Venezuela and The End of Hypocrisy
Trump isn't even pretending to care about democracy in the Western Hemisphere. Is that a good thing?
Who would have thought? Venezuela is becoming more authoritarian and repressive after the U.S. intervention, rather than less. Of course, I’m being sarcastic here, since Donald Trump has long made clear that he has no interest in supporting democracy abroad.
The Venezuelan regime — which is still in place, populated by Maduro-aligned hardliners, including the interior minister and top military officials — has announced a state of emergency and directed authorities to “immediately undertake the search for and arrest . . . of any person involved in the promotion of or support for the armed attack by the US against the territory of the republic.” Journalists have been arrested and paramilitary gangs, known as colectivos, have spread throughout the capital, erecting checkpoints.
The early retort, in defense of Trump’s capture of Nicholas Maduro, was that Venezuelans were thrilled. And they may have been, for a moment. But now they are barred from expressing any support or enthusiasm for what the Trump administration did. And the Trump administration doesn’t care. In an excellent and somewhat chilling piece titled “Trump now has his very own oil empire,” Javier Blas lays out in detail what most of us already suspected: it’s about the oil. And it’s about dominating a country that has a lot of it.
Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio quickly poured water on the notion that the opposition, which won Venezuela’s last presidential election and then was denied its rightful role, would have any role in governing Venezuela. Holding free and fair elections within a reasonable timeframe was not mentioned. What about a bit of power-sharing? None of that, either, even as a merely rhetorical aspiration.
My own view is that if you're going to depose an authoritarian leader, the least you can do is try to facilitate a more democratic outcome. I was and am against what the United States did. But it happened. It’s done. And it can’t be undone. The task of progressives — who care about values and morality in foreign policy more than Trump does — should now be to call on the United States to support a democratic transition. That doesn’t mean Venezuela becomes democratic overnight, but it can mean that Venezuela gradually becomes somewhat more democratic than it was before, and that can only be done by holding new elections, rather than handing over permanent power to Maduro’s vice president Delcy Rodriguez.
I have my doubts that progressives will rise to the occasion, although I’d love to be proven wrong. It’s not enough to condemn. You actually have to have a vision for what the alternative to Trump’s “nakedly predatory” power grab might actually look like.
But I’d like to return to what this tells us about Trump’s foreign policy vision, because it is a vision, however chilling it may be to the rest of us. As one administration official put it: “[There’s] something refreshing about Trump just saying, ‘Yeah, we are taking the oil.’” There’s no hypocrisy here. There’s no pretense of higher aspirations, of the United States being interested in anything more than its own self-interest, very narrowly defined.
As I argue in The Case For American Power, to accept hypocrisy as an inevitable fact of living imperfectly is to hold on to our sense of morality in the breach. Hypocrisy does something that anti-hypocrisy cannot — it, in the words of the writer William Raspberry, “accepts the sanctity of societal standards, even while violating them. It says: What I’m doing is wrong; therefore I must not be found out.” Without hypocrisy, there is no such sense of self-awareness, that what one is doing is actually wrong.
I believe it is a good thing that the charge of hypocrisy can be leveraged against U.S. officials. Because it at least reminds us of the kind of country we should — and still can — become. We can no longer level such a charge against the Trump administration, and that should frighten us.
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Realistically, this US government has no credibility or desire to play a role in supporting a democratic transition.
Surely, the task of progressives in the US who care about values and morality should now be to oppose the imperialist foreign policy of their government, as it has already set its sight on the next targets.
I completely agree with this sentiment. I find the whole process and acts really quite terrifying and wonder where it ends? Is he going to take Greenland or depose the President of Mexico next? The Trump administration are not hypocrites but they are amoral. This is why it's not the same as what Putin is doing to Ukraine. Putin is doing that because he genuinely believes Ukraine is a natural part of Russia and that its leaving was a historic mistake that he wants to turn back. This is pure power politics....