President Donald Trump’s strike on Venezuela and his capturing of President Nicolás Maduro has a “fatal flaw,” according to a political analyst.
Trump’s administration confirmed the capture of Maduro after military strikes Saturday. He has since been flown to the U.S. Though the attack and capture had been authorized by Trump, it sets a dangerous precedent for the U.S. and the administrations’ involvement in future world politics, according to The New York Times’ David French.
French suggested the admin’s excuse for the strike is “laughable” and that the “fatal flaw” Trump and his team failed to note was the possibility of such an action spilling into all-out war.
French wrote, “Trump has embraced the Donroe Doctrine enthusiastically,” giving a new name to the historic Monroe Doctrine that declared that the United States would not tolerate European colonial expansion or political interference in the Americas and would regard any such attempt as a threat to American peace and safety.
“He’s engaged in economic warfare against Canada and Mexico. He’s said that Canada should be America’s 51st state. He has designs on Greenland, part of the sovereign territory of Denmark, a NATO ally.
“That brings us back to the fatal flaw of running the world through spheres of influence and the amoral approach to war as an extension of policy. Smaller nations don’t want to be dominated by the strong, and strong nations don’t want to see their rivals get stronger. So they make alliances.
“In 1914, Serbia had Russia, and Belgium had Britain. In 1939, Poland had France and Britain. That’s exactly how regional conflict turned into global war.”
The administration’s excuse for the strike could set a dangerous precedent for future strikes, French noted. “This defense is laughable,” he wrote. “Under that reasoning, a president could transform virtually any war into a law enforcement operation by indicting opposing leaders and claiming that the large military forces needed to secure the leader’s arrest were simply protecting law enforcement. That’s not an argument; it’s an excuse.”
Not only could Trump have set a new standard for intervention from the US, but he could have bolstered the likes of China and Russia to act accordingly in Taiwan and Ukraine respectively.
French added, “The worse argument is to say that Trump set a precedent with his intervention in Venezuela — a precedent that nations such as Russia, China and Iran will be eager to follow in their own respective spheres of influence, and we will have no standing to object when our adversaries take the same approach to countries in their spheres of influence that we took in ours.
“But Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China and revolutionary Iran have never had the slightest concern for just war theory or any moral argument. They’re held in check (to the extent they are) by deterrence, or, when deterrence fails, raw military force.”
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