are being forced to work for free and many cannot pay for necessary medicine to keep them alive, and we can't even pull ourselves together enough to have a State of the Union address or decide whether or not to institute a debt-inducing xenophobic border wall.

And yet, despite all of this, in natural US fashion, we have decided we should get involved in helping stage a civil war in a socialist nation that would rather we stay out of it (sound familiar? the Vietnam War says hi), a process which will ultimately do little more than drain our budget and potentially trigger a series of events that will lead to the largest conflict since the Iraq War.

So, to all of this I say, President Trump, we need to leave Venezuela alone, stop policing the world and tend to our own domestic policies before we worry about our foreign ones. Imperialism and unprovoked acts of war are condemnable, criminal acts, and I for one, as a citizen of this country, will not stand to watch us continue to do them again. Get out of Venezuela before it's too late, respect Maduro's wishes as the President of the nation, stop pulling puppet strings of nations who cannot fight back.