Ever since Donald Trump’s scatterbrained news conference on Saturday, at which he announced that the Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and his wife were being brought to justice after a U.S. commando assault on Caracas, many have naturally focused on the one thing the president said that was crystal-clear. “We’re going to have our very large U.S. oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” he vowed — and he repeated the promise again and again.
Mr. Trump is already paying a political price for his forthrightness. Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, spoke for many in his party when he called the raid “wildly illegal” and alleged that administration officials had “lied to our face” about it. Many of Mr. Trump’s rank-and-file supporters are also unlikely to be forgiving. Republicans trusted Mr. Trump to take over their stumbling party in large part because he cursed the George W. Bush administration for having led the country into the Iraq war with a bunch of specious talking points about weapons of mass destruction. Now, it seems, Mr. Trump is taking the United States into another major military engagement for reasons that have little to do with the “America first” foreign policy he promised.
On closer examination, that is not true. Whether or not the Venezuelan raid was advisable, it was Trumpian. The National Security Strategy released last month promised a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, the 19th-century commitment to stop European powers from pursuing imperial ambitions in the hemisphere. The Trump corollary is that the United States will also prevent “non-hemispheric competitors” from owning or controlling “strategically vital assets” in its neighborhood.
Venezuela’s oil and its proximity to transoceanic shipping lanes constitute strategically vital assets; China, a key Venezuelan partner, is America’s most important non-hemispheric competitor. Those among Mr. Trump’s disappointed followers who say that Venezuela is not an adversary important enough to merit a huge investment of American military power are probably correct. But this is not about Venezuela. It’s about China — even if the administration did not mention that country’s name in connection with the invasion.
China’s systematic buildup of commercial influence in Latin America is the most frontal challenge to the Monroe Doctrine in well over a century. China’s trade with Latin America has grown by a factor of 25 in the past generation, from $18 billion at the turn of the century to just under $450 billion at the turn of the decade. Since the leftist colonel Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998, Venezuela has become China’s most important hemispheric partner. China has a vast and still-growing need for oil, 74 percent of which it imports; Venezuela exports 68 percent of its oil to China.
While Mr. Trump has not been uniformly belligerent toward China, its growing role in Venezuela preoccupies his administration. Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, defended the attack as a means of assuring “that foreign countries don’t have a lodgment inside our hemisphere.” Yes, oil is of primary importance here, but more as a channel of geostrategic power than for its own sake.
Americans may have a hard time focusing on such geostrategic matters because they have grown accustomed to thinking that foreign policy is primarily about morality — specifically, human rights. True, Venezuela’s socialist regime, dogmatic and intimidating, lends itself to such a reading. The eight million Venezuelans driven into exile under Mr. Chávez and Mr. Maduro — at least a fifth of the population — constitute the largest migrant wave in the history of the New World. Many thousands of them could be seen dancing in the streets this weekend in the cities to which they’ve fled: Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Miami. Mr. Trump is on their side.
But he is not on their side for any moral reasons, at least none that he has declared. As the new National Security Strategy reminds us, Mr. Trump favors the icier, more Machