Nostalgia for American Hypocrisy
Two decades ago, Richard N. Haass, a senior foreign-policy official in the George W. Bush administration, confessed that he would go to his grave not knowing why the United States had invaded Iraq. “A decision was not made,” Haass told me. “A decision happened, and you can’t say when or how.” I thought of this astonishing remark after Saturday’s military action in Caracas. President Donald Trump and his advisers have thrown out numerous justifications for seizing the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife and bringing them to New York for trial. None of them makes sense.
Maduro ruled Venezuela viciously and illegitimately, but Trump has no qualms about doing business with the vicious and illegitimate—he prefers them to democratically elected leaders. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told skeptics in Congress that the operation wasn’t an act of war at all, but a simple arrest based on Maduro’s indictment for drug trafficking. Then why, at the end of last year, did Trump pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the ex-president of Honduras who had been convicted of the same crime by an American court and sentenced to 45 years in prison?
If narco-terrorism is a threat to U.S. security, Venezuela is a relatively small player in the global narcotics trade; the chief drug it exports, cocaine, is not a mass killer of Americans like fentanyl is, and the probable destination of the alleged drug boats that U.S. forces have been bombing off the Venezuelan coast was Europe. If Trump wants to deport 600,000 Venezuelan migrants from the U.S., the political chaos left by a decapitated regime could increase the exodus to this country. If his concern was the intolerable oppression of the Venezuelan people, he would have demanded the release of political prisoners and planned for a democratic future rather than kept their tormentors in power. As for the oil that Trump craves, America doesn’t need Venezuela’s reserves, and tapping them would require years of investment in the country’s decayed infrastructure. In a New York Times report, Trump officials cited Maduro’s public dance moves to a techno remix as a final provocation.
Bush apparently decided to invade Iraq before he had settled on a specific cause. He wanted to assert American power after September 11, and a preventive war gave him a way. “Fuck Saddam,” he told a group of senators a full year before the invasion. “We’re taking him out.” The tragicomic improv act following the raid on Caracas suggests that Trump attacked Venezuela for the same reason: because he could. This is more often the case than we’d like to think. It would be comforting to believe that geopolitics is a nefarious conspiracy plotted by rational actors pursuing rational interests in a windowless room—but in the long history of human folly, we seldom know why events of the most momentous consequence even happened. “Foreign policy makes no sense,” the late foreign-policy expert Leslie Gelb liked to say.
The specter of Iraq hangs over Venezuela like a warning light. Trump seems to have taken Operation Iraqi Freedom as a guide to how not to conduct Operation Absolute Resolve: no year-long propaganda campaign to gin up public support; no congressional authorization; no speeches and votes at the United Nations; no coalition of the willing or of any other kind; no American troops on the ground for more than a few hours; no talk of human rights, elections, and postwar reconstruction; no change of regime at all. Iraq was a disaster in part because the Bush administration, wanting regime change without nation building, substituted wishful thinking for post-invasion planning. Now we might learn that wishful thinking is better than no thinking at all. The Trump administration appears to be making up the future of Venezuela on the fly.
The embrace of unilateralism, preemption, and torture in Iraq seemed to mark the start of a new era in U.S. foreign policy—endless, unrestrained war. A mountain of books, articles, and speeches declared America alone. But from the vantage point of the Trump era, we can see that Iraq was instead the last American war of the 80-year postwar period. Its architects might have been eager to break all constraints on their way to catastrophe, but Iraq was a final burst of hubris in an era still characterized by internationalism and democracy. Concepts such as humanitarian intervention and transitional justice were manipulated and abused by the Bush administration, but it wasn’t free to discard them. It felt compelled to hold several elections that were bound to give power to Iraqis who were aligned with America’s enemy, Iran.
In the 2002 National Security Strategy, Bush declared: “Today, the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence. In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not use our strength to press for unilateral advantage. We seek instead to create a balance of power that favors human freedom.” Trump’s version of the same document, released in November, has nothing to say about any universal values, including freedom. It’s all about unilateral advantage, with a crudely transactional view of America’s relation to the rest of the world. It’s a clean break from the postwar years of internationalism that, although flawed, prevented another world war and created unprecedented conditions of freedom and prosperity, first in the West, then in the former colonial world.
Bush was guilty of being arrogant, reckless, naive, and incapable of self-judgment, but he believed in an American mission with enough zeal to start a foolish war on its behalf that did irreversible damage to the mission. To critics on both the right and the left, the post-9/11 “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan brought disrepute to the entire project of an American-led liberal international order. The left wanted America to be more like Norway, peaceful and humanitarian. The right wanted America to be a stronghold of isolation. But Trump has shown that neither of these was on the menu of a superpower. The likeliest alternative to Pax Americana is naked imperialism.
Just as Bush’s messianic National Security Strategy foretold the Iraq War, the crude cynicism of Trump’s produced the raid in Caracas, where it is facing its first practical test. Since Saturday’s military action, Trump and his aides have been spouting threats about the United States military dominating the Western Hemisphere wherever the president wants. What began in Venezuela might well be repeated in Greenland, Cuba, Panama, or even Canada. What the U.S. can do it is free to do. Force is its own justification. Trump’s strategy recalls the era before World War II—one of dollar diplomacy and gunboat imperialism, spheres of dominion, puppet dictators, resource grabs, annexations, and the threat of larger wars among great powers. Only now those nations are armed with nuclear weapons, and America in 2026 is incomparably stronger than America was in 1926, and Calvin Coolidge was no Trump.
The clearest expression of Trump’s thought here, as always, comes from the mouth of Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff and his homeland-security adviser. Miller is more coherent than the president, less self-seeking than the vice president, and more openly hateful than any member of the Cabinet and Congress. He’s a genuine ideologue with no conventional political ambitions, and his words make it impossible not to think of the 1930s: “America is for Americans and Americans only!” “At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” “The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” “We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened.”
With Venezuela, Miller is taking a public role in foreign policy. Like the rest of the leadership circle, he seems unworried by the prospect of civil war, insurgency, or prolonged chaos in post-Maduro Venezuela, indifferent to the fate of Venezuelans under the regime left in power by Trump and untroubled by the possibility of an American quagmire. He seems to have limitless faith in the ability of U.S. warships to work the administration’s will on another country and people. On Monday, Miller explained to CNN’s Jake Tapper why Venezuela is going to be run by Trump: “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
It’s a kind of candor that makes me miss the old American hypocrisy.