‘Jack Ryan’ TV show means US coup in Venezuela is toast

CIA agent Jack Ryan will tackle ‘nuclear-armed’ Venezuela in the next season of the Amazon streaming show. That is perhaps the clearest admission that Washington’s attempt at regime change in Caracas has failed.

Amazon teased the second season of ‘Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan’ this week, ahead of its premiere in November. The 90-second trailer shows the title character on a mission to Venezuela, which may have secretly obtained nuclear weapons from the evil Russians (who else?), or something to that effect.

Needless to say, this has been met with everything from raised eyebrows to outright derision by journalists, historians and others, who condemned it as CIA propaganda of the worst kind.

“Leave it to Americans to make a show depicting their victims as monsters who want to nuke them,” tweeted journalist Rania Khalek, alluding to assessments that over 40,000 people have died as a consequence of US sanctions against Venezuela.

“The 1980s was the time to make garbage like this,” said journalist Aaron Mate. “It’s 2019, and [Jon Krasinski] et al are making Cold War propaganda for John Bolton and other far-right overlords.”

Historian Gary Alexander described the trailer as being “like snorting 100 [percent] pure John Bolton.”

President Donald Trump’s hawkish national security advisor is considered the principal driving force behind the US push for regime change in Venezuela, which was launched in January but bogged down after repeated failures to install “interim president” Juan Guaido in the Miraflores Palace.

Other critics wondered if the show’s plot lines were simply hand-delivered from Langley, which already has contracts with Amazon for hosting CIA data on its cloud servers. Comedian James Adomian wondered if there was any way to “de-list this as a television show and categorize it correctly as in-house CIA propaganda?”

Jack Ryan was introduced in the ‘The Hunt for Red October’, the 1984 bestseller that launched the career of techno-thriller writer Tom Clancy. Clearly a wish-fulfillment proxy for Clancy himself, down to his Baltimore roots, over the course of several novels Ryan rises from a humble data analyst to CIA director and eventually the US president. Along the way, he defeats every imaginable US boogeyman, from the Soviets in the early books to China, Russia and Iran in the more recent ones. 

Jon Krasinski (aka Jim from ‘The Office’) portrays Ryan in the Amazon reboot, following in the footsteps of Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and Chris Pine.

“Ryan has been reanimated by Amazon and a team of CIA consultants to indoctrinate a younger audience into the paranoid culture of the new Cold War,” journalist Max Blumenthal, who recently reported from Venezuela, told RT.

“As Washington’s real life coup comes crashing down in Caracas, the regime change fantasy of Ryan provides a wounded empire with the perfect salve,” added Blumenthal.

It would not be the first time a US foreign adventure was “retconned” into a success on the silver screen. Think ‘Black Hawk Down’ laundering the US failure in Somalia, ‘Behind Enemy Lines’ repackaging the intervention in Bosnia, or ‘Rambo II’ winning the war in Vietnam by rescuing the missing US prisoners. 

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