“No blood for oil!” was the cry opposing our 2003 Iraq action. The cynical notion that it was to grab Iraq’s oil was false. We went in for high-minded reasons. Which we failed at. But never took a drop of oil.
Our seizing Venezuela’s president is decried as violating international law. But Maduro was not a legitimate president, he’d stolen an election. The drug charges against him may be rubbish, I don’t know; he should rather be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Many deaths on his head. The international machinery for such cases is moribund, but the U.S. putting him on trial a-la-Nuremberg would be right and moral.
That would characterize our Venezuela action more broadly if (as we aimed to do in Iraq) we were replacing a whole vicious regime with a democratic one. Led by Edmundo Gonzales, rightful winner of the 2024 election, and ally of Nobel laureate Maria Corina Machado. Instead, Trump has callously sidelined them in favor of a deal keeping Venezuela’s rotten regime in power, as America’s tools.
After some flailing, he is now clear that it’s all about oil. Certainly not restoring democracy. The drug stuff was always dubious too — Venezuela is involved with cocaine, not fentanyl, which is our real problem. Nor is this is some do-gooder mission to aid the country’s oil infrastructure. Trump unashamedly says it’s for America to get oil to sell, keeping the money. (Something we never dreamed of pulling off in Iraq.)
The deal does give us some of Venezuela’s oil. A mafia-style protection racket — they pay us to let them stay in power and brutalize their population.
But in fact even oil is just a pretext rather than the true reason. Which is macho swagger. To show who’s boss in this hemisphere. Display our muscle. That’s the “Donroe Doctrine” Trump has brayed about.
This broader ethos was shockingly enunciated the other day by top Trump henchman Stephen Miller in a CNN interview: “We live . . . in the real world . . . that is governed by strength, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world . . . We are a superpower and will conduct ourselves” as one.
And so we now threaten Colombia, Nicaragua, Mexico, Cuba — and Greenland. Trump and Rubio have stated it would be nice to get Greenland peaceably, but otherwise, we’ll be entirely justified in seizing it by force, because we can.
Greenland is strategically important. That’s why we already have a military base there — pursuant to a longstanding joint security agreement with our NATO ally Denmark (of which Greenland is a territory). Trump’s belligerent threats are wrecking that mutual relationship and thus actually undermining our security interests regarding Greenland. The rest of Europe is openly aghast too. For one NATO member to attack the territory of another would blow up the alliance, long a pillar of America’s global security. This is insane.
More than any other country, America was admired and looked to as a moral leader. Today, not so much. Trump and Miller are proclaiming we’re just another bully, and a might-makes-right world is not only what exists, but what should exist. A world where the powerful can do as they please. Not exactly a recipe for a world of peace and human progress. Not the kind of world we should want to live in. And, actually, not serving our true national interests.
For most of a century, we were the leaders in trying to coax the world toward a better paradigm. Now we instead declare we like it when bullies rule, and relish being one ourselves.
Further, Trump now says the only constraint on his foreign policy is his own morality. He has none. He too is guilty of crimes against humanity, literally with countless deaths on his head. He too belongs before a Nuremberg tribunal.
