Why Trump’s Venezuela Operation Is Politically Incoherent

The most striking features of US intervention in Venezuela over the weekend were its lawlessness and astonishing logical and political incoherence.

The world has just witnessed Washington use its armed forces to kidnap the leader of a foreign sovereign nation for the stated purposes of subjecting him to the American criminal justice system. Most strikingly, this unilateral action was ordered by the President of the United States – Donald Trump – whose impunity has been increased immeasurably by an extraordinarily pliable US congress controlled by his own Republican Party, and a landmark 2024 Supreme Court decision that shockingly ruled that US leaders generally cannot face criminal prosecution for their official actions.

The Trump administration has justified its actions in Venezuela using a mixture of weak and childish justifications. She has ceaselessly described Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro as a dictator and denounced his alleged corruption. But the foundations on which these claims are based are remarkably weak. Whatever Maduro’s corruption, the main accusation used to justify the buildup of US forces in the Caribbean and his heavily armed rendition — that he was a major drug lord ultimately responsible for countless deaths in the United States — has never been supported by evidence, and is highly doubted by many experts.

What’s more, if being a bad guy or even a dictator constitutes sufficient justification for removing another country’s leader, then this ridiculous standard will accelerate the world away from a more principled order — and toward a return to the jungle, where countries drop any pretense of respecting the principles of sovereignty, rules, and the rights of others, and simply do whatever they feel they can get away with. (It’s also clearly inconsistently applied. Where does the list begin and end? Kim Jong Un? Vladimir Putin?)

A large part of Washington’s claim to the legitimacy of the operation lies in official boasting of the US military’s prowess and ability to carry out complex and dangerous operations in distant lands. But this is just a political fig leaf. The Pentagon’s capabilities appear less impressive when we take into account the extraordinary military expenditures of the United States, the world’s largest defense spender, amounting to more than the next nine countries combined. Indeed, Washington’s need to rely increasingly on muscle strengthening is a symptom of the massive and accelerating erosion in recent decades of its claims to any moral, ethical, or democratic leadership in the world. No amount of boasting can overcome this, and hailing this intervention as an extraordinary act of arms highlights the horrific loss of dozens of Venezuelan lives reported.

A world power more concerned with such matters would have focused on electoral legitimacy before oil and committed to a rapid democratic political process immediately. Instead, the United States did the opposite. Amazingly, Trump ignored any consideration of handing power to Venezuela’s recently exiled Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Maria Corina Machado, whose political coalition is widely believed to have won the country’s recent elections; Anonymous sources said to The Washington Post And that was because he was envious of her for receiving this global honor at his expense.

If the intervention had anything to do with human rights, it would have ensured the immediate release of the large number of political prisoners in Venezuela. But when given the opportunity to talk about the issue, Trump showed disinterest, saying: “We didn’t get there. Now, what we want to do is fix the oil.” In this regard, if Maduro’s dictatorship were a truly central complaint, it would not have left the entire state apparatus upon which Maduro established his rule, including his deputy, Delcy Rodriguez, and key ministers, some of whom also face drug indictments in the United States.

The winds of chaos could be heard above the feverish claims of military competence repeatedly over the weekend. These words were echoed loudly in Trump’s language when he said that the United States would “manage” Venezuela; that American oil companies will recover another country’s underground resources that were “stolen” from them; And that Washington will make a lot of money as a result of this intervention; And that the de facto president of Venezuela, Rodriguez, “now has no choice” but to comply with Washington’s directives regarding the management of her country.

They also shouted at the bizarre wording of Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state and national security adviser, who said the White House did not need to inform Congress of an intervention like this because it was a “launching” operation — the rhetorical equivalent of circus magic. Both Rubio and US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have repeatedly stated that whatever happens next in Venezuela, and by implication almost anywhere in the world, will be decided by Trump himself. They didn’t use the word “freak”, but they didn’t need to.

And for any doubters, when talking about US intervention, a beaming Trump told Fox News on Saturday: “We can do it again, too. And no one can stop us.”

No doubt some Americans will celebrate all of this as a restoration of what they see as their country’s power in the world, which had been allowed to fade. For them, Trump represents an uninhibited and unapologetic America — an America that exerts its will on the world with renewed freedom. Saying they are wrong has nothing to do with partisan politics.

Over recent decades, US power in the world has diminished in objective and measurable ways. Some of this is due to strategic mistakes the country has made, such as waging costly and irrational wars in places like Iraq and Afghanistan; Part of it is rather due to the expanding distribution of global wealth, which over time inevitably expresses itself in terms of power.

First China, then India, and in the aftermath, a host of other “secondary” and “tertiary” world powers have increased in stature as their economies have grown relative to the United States and other world leaders in the past 70 years or so, especially Europe and Japan. Washington can do little or nothing to reverse the course of history in this direction. But this does not mean that the United States is unable to do anything to strengthen its position on the global stage.

Its wisest course of action would be to build a calmer, more accommodating foundation for its continued power and influence in the world. Instead of throwing its weight into ill-considered military force, as it did in Venezuela – and more recently in Nigeria – it should focus on strengthening its internal power and patient renewal and expansion of principled alliances.

This is almost the exact opposite of Trump’s approach, which has been to destroy scientific research, attack the country’s universities in the open pursuit of political advantage, and continue to belittle and disparage Washington’s allies.

Ironically, the biggest beneficiary of Trump’s recent actions is the country routinely identified as the most dangerous threat to US power: China. The weakening of Washington’s alliances under Trump has been a tremendous boon for Beijing, as has been his administration’s unprovoked attack on the country’s world-leading scientific and educational establishment.

As I watched the build-up of US Navy assets in the southern Caribbean – and the quasi-civilian attacks on small boats off the coast of South America, killing their crews without any public evidence to support their claims that they were smuggling drugs into the US – I felt that China must get a taste of this spectacle. By acting as if the Western Atlantic is an American lake, Washington gives legitimacy to Beijing’s claims that its will alone is equivalent to the order of law in the Western Pacific. One can hardly imagine now how Washington could complain if Beijing beheaded Taiwan’s leadership as part of what it describes as a matter of China’s internal law, just as the United States pretended to intervene in Venezuela.

How could I not think of China conducting a large-scale naval exercise of its own to encircle Taiwan while the US fleet was gathering near Venezuela? Or how can Beijing invoke Washington’s broad sense of its geopolitical privileges in its region to justify its behavior?

But in the wake of the US military’s arrest of a foreign leader, my concerns have deepened. In apparent ignorance, the United States has stumbled throughout history in creating the framework of international power that China perfected and administered for thousands of years before the West invented the so-called Westphalian system after a series of disastrous European wars over religion in the 17th century. The name it eventually acquired was the “tribute system,” the main subject of my 2017 book, Everything under heaven. Beginning with the Han Dynasty, which corresponds to the early Christian era in Europe, kings near and far were urged or forced to acquiesce to China’s imperial geopolitical primacy, accept its preferences in both politics and trade, and finally pay tribute, which meant imposing an informal tax on China in exchange for the supposed benefit of living in a world of order and a civilizational ideal.

If this is indeed the kind of order that the inexperienced United States now wants to recreate, by vulgarly extracting tribute in the form of oil after overwhelming conquests or putting a gun to the heads of the leaders of small states, one senses that China will be the happiest country ever. After all, through centuries of practice, it has perfected and perfected methods for persuading its neighbors to submit to its will without explicit resort to force at all.