By Nick Catoggio
Monday, January 05, 2026
There are three foreign policy factions inside the White
House. That’s why the administration acts
schizophrenic on Ukraine, and also why it can’t get its story straight
about its reason for kidnapping
Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
One faction is J.D. Vance’s isolationist camp, which
wants government resources diverted from messy interventions abroad and
reapplied toward helping the “forgotten man” of the American heartland. How
does one square that worldview with ousting Maduro? Drugs, of course. Venezuela
is supposedly (emphasis
on “supposedly”) a powerhouse of “narco-terrorism,” to borrow a favorite
White House buzzword, poisoning our citizens with addictive substances smuggled
into the U.S. By snatching Maduro and frightening the smugglers, we’re
protecting the forgotten man from drug dependency by reducing the supply.
The second faction is Marco Rubio’s Reaganite camp, a
remnant of the pre-Trump GOP that’s adapted—somewhat—to the new Trumpian
reality. Rubio rarely speaks in terms of moralistic Bush-era interventionism
anymore, as he routinely did in the Before Times, but the fact that he’s
targeted Venezuela and
Cuba for regime change unmistakably reflects the traditional conservative
impulse to free oppressed peoples from communism. (There’s a Shakespearean
element to the son of refugees from Castro’s Cuba avenging his family’s exile
by rising to power in the U.S. and toppling the government there.) Any time an
administration official mentions how ruthless and oppressive Maduro was,
they’re nodding at Cold War liberationism.
The third faction is Donald Trump. Trump is a mafioso, so
much so that he accepted
the term “kidnapping” to describe what he’d done to Maduro when a reporter
used it yesterday. Any other leader would have chafed at an analogy to criminal
law—we captured Maduro, we didn’t “kidnap” him—but the president has
never been bashful about his corruption, especially now that he’s functionally
beyond prosecution. I suspect he prefers “kidnap” to “capture,” frankly, because
it underlines his own impunity.
The mafioso views foreign policy chiefly in terms of
plunder: How will this operation make my organization richer?
And so, repeatedly over the last 72 hours, Trump has chattered
excitedly about Venezuela’s oil reserves.
The Donroe Doctrine.
That’s been a recurring theme in his approach to U.S.
interventions dating back to before he was first elected. He wanted to “take
the oil” in Iraq when America had troops there. When the Obama
administration supported a humanitarian mission in Libya, Trump wanted to take
that country’s oil too. Ukraine doesn’t have major oil reserves but rest
assured that, if it did, the White House wouldn’t have limited its demands for
“compensation” to
Ukrainian minerals.
Twenty years ago, leftists mockingly caricatured the Bush
administration’s designs on Iraq by asking “What’s our oil doing under their
land?” but that really is how our mafioso president seems to think about these
things. If he and his syndicate successfully extend their turf to some new
neighborhood in the global city, they expect to profit and further expect the
local hoodlums to assist in the effort, or else.
That’s all the “Donroe
Doctrine” really is—the bright idea of a crime boss who’s running all sorts
of rackets domestically to expand operations and see what opportunities might
exist further afield. I wonder how many military service members enlisted
expecting that someday they’d be treated as the muscle in a criminal
organization with a taste for piracy.
The mafia approach explains why Trump prefers to have
Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, in charge of the country for the time
being rather than
pro-democracy opposition leader María Corina Machado. (Well, that and the
fact that Machado accepted the Nobel Peace Prize instead of insisting that it
be given to Trump, which reportedly upset
the don.) If you care about Venezuela’s oil but not about Venezuelans, why
wouldn’t you keep the thugs who’ve been running the place in charge? Ousting
them would risk the same chaos that de-Baathification caused in Iraq, creating
a power vacuum and forcing U.S. troops to impose order. That would be bloody
and would delay the all-important project of extracting black gold from the
ground.
Trump doesn’t care about liberating foreigners and doesn’t
care much about drug smuggling. If Rodriguez and the other commie toughs in
Caracas are willing to plunder Venezuela on the White House’s behalf instead of
Maduro’s, that’s a solution in search of a problem. (“If they stay loyal [to Maduro], the future is
really bad, really bad for them,” the
mafioso-in-chief warned
his new capos in the Venezuelan military this weekend.) Whatever else you want
to call what happened this past weekend, it’s not “regime change.”
But doesn’t this aggressive foreign intervention
contradict “America First?” you might say. To which I say, it depends on
which definition of “America First” you’re using.
Under the traditional definition, sure. “America First”
is shorthand for the Vance foreign policy view that I described earlier, the
idea that the U.S. government needs to look inward and focus on improving the
lives of Americans rather than spend resources on improving the lives of
third-worlders. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s lengthy freakout about
the Maduro kidnapping captures the attitude well. We should be solving our
own domestic problems, not those of other countries. Put Americans first!
