'Twere Ever Thus

US Imperialism in a New World

Ever since Vietnam, I have been shaking my head at the foolish, self-defeating actions of successive administrations in the arena of foreign policy, thinking “my country should not be doing this.”

I stopped shaking my head around 23 years ago. And I am not surprised today by Trump’s military action in Caracas. The Venezuela aggression is what America does and has done for decades; in Latin America we have been doing it for two centuries. The bald-faced intrusion of the US military into the internal affairs of countries to our south is business as usual.

Some disagree. I heard John Mearsheimer, (University of Chicago political scientist) say recently on a Quincy Institute panel, that Venezuela is not a continuation of the Monroe Doctrine of 1826, which simply told the Europeans to stay out of the Western Hemisphere.

But he is wrong. Telling the Europeans to “stay out” in 1826 also said that the Western Hemisphere was ours, and, by implication, the US can do what it wants there. After all, Latin America was not much different from the imperial expansion the Americans were executing in their North American space. The Teddy Roosevelt corollary of 1904 formally recognized the right for the US to intervene in support of the doctrine throughout the hemisphere.

So, since 1823 the US has been doing what Donald Trump just did. Everbody knows the litany, if they have been paying attention: the US kicked the Spaniards out of what became its West; seized Texas and invaded Mexico, kicked the Spaniards out of Cuba, seized Puerto Rico, created Panama and built the American-owned canal, and occupied Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic.

All that before World War II. The Caribbean, Central America, northern South America have always been the US’ “near abroad,” every bit as much as all those Stans were and are the Russian near abroad.

After 1945, the US pasted anti-communism over its imperialism and just kept going, overthrowing some governments by barely concealed stealth, like Guatemala and Chile, others by direct military assault — the Dominican Republic, Cuba (Bay of Pigs), and Grenada. Even seized a drug-dealing political head of state (Noriega).

Democrats and Republicans alike, the US has always done what it wanted in Latin America and used a dominant military to do a lot of it. It put in place or supported authoritarian governments for a century, defended its business interests, stomped adversaries and basically didn’t care if other countries objected. The US bullied, threatened, cajoled its neighbors, all smaller, weaker, less well-armed.

The only difference in what Trump and the American military did last weekend was how blatant his action was, using the thinnest of excuses. Without the usual sugar-coating of good intentions, democratizing rhetoric, and well-intentioned development assistance advisors slipping in behind the military to “do good” and make the US look good.

The Trump action in Venezuela is just raw naked imperialism, without apologies and excuses. Flavored with an explicit warning that Mexico, Colombia, and especially Cuba may be next.

Marry megalomania with an interventionist tradition and you have the seizure of Maduro and spouse.

I heard Curt Mills, Executive Director of The American Conservative, call the Maduro capture “performative” on the same Quincy Institute Zoom session. If so, it is a long-running show with devastating implications for countries and peoples to our south.

There are those who argued that the issue at stake here is the “rules of the international order” the US helped shape after World War II. Yes, of course, there are such rules – charters, treaties, agreements, institutions, international courts (one, the International Criminal Court, that the US declined to become part of) – all things the US has supported or helped create. And routinely violated or ignored, because the US can, often concealing its actions behind the veil of intelligence operations.

Not only did the US do that in its back yard; it did so across the world, because super-power is, or was, a global role.

So there is something feigned, ever so slightly hypocritical, about the chattering class wringing their hands over the “rules” of the international order, international law, the lack of congressional briefings or UN resolutions, etc.

Even the debate and anxiety over “what is the Trump plan for Venezuela after day 1?” They didn’t have a plan. The plan was to seize Maduro. The administration scoffs at the rules, the call for briefings, the worry about the plan. After Iraq and Afghanistan, any such a plan is at best, wishful thinking, and, in reality, un-executable. The US doesn’t know how to do post-invasion planning, as the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan amply proved.

For those who worry that the regime in Washington risks another quagmire, they are taking Trump too seriously. I could be wrong, but I don’t believe the intention to be in charge of internal Venezuelan governance has any legs at all – otherwise they would have replaced Maduro with Nobel prize winner María Corina Machado or 2024 election winner Edmundo González Urrutia, or at least tried to.

One-and-done is surely Trump’s mantra; let the chips fall where they may. Think Elon Musk making foreign policy for a model.

In Venezuela, remember the words of Thucydides: “The powerful do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The most naked assertion about international power ever written.

Until Steven Miller, presidential advisor, revived power politics as the explanation for Venezuela:

“The US is running Venezuela. By definition this is true….You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

But/and…speaking of power.

The world is now a different place. Then the US was a super-power. Eight years ago, I wrote that the “international order” being cited right and left today, the order the US dominated, was disappearing. It was being replaced by a more disorderly international balance of power, with many regional centers, at least two (China, the USA) global powers, and a bevy of regional powers. Power was dispersing; many rules would compete with each other.

That fundamental change is now complete. The Venezuela action takes place against a backdrop of dispersed and disorderly power in a world the US no longer dominates. China has risen – how will the Venezuelan action affect Chinese decisions going forward, especially with regard to Taiwan? China is a legitimate power in Latin America today; how will this action change those relationships. The unilateral actions of Putin’s Russia look less inconsistent with the Trumpian assertion of naked power. The Europeans grow anxious about unilateral Trump regime actions – is Greenland next? Is NATO really, truly dead? Regional powers rise, as forecast – Turkey, India, Nigeria, Brazil, South Africa. How will they respond?

At the level of global strategy, every US action today is likely to create a counter-action, unlike the “good old days,” when it was just the dominant power (US) “getting away with it” again, when nobody else could rewrite the rules.

This new world is not yet organized into a system. Trump’s action breaks with the old rules, just as the actions of others have. They help put the world on a different, unfamiliar course, toward a future only dimly foreseeable.

The US may have dominated South America and much of the rest of the world, especially from1945 to 1979. But times have changed; power politics today is playing with fire.