Venezuela: An Evil Omen

In which I take a break from taking a break from political commentary

I felt literally sick to my stomach when I read of the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife by US forces. It is the latest in a series of crimes by the increasingly deranged Trump administration against that country: first murder (the extrajudicial killing of passengers and crew on boats in the Caribbean), then piracy (the seizure of an tanker carrying Venezuelan oil), and now kidnapping.

Mere criminality doesn’t explain why this move provoked in me such nauseous dread. Horrible crimes, some much worse than this, are happening all the time, whether perpetrated by my own country, its allies, or pretty much any government on earth. But this one strikes a particularly evil omen.

As I write this, Maduro is being indicted in a federal court in New York for violations of US law. What principle is being asserted here? Is it that if a leader of one country violates the laws of another, that leader can be abducted, tried, and imprisoned? What if Donald Trump, or the president of France or some other country, violates Chinese law? Would the Chinese be within their rights to kidnap them? That is the principle that this action asserts.

How would people in this country feel if Venezuela abducted President Trump and indicted him in Venezuelan court for violating Venezuelan law? (OK, maybe some of us would feel gleeful, but this is no way to run international affairs.)

Of course, the difference between President Maduro and the leader of a more powerful country is that the former is vulnerable to abduction and the latter is not. So really the principle being asserted here is simply, “Might makes right.”

The whole idea of law, of civilization even, is to replace that bestial principle with higher principles that embody fairness, compassion, freedom, sovereignty, self-determination, and a concept of natural rights. Law is a set of agreements that puts limits on the ability of the strong to dominate the weak, for the state to dominate the individual, for the majority to dominate the minority. Without law, we live always in anxiety: a constant struggle to assert dominance until, one day, misfortune overtakes us and whoever was once strong becomes old, frail, sick, or weak.

The kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro is not an assertion of the rule of law; it is a repudiation of the rule of law. To be sure, Trump and his predecessors have set ample precedent for this latest disregard for legal and diplomatic principle. Particularly flagrant was the support for Israel’s assassinations of leaders of its enemies while in the midst of negotiations, and then our own bombing of Iran in a similar vein. Also, the “ceasefires” Israel agrees to and then promptly violates, again with US diplomatic and military support. If negotiations are used as a ruse to lull the enemy into complacency, then the very possibility of negotiation vanishes. Imagine, for example, if when Vladimir Putin showed up in Alaska to negotiate with Trump, Trump had him arrested. Imagine if Trump went to Beijing to meet Xi Jinping, and Xi had Trump arrested. Soon no leader would dare negotiate with anyone.

It would be unfair, though, to pin all the blame for this recent eruption of lawlessness onto Donald Trump. Rule of law has always been lipstick on the pig of imperial power. The empire wields the law selectively against enemies, resistors, and dissidents, exempting its own leaders and allies. Trump differs from his predecessors only in neglecting the pious homilies to “democracy” and “the rule of law” that customarily accompany the exercise of imperial power. He dispenses as well with subtlety. Instead of leveraging NGOs and CIA media assets to engineer a color revolution, Trump sends in the special forces. Instead of deploying a weaponized US dollar and sanctions to steal other countries’ assets, Trump sends the Coast Guard to seize oil tankers and promises ‘boots on the ground” to take Venezuela’s oil that, he says, they “stole.” Instead of talking about “nation-building” or “restoring democracy,” Trump says quite baldly, “We are going to run the country.”

Maybe the nakedness of his exercise of power will prove a good thing, exposing the empire for what it is and vitiating the pretense that our interventions are about freedom and democracy. Maybe, but I don’t think so. The pretense of principle at least served the function of affirming principle. Invoking the rule of law affirms the rule of law—even when one’s actions violate it—by establishing it as a norm for civilized people. The shameless exertion of naked power does the opposite, normalizing the worst of human impulses.

The Maduro kidnapping, along with the murder and piracy that led up to it, portends a total breakdown in international law and diplomacy. The most powerful country in the world has completed its transition to a rogue nation, bristling with nuclear weapons with a megalomaniac at its helm. It is somehow fitting that the propaganda shibboleth of the “mad dictator with nuclear weapons,” invoked to whip up war fever against the enemies of the empire like Hussein, Assad, and Gaddafi, has circled back to roost in our own nation.

Again, the dissolving of the rule of law—and even the pretense of the rule of law—did not start with Donald Trump, and it would be vain to imagine that his overthrow would restore it. “Might makes right” as a shameless, explicit operating principle of foreign policy dates back at least to the rise of the neocons in the second Bush administration and their dreams of “full spectrum dominance.” The neocons started in the Republican Party but eventually came to exercise considerable influence in the Democratic Party too, installing their members in high positions under Obama and Biden. In the 2024 election many of their key leaders openly opposed Trump.

