Venezuela and Trump's Throwback Imperialism

Overthrowing the government of a much weaker country so that the U.S. can exploit that country’s resources is what he thinks the U.S. should have always been doing.

Michelle Goldberg discusses the bizarre buildup to a U.S. attack on Venezuela:

To hear the administration tell it, our hostilities with Venezuela are largely about the country’s role in drug trafficking. But fentanyl, the drug at the center of America’s addiction crisis, neither originates nor passes through Venezuela. The country is a transit hub for cocaine trafficking, but mostly to Europe. So the administration’s drug war rhetoric seems like a pretext. But a pretext for what?

Regime change in Venezuela has been one of Trump’s few fairly consistent policies since his first term. He sought regime change in 2019 and backed Guaido through the end of the term. Almost as soon as he was back in office, Trump had Venezuela in his sights again. Once he had picked Rubio to be his Secretary of State, the writing was on the wall. It was practically guaranteed that he would be pursuing regime change in Caracas again, and that is what we are seeing unfold right now.

Why target Venezuela? My best guess is that he was frustrated with the failure of his Venezuela policy in the first term, he sees Maduro as a relatively vulnerable target, and he thinks he can rack up a foreign policy “win” at low cost. Bombing Venezuela is wrong and stupid, but it would satisfy almost every faction of the Republican Party. He is also surrounded by Floridian hardliners that have been telling him how easy this will be. Trump may think that he can have a quick war against an extremely weak country and reap the political rewards. He is almost certainly wrong about this, and if he attacks Venezuela it is likely going to haunt the remainder of his presidency.

I assume the anti-cartel framing is being done mostly for the benefit of Trump supporters that don’t like the idea of ideological regime change wars but have no problem with using force to beat down other countries. Regime change in Venezuela is very much Rubio’s policy and it is being pursued for clearly ideological reasons, but if they can dress it up as an attack on cartels that makes it easier for a lot of Trumpists to accept. It may be that Rubio needed to dress it up this way to get Trump fully on board with military action.

They aren’t making much of an effort to sell the public on a war because they don’t think they need the public’s support. They are ignoring the public and Congress, and that has allowed them to prepare their attack while facing almost no resistance. They will go ahead and do it without bothering to persuade anyone that it is worth doing.

This is unfortunately what happens when we allow presidents to start wars on their own without even going through the motions of a debate. We have let this happen often enough under at least the last three administrations that no one even thinks twice when the president wants to start a war somewhere. The president never “made the case” for bombing Yemen or Iran, and it would never have occurred to him to make the effort. Trump has discovered this year that he can launch air wars and major attacks on other countries without suffering any consequences, and he seems to delight in being able to blow things and people to oblivion.

Trump resumed and intensified the illegal bombing of Yemen earlier this year without facing any meaningful opposition, and then ended the failed bombing campaign when he got bored with it. There was no legitimate reason for the bombing campaign, but he wanted to be seen as “tougher” than Biden so he ordered more attacks than his predecessor. He launched illegal attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities at least partly because he didn’t want to miss out on the action once the Israelis started attacking. It is not hard to imagine him ordering attacks on Venezuela just for the sake of doing it.

Perhaps the most straightforward explanation is that Trump is a crude throwback imperialist. Overthrowing the government of a much weaker country so that the U.S. can exploit that country’s resources is what he thinks the U.S. should have always been doing. To the extent that he criticized previous regime change wars, his complaint was that the U.S. didn’t plunder the affected countries and enrich itself at their expense. The U.S. is a predatory rogue state, and Venezuela has become its next prey.