Welcome back to the era of raw power
The US operation in Venezuela is the latest evidence of an epic change in the international system. What will it take to wake up Europe to the new reality?
Happy New Year! I hope subscribers had a relaxing break over the festive period. After travelling and then tuning out for two weeks, and reading a lot of books along the way, I’m back with this first post of the year on the implications of President Trump’s move on Venezuela. Thank you for being a subscriber to this newsletter - especially to paying subscribers. If you receive only a taste of it and want to upgrade to paid, where you have full access to read, then it is easy to do. There will be more from me at the weekend.
The first thing to say is that the US has always taken an elastic view of niceties when it comes to intervening in Latin America and the wider Western hemisphere. Teddy Roosevelt was notoriously robust on the question of America’s right to police its own backyard, to such an extent that he even participated in the “rough rider” expedition to Cuba in 1898 which freed the country from Spanish overlordship. Cuba became independent, albeit within America’s sphere of interest until the disastrous Cuban Marxist revolution of 1959. Go back further and large chunks of what is today the US were acquired after the war with Mexico ended in the treaty of 1848. California and New Mexico became part of the US and more land was added - though the Americans paid - in 1854 with the Gadsden Purchase. All this is relatively recent and consistent with the American view that the territorial integrity and security of the nation created 250 years ago this year trumps all other considerations. During the Cold War, under presidents of both parties, this manifested itself in repeated operations both covert and public to ensure that there were in place governments and regimes who wouldn’t threaten American interests. The naive US decision since the end of the Cold War to abandon any serious interest in the region helped facilitate Venezuela’s slide from prosperity into a Marxist narco hell-hole, and fuelled the migration crisis at America’s border.
Even so, even by the standards of American history, the decision to extract Maduro from a military base in Venezuela on Saturday morning and transport him to a prison in New York was audacious.