Trump’s election despite them was a tragic missed opportunity. In an alternate universe, anti-imperialist Democrats would have supported Trump’s anti-interventionist inclinations, giving him political cover to defy the likes of Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz in his own party. Facing blanket hostility, Trump turned toward them instead. They and other neocons added the poisonous catalyst of naked aggression to Trump’s own America-first chauvinism, his obsession with “winning,” and his narcissistic compulsion toward “greatness.” Thus it was that Trump, the anti-interventionist who believed the Iraq War was a mistake and vowed to keep us from further military conflicts became another (though cruder) tool of the military-industrial complex.

Not just in the Trump administration, but in both political parties in the US, and in countries around the world, the rule of law is waning. What do I mean by “rule of law”? It isn’t about obeying rules in an over-ordered legalistic society where laws replace informal, vernacular governance. Ultimately, the rule of law springs from an ethic that puts something else higher than immediate personal or national self-interest. It is a set of agreements arising from that ethic. Rules alone cannot enforce it. It requires consensual buy-in. A saying goes, “There are no rules in love and war.” Leaving aside love for now, indeed it is true of war. When winning is the most important thing, an existential necessity, then everything else must be sacrificed to the god of victory.

Appalled and sickened as I am at Donald Trump’s actions in office, I do not suffer from “Trump derangement syndrome.” Nothing has harmed his opposition more than TDS, since it misapprehends the man and his supporters, and distracts attention from the many policy disasters that require no frothing abhorrence of the man to see, but only sober, rational consideration. Trump’s followers—those with Trump adulation syndrome—are just as blind to those as his opponents are blind to his (few) positive accomplishments and his unrealized populist instincts.

Ironically, Trump derangement syndrome has contributed to the derangement of the man himself. Wouldn’t it drive you crazy if half the population believed you are a depraved monster? Trump has made a god out of winning—but so did his opponents in the 2024 election when they tried to defeat him with dirty tricks, censorship, media control, and a weaponized justice system. They put winning above democracy, above freedom of speech, and above the impartiality of the law. Trump inherited their methods and mindset, and now turns all those tools back against his opponents. When one side fights by all means available, the other side must too. It is a classic multipolar trap. And now President Trump has released win-at-all-costs from the bounds of domestic politics and unleashed it upon the world of international affairs. How can the world function, unless it rejects the precedent Trump (and his predecessors, I am sorry to say) have laid down of extra-legal asset seizures, regime change, piracy, kidnapping, murder, and subversion of diplomatic principle?

Some of my readers might protest, “But Maduro was a bad guy. He destroyed that country’s economy. Venezuelans are celebrating in the streets.” OK. This exemplifies the kind of us-them, good-guy-bad-guy thinking that flattens complexity and ignores history. What is Maduro’s context? What are the conditions that tilted him toward dictatorship? Do you understand the history of economic sanctions that destroyed Venezuela’s economy? US imperialism in Latin America? Blinded by a binary worldview of good and evil, we ignore questions like these. The bad conditions of this world are not caused by bad men. It is more that bad conditions create bad men. Dispense with the binary worldview and we can begin the process of truly understanding the conditions that produce a man like Donald Trump, or Nicolas Maduro, or a movement like MAGA, or Antifa, or any other person or group you care to hate. Then we can begin to address the conditions instead of warring endlessly against their symptoms.

So, what is to be done now? I wish I could offer a quick solution, a solution couched in the familiar idiom of politics. I wish I could believe that if I exhort all my readers to call their elected representatives or march in the streets, that we could put an end to the madness. In fact, I support both these actions, though to be honest I doubt they will do much good given the current level of public apathy. The present calamity is decades in the making, centuries maybe. We need nothing less than a new kind of politics. Trump shows us in distilled form the state of our political culture, the dehumanization, the hate, the derangement. It will not do merely to “stand up against Trump.” We need to stand up, yes, but stand up for something, We need to stand up for peace. We need to stand up for dignity. We need to stand up for the basic truth of our common humanity. We need to stand up for all the “right” that is sacrificed in the contest of might, and we need to do so through our means as well as for our ends. We need to treat even our opponents—especially our opponents—with respect, humanity, and dignity. Our politics is profuse with the opposite: with ridicule, contempt, mockery, and hate. Why are we so shocked when our president mirrors those same qualities back to us and projects them across the world?