30 Thoughts On The Illegal Venezuela War
No war for royal.
This did not pan out as I’d hoped, but if you read through the piece you’ll see it comes as no surprise. Politics is bedeviled by the fact that it’s hard to get people worked up about future risks, particularly if they sound crazy. Survey takers frequently don’t believe the Republican policy agenda is real (because it sounds crazy). Many Americans surely didn’t sweat the invasion and colonization of Venezuela (because it sounded crazier still). Thus, we did not see mass mobilization against war with Venezuela before Donald Trump ordered airstrikes and an incursion. Opposition will, once again, have to take shape after the fact.
For elected Democrats that principally means not being cowed into limp opposition to Trump’s gangster foreign policy.
For the anti-Trump grassroots, the challenge is to avoid over-learning the lessons of the past.
There is a temptation on the left to view all abuses of American imperial power as outgrowths of the capitalist system per se.
In this telling, Trump and the MAGA ringleaders running the country scarcely matter—this is something the money class wanted, and it thus would’ve happened under any Republican president, possibly even under a Democratic president.
These insights, though reductive by definition, were much more applicable to the war in Iraq than they are to…whatever Trump thinks he’s doing in Venezuela.
This isn’t a “war for oil” in the geostrategic sense, where controlling an oil-rich part of the world might be broadly useful to a country that imports a great deal of oil on net. We export oil. I can’t pretend to know what Trump’s oil-industry donor buddies believe in their hearts, but on the profit motive here, they are at least conflicted, and surely weren’t demanding this.
It may narrowly represent a “war for oil” in that Trump has used the phrase “take the oil” as a mantra, to distinguish himself from his supposedly stupider predecessors. They didn’t have the nerve or cunning to “take the oil.” He does. He has said stuff like this for years, without demonstrating any interest in or knowledge of what “take the oil” means in practice. Now he’ll learn
It may also represent a “war for oil,” in that Trump is a kleptocrat, and will—if he can—abuse U.S. power and influence to help his children and friends profiteer personally from the reserves. Remember this? Don’t be shocked to learn that Don Jr. and Eric have dipped their toes into the oil-refining business for the new year.
But the political forces driving this move mostly lie elsewhere.
As I argued last week, the intra-MAGA appeal of military hostilities with Venezuela is to harmonize Stephen Miller’s domestic police state with Marco Rubio’s bellicose antipathy for left-wing (rather than right-wing) Latin American dictatorships. Rubio gets to replace a genuinely malevolent actor with one he may be better able to control; Miller gets a regime that will accept immigrants he wants to render by the hundreds of thousands.
The appeal to Trump, apart from the libidinal thrill he derives from using force whimsically, is to arrest his slide into political oblivion. It is perhaps the clearest case of the tail wagging the dog as we’ve seen in the Trump years, if not the whole modern era.
At the same time, it does not strike me as a big political winner even in the short term.
If I’m right about all this, it carries implications for the resistance.