It’s that logic that led Trump and Vance to campaign last
year as the “peace” ticket against supposed warmonger Kamala Harris. Democrats
are forever worrying about the welfare of non-Americans, we were told, which
leads them to pursue pointless “forever wars.” Trump would re-prioritize the
welfare of the forgotten man and avoid foreign adventures that risk getting
U.S. soldiers killed.
Sending Delta Force to kidnap the head of another country
is, shall we say, in tension with that promise of restraint. Yet when CBS News polled
Republicans in November about potential military action against Venezuela, the
group that was most supportive of the idea was—ta da—MAGA Republicans. They
split 66-34 in favor; non-MAGA Republicans opposed intervening by a 47-53
margin.
That result is partly explained by the raw cultism of
Trump devotees, in which they’re duty bound to endorse whatever the boss wants,
but I don’t think all of it is. Some MAGA types must be defining “America
First” differently than Marjorie Taylor Greene is. And I suspect some are.
American greatness.
The alternate definition looks outward, not inward. If
MAGA can’t restore national greatness by making the lives of Americans
materially better—and so
far it can’t—it can at least reassert its power over other nations with
awesome acts of military might at the expense of puny neighbors. Under this
definition of “America First,” the term doesn’t refer to spending taxpayer
dollars on Americans first, ahead of foreigners. It means demonstrating that
America’s national interests come first before any other country’s and that
there’s no authority, especially law, to which one might appeal to challenge
that.
It’s shorthand for imperialism, the antithesis of the
isolationism that Trump ran on. Lots of MAGA zealots who claimed for years to
love the latter are now professing their love for the former, go figure.
It was fun watching them flip from one definition to the
other in the aftermath of Maduro’s kidnapping this weekend. Some, like Elon Musk,
contradicted themselves glibly and without explanation. Others focused on how “badass” the
operation was, betting (no doubt correctly) that the right would swoon over
an overwhelming show of force even if the logic behind it confounded their
isolationist beliefs. Utah Sen. Mike Lee went as far as to politely question the
constitutionality of a decapitation strike of which Congress had no
inkling whatsoever, only to retreat hastily
after Rubio called him up and mumbled something vague about Article II. Soon
Lee was posting photoshops
of Rubio in caudillo attire and cheerfully wondering what his title
would be as the new viceroy in Venezuela.
Some “influencers” dispensed with the niceties about law,
though, and embraced Trump’s imperialist logic of power and plunder
forthrightly. Expanding our oil reserves is one of the pillars of “America
First,” Clay
Travis declared. Stephen Miller’s wife Katie posted a
map of Greenland, coveted by the president for its minerals, with the stars and
stripes overlaid and the caption “SOON.” Daily Wire sage Matt Walsh
pronounced international law “fake and gay”
and candidly professed his desire to see other countries in our hemisphere become “subordinate
vassals of the United States. That’s the very definition of an America First
foreign policy.”
When a Canadian user tweeted that America had gone from
friend to enemy, Walsh replied, “We
aren’t your friend or your enemy. We’re your boss. Now get in line.”
Inevitably the White House will try to square its
original definition of “America First” with the new imperialist definition by
stressing that opening Venezuela up to U.S. oil companies will materially
improve the forgotten man’s life. Cheaper gasoline! A boost to the
economy!—maybe, as much depends on how long it’ll take to rebuild the country’s
oil infrastructure and how costly our occupation-by-proxy will be. But even if
you accept that ousting Maduro will make the United States richer, you’re left
with an obvious question: Is there any limiting principle to running an
international protection racket in which pipsqueak countries are coerced into
coughing up some of their wealth?
How rapacious and Putin-esque should America be in the
name of self-enrichment?
For ages, American doves mocked hawks for stretching the
concept of “national interests” to justify practically any foreign
misadventure. The U.S. military should be used only to defend the homeland and
protect Americans from threats, they insisted. What we’re now seeing in Trump’s
mafioso approach to foreign policy—which has him eyeing
Cuba, Colombia, Iran, and Greenland, to name just a few targets—is the
concept of “national interests” being stretched by erstwhile doves to
accommodate rank banditry. If our resources are under their land and they can’t
stop us from taking it, why shouldn’t we take it?
These are the questions we’re forced to ask ourselves
after tens of millions of civically challenged Americans chose to reinstall a
petty crook as the head of history’s greatest military.
