There is a constant tug toward universalism in U.S. foreign policy, and hence a recurring temptation for crusading. The strength of the tug waxes and wanes, responding to the perceived success or failure of the most recent undertaking to reorder realities abroad.
Universalism flows from the ninth word of the most important sentence in this creedal nation’s catechism: “all.” All human beings are endowed with unalienable rights, including the right to government legitimated by consent. The perennial American argument concerns what, if anything, this catechism commits the nation to do.
Twenty-one years ago, George W. Bush’s second inaugural address proclaimed “the calling of our time” to be nothing less than “ending tyranny in our world.” This project has not fared well since then.
The 1823 Monroe Doctrine declared the Western Hemisphere closed to further European colonization, and, implicitly, open to U.S. intervention in order to guarantee … Here things become murky. Commercial considerations (long ago, bananas; today, oil) and geopolitics have driven interventions.
The doctrine, although promulgated by President James Monroe, should be called the Adams Doctrine, for his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams. (The Marshall Plan, announced in a brief Harvard commencement speech by Harry Truman’s secretary of state, George Marshall, is not known as the Truman Plan.)
Although European colonization in this hemisphere long ago subsided, perhaps the Monroe Doctrine is still apposite. But two years before the Monroe Doctrine was enunciated, Secretary Adams said of our nation:
“Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
Many presidents, and most recent ones, have rightly disagreed. The current one, who also disagrees, speaks so often and so imprecisely, as in his meandering babble late Saturday morning, a cloud of confusion envelopes everything. Dissipating it can begin with this:
That Nicolás Maduro is a monster is patent, as was the illegitimacy of his government, which disdained respect for the consent of the governed. But the urgent argument begins, not ends, with those two facts.
Heartbreak, a risk inherent in puppy love, today afflicts those who believed this president’s reiterated disparagements of U.S. involvement in regime changes, wars of choice and nation-building. The lovers will recover.
Remember, however, what Colin Powell, prior to the invasion of Iraq, called “the Pottery Barn rule” (“You break it, you own it”) regarding the use of U.S. force to restructure other countries. We owned Iraq and Afghanistan for many unhappy years. Perhaps this time things will go smoothly as U.S. officials, in the president’s insouciant words, “run” Venezuela until “we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”
Transition to what? Presumably the administration has plans. Certainly there is an aphorism: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration must devise justifications for the Venezuelan intervention without employing categories by which Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping can give a patina of faux legality to forcibly ending nearby regimes they dislike. The Trump administration’s incantations of its newly minted and nonsensical phrase “narco-terrorism” will not suffice.
Andrew C. McCarthy, the conservative lawyer who prosecuted the 12 terrorists convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, says this phrase “has no standing as a legal term — no significance in the extensive bodies of federal law defining narcotics trafficking and terrorism.”
As Bishop Joseph Butler (1692-1752) said, “Everything is what it is, and not another thing.” Narcotics trafficking is a serious crime. It is not a terrorist activity. Neither is the self-“poisoning” of Americans who ingest drugs.
So, the administration must improvise post facto rationalizations for the forcible regime change in Venezuela, rationalizations harmonious with the president’s recent pardoning of Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president convicted in a U.S. court of shipping here more than 400 tons of cocaine. “The Honduran regime,” McCarthy writes in National Review, “figures prominently in the indictment of Maduro brought by the first Trump administration.” Maduro’s lawyers will have fun with this.
And perhaps with this: When Theodore Roosevelt asked Attorney General Philander Knox to concoct a legal justification for the unsavory U.S. measures that enabled construction of the Panama Canal, Knox replied, “Oh, Mr. President, do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.”
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