Is Venezuela’s 2017 transformation symptomatic of the growing global polarization? And does it show how the collapse of globalism is resulting in the re-emergence of a range of governmental forms which no longer even need to acknowledge “Western-style” democracy? Are we seeing the revival of a bloc of pre-Westphalian nation-states [1] with major power support? Some trends are emerging which show how different the 21st Century global strategic architecture will be from the 20th. The present Venezuelan Government has abandoned even a pretense of adherence to what the West calls democracy. For some states, a return to autocracy is seen as the only avenue to escape total loss of power by governing élites, even though history has demonstrated how fragile and vulnerable such power structures can quickly become. Venezuelan Pres. Nicolás Maduro’s stage-managed July 30, 2017, “election” of a new National Constituent Assembly may have set the paradigm for […]