Needless to say, none of this is as surprising as it
feels. It’s jarring to watch Trump and his minions shift so effortlessly from
“end endless wars” to “gunboat diplomacy for oil,” but expansionism is baked in
the cake of a movement like his. The fascist impulse to dominate will
eventually turn outward; the national
greatness fantasy that drives it eventually requires demonstrations of
greatness at other countries’ expense. It’s plainly not natural resources that
excite Travis and Katie Miller and Walsh, it’s the thought of their faction
imposing its will on virtually any opponent on Earth, foreign or domestic, with
no recourse but to “get in line.” Might makes right is now official U.S.
policy and they’re ecstatic.
They’re vicariously
stoned on wielding raw power unchecked by any rules or norms. Congress
can’t stop them, the United Nations can’t stop them, the Venezuelan military
can’t stop them, and the many “fake and gay” international laws that the U.S.
has adopted by treaty over many decades can’t stop them.
The White House is barely pretending that the Maduro
kidnapping wasn’t illegal,
in fact. Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, told Vanity
Fair in November that an attack on the Venezuelan mainland like the one
that played out last weekend would require congressional approval, but oh well.
Another rationale commonly heard to justify the mission was that Trump had
authority to act because Maduro was indicted in a U.S. federal court years ago,
but that’s moronic. A skilled prosecutor can convince a grand jury to indict a
ham sandwich, it’s been said; if all the president needs to start a war
unilaterally is to indict some foreign enemy, he can effectively start one at
will.
No one can protect you so you’d better submit:
That’s the core coercive principle of the Donroe Doctrine, and not
coincidentally also the principle with which Trump conducts his various
shakedowns of domestic businesses and academic institutions. The impunity is
the point.
Things to come.
A few things will follow from all this.
One, obviously, is that NATO is on borrowed time. It
already was, but Trump has started fantasizing
about Greenland again in the aftermath of his success in Venezuela. He’s drunk
on expansionist power, has taken a shine to the idea of the “Donroe
Doctrine,” and plainly doesn’t feel enough camaraderie for Denmark and Europe
writ large to refrain from an easy land grab off of America’s coast.
What are our minerals doing on their island
in our hemisphere?
He’s going to try to coerce the Danes into giving up
Greenland, and I wouldn’t put it past him to send in the troops if they refuse.
When he does, that’s the end of the trans-Atlantic alliance and the so-called
rules-based international order, if such a thing still exists. You can’t have a
mafioso to be a global policeman and you can’t have a Putin manqué in charge of
NATO.
I also wouldn’t put it past Trump to stubbornly prefer a
puppet government led by Delcy Rodriguez and other Maduro cronies to whatever a
free and fair Venezuelan election might yield. In all likelihood candidates
from every party will be favorably disposed to their new patron in Washington,
but that depends to some degree on how U.S. hegemony over the country shapes up
over the coming months. If many Venezuelans end up disgruntled by Trump’s
colonialist ambitions and some clever nationalist politician rallies them with
a “Yankee go home” platform, what will Trump do?
Do you think he’ll let that election take place and allow
a compliant Rodriguez to be swept aside by a successor who’s hostile to the
White House? That’s not how imperialism usually works, and it sure isn’t how
Donald Trump works when he gets an election result he doesn’t like. Which is to
say, there’s a nonzero chance that he and the Maduro-ites will end up as allies
against Venezuelan democracy, pitting the president’s mercenary view of foreign
policy against Rubio’s liberationist view.
I would also not bet my life that the “Donroe Doctrine”
will prove to mean what it’s been understood to mean, namely that major powers
in the Eastern Hemisphere won’t be allowed a foothold in the Americas.
One would hope that Trump will at least keep Chinese and
Russian military assets out of nations to our south. But if China or Russia
want to develop economic interests there and are willing to cut the U.S. in
somehow, why would the president—who’s keen to befriend both nations—say no? If
they can make his “organization” richer, he might let them pay to play. Which
means a Trump-dominated hemisphere could actually end up more hospitable to
hostile powers’ economic plans than it is currently.
As for a potential
MAGA backlash to Trump’s Venezuela adventure, things would probably need to
go very badly for right-wing populists to get cold feet. Things going very
badly is
a live possibility, mind you, and if it happens swing voters will be set up
for a slam-dunk Democratic midterm campaign about Trump building sand castles
in Caracas instead of making sure Americans have health care coverage. But for
the president’s own base, blame for a “quagmire” in Venezuela would surely be
laid at the feet of Marco Rubio, the Reaganite interloper, in lieu of blaming
Trump himself.
In which case they’ll simply revert to the original
definition of “America First,” declare that the alternate imperialist
definition was some neocon trick, and lament that once again our poor president
was given bad advice by an aide who didn’t have his best interests at heart and
who made him look like a mafioso. Best of luck, Marco. No wonder J.D. Vance has
made himself scarce these
last few days.
No comments:
Post a Comment