Once more, but worse
On the morning of January 3rd, while you and I slept, the American military illegally entered Venezuelan airspace and kidnapped the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro.
The United States was not, at the time, at war with the South American country and, as of writing this piece, remains notably not at war.
Since Maduro inherited Venexuela’s reins following the death of his predecessor, the revolutionary leader Hugo Chavez, the new president’s government has been fraught with allegations of corruption, mismanagement, and human rights abuses. Venezuela’s national economy has suffered tumultuous downturns and living standards for the country’s people have dropped considerably.
None of this has anything to do with the decision to kidnap the President, a move that echoes the capture of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in 2005 (notably two years after the United States invaded that country in a considerably more warlike not-war).
No, the Trump Administration’s beef with Venezuela is, apparently, drugs.
Drugs, the illicit drug trade, and drug overdose remain a problem in the United States, but Venezuela is far from the biggest offender. Indeed, much of the uptick in drug-related deaths in recent years is attributable to fentanyl, a particularly strong opioid that’s synthesized in labs using ingredients from China and shipped largely through Mexico.
Venezuela is the source of some drug trafficking into the United States, but its influence pales compared to the overland route (Colombia, Central America, and Mexico).
If we set aside cocaine (Colombia’s pride and joy) and fake, synthesized opium to look at real opium, Afghanistan still produces far and away the lion’s share of that crop, apparently undamaged by nearly twenty years of American occupation.
If this is ringing any bells to you, it could be that you’re smart. It could also be that you’ve read one of many other articles about this issue and thus you’ve seen this all compared to the 2003 American decision to invade Iraq in pursuit of that country’s (non-existent) stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.
The spark that ignited that conflict was the allegation from the United States to the United Nations (and, afterward, to the “coalition of the willing”, a pact of nations we bullied into helping us out with our hero fantasy side project) that Iraq’s longtime dictator, Saddam Hussein, was illicitly working on nuclear weapons, and it was our job to stop him.
Saddam Hussein wasn’t working on nuclear weapons, not in any realistic capacity. But let’s imagine ourselves in the shoes of my government and pretend he was for just a moment. The argument implicit in our decision to go to war with Saddam was that building nukes makes him a threat to the world and thus he must be dealt with before he has a chance to use them.
But doesn’t that make everyone who already has nuclear weapons a threat? The United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France. Should we have our arms confiscated as well?
Of course, these countries are all signatories to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which regulates the production and use of these weapons. In other words, we’re the good guys with a gun nuke. According to that treaty, Iraq isn’t one of the lucky early adopters allowed to have a nuclear weapon.
Of course, countries like India and Pakistan have refused to sign the treaty and have since built up their own nuclear arsenals. Should we have invaded those countries as well? (And don’t even get us started on Israel.)
If “threat of use” is the concern, North Korea (a former signatory, since withdrawn from the treaty) has been openly working on nuclear weapons for decades and frequently threatens to use them against the United States. So it can’t really be that.
Or maybe it’s opportunity. A right-place, right-time enemy ripe for the American picking, a comparatively weak pariah state with few regional or international allies and a treasure trove of America’s favorite black gold, oil, underfoot.
We picked Iraq because they were an easy target. We’d get in, replace a moderately-hostile Saddam with a government more amenable to American intervention, and skedaddle knowing our economic prospects were in better hands.
Of course, that’s not how it happened. Instead, American troops got bogged down in a quagmire of a war that stretched years beyond the capture and execution of the Iraqi president and ended in the propping up of a weaker government and power vacuum that made inevitable the rise of the Islamic State, a body robbed of its titular state but still an active disease eating away at disparate sectors of the Muslim world and beyond.
Iraq was a failed operation. Despite being built on a lie, the United States remained in the Mesopotamian nation long after it had been determined the supposed weapons of mass destruction were mythical. We lacked the interest, the knowledge, and the dedication to leave Iraq better than we found it. After eight years of war, Operation Iraqi Freedom and subsequent efforts resulted in hundreds of thousands dead (mostly Iraqi civilians and soldiers on both sides of the conflict, but also thousands of American and coalition soldiers and contractors).
Of the few who benefited from the conflict, most notable were the corporations and contractors that made billions in US dollars from the bloodshed. According to CNN, private contractors pulled in a combined $138 billion over the course of the war. Halliburton, a firm once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, alone made over $39 billion.
In this conflict, the rich, as usual, got richer. The poor were killed, rendered homeless, separated from their families, and returned to their homeland thousands of miles away with a pat on the back and a new PTSD diagnosis.
So here we are today, nearly a decade-and-a-half later and apparently still none the wiser. But this time, things are worse.
It’s said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Whether or not you believe the Bush administration’s purported reasons for going to war with Iraq, at least some of the administration’s officials seemed to share a genuine belief that the situation post-war would be preferable to the situation leading up to it. Sure, they’d also make out like bandits, but a Saddam-free Iraq would be more peaceful, both internally and externally. What comes next couldn’t possibly be worse.
The Trump administration lacks the same sort of optimism. George W. Bush pursued a foreign policy whereby the United States played world policeman, a foreign policy the country has been attempting to follow against Soviet dissent since the end of World War II. With Iraq, Bush sought to push this policy to the point of evolution: regime change for good.
Trump is a different kind of president. Following the through line of his policy proposals over two non-contiguous terms, we can’t help but see a much more juvenile approach to politics. Buying Greenland (for what?), annexing Canada (for whom?), renaming Denali and the Gulf of America (why???).
You’d be forgiven for identifying this merely as a turn to nationalism. Unfortunately, it’s something much more obvious (and stupid): the President’s agonizingly familiar brand of narcissism.
For Donald Trump, nothing is more important than being perceived as the best. Actually being the best doesn’t matter at all as long as he and others think he is.
Trump never wanted to be President to effect meaningful change, to help the people, or even to enrich his wealthy friends. No, Trump sought the highest office in the country because… why shouldn’t he? He’s the best guy in the country.
And so, stripped of the sort of pointed ambition that led most of his predecessors, Trump’s been forced to guess what a good President does, how a good President acts. Most often, he’s willing to delegate either to sycophantic aides or his own weird impulses. But when in doubt, he hits the history books.
…not literally, obviously. The President’s briefings are famously limited to single-page bulleted lists because his septuagenarian brain is so addled by Twitter and cable news addiction that he can’t pay attention to anything (up to and including his own voice).
Maybe he has one of his lackeys read history. Or maybe it’s from memory, given the depth of understanding.
But these decisions, annexing nearby territory, reclaiming given up territory, pursuing a policy not of American interests but executive whims? It’s better representative of American policy of a century past than anything moderately modern. In other words, Trump’s strategy (when he’s not giving his lackeys carte blanche to do whatever wacky internet nazi shit their incel staffers think up) is presidency by numbers; if it worked for James K. Polk in 1848, why can’t it work for Donald J. Trump in 2026?
And that paints the picture of the best case scenario: Trump, led by his whims, will get bored with a war with Venezuela that doesn’t resonate with the public and move on to his next wild pursuit.
But, alternatively, if his famously-rabid base can be whipped up to support him as they always have, if they can be convinced that an Axis of Evil-esque line connects Venezuela with all drug trafficking, with Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah across the Middle East, with the plethora of immigrants, legal and illegal alike, apparently pouring over the southern border? Then maybe we get locked into another war. But this time it’s not for freedom, it’s not for safety, it’s not for regional stability, and it’s not even for greed (though big business stands to make a killing off of the privatization of Venezuela’s state-owned petroleum reserves, estimated to be the world’s largest). No, this time we’re going to war for vibes.