A few days ago President Obama signed into effect Executive Order No. Six Trillion, which made it clear that Venezuela, a small Narco-American country, known to most Americans as the donkey-fetishizing birthplace of Shakira and Eva Peron, is a Major National Security Threat. This got me thinking. . .if this is a formal designation, surely there must be a formal list of America’s National Security Threats. And if the news about Venezuela’s addition was so widely covered, that list ought to be easily publicly available.

But it’s a bit more complicated. There is such a thing as the FBI National Security Threat List, but the country section is classified. This made no sense. Why publicly say that Venezuela had been added to a secret list?

The answer becomes clear through a more careful reading of the articles relating to the recent Executive Order. Apparently, declaring a nation a National Security Threat is merely the first step in America’s Sanctions Program: something administrated not by the Department of Defense, nor that of Homeland Security, nor even by the State Department, but by the Department of the Treasury.

The Dept. of the Treasury website contains a list of ongoing sanctions processes, which the most casual glance shows to be a complete joke. If declaring a country a National Security Threat is the first step, or even in the first 100 steps in the Sanctions Program, how in the world can such international non-entities as the former Liberian Regime of Charles Taylor, Cote d’Ivoire, and Belarus be included?

The Belarus Program has not seen any action taken since 2011. Which means, supposedly, that we have been living under terrible threat from that nation, but have been able to ignore it for four years. That’s a very cold war! And not only the Treasury Department, but everyone else has been able to ignore Belarus, except the odd journalist looking to write another lazy piece on Europe’s Last Dictatorship™ (pieces which, incidentally, always fail to mention the mitre’d elephant in the basilica).

All of this gives us some pause to ask, “What does it mean?” Is Venezuela’s addition to an ersatz enemies list some kind 1984-esque psy-op along the lines of “We have always been at war with Eurasia,” or is it a legitimate attempt to “degrade and destroy” a clay-pot dictatorship that drank the socialist Kool-aid?

My suggestion is that the action actually means nothing, it is of no significance whatsoever. Our entire foreign policy appears to be something of a galvinism: useless contractions and reactions to stimuli without a coordinating system. None of it makes any sense. Is the President confused? What is our foreign policy? What is going on in Syria? We arm ISIS, we bomb ISIL. What about Ukraine? We seem to have abandoned a really fantastic effort to false flag our way into a conflict with Russia in the grand old style of CIA coups. No follow through anymore. And Netanyahu’s recent speech—why did that even occur? Twenty-three standing ovations during a three hour speech is more like the response of an audience at the Party Congress to the Premier’s ovation, and yet the so-called American President allows this farce to occur. Then Republicans send a letter to Iran for some reason, letting the ayatollahs know that they should watch their back, because somehow an America that can’t even agree on its policy toward them is a powerful, confident nation they ought to be scared of.

I repeat, what is our foreign policy? Why does it increasingly appear to be culture-jamming performance art, rather than a legitimate and coherent attempt to advance America’s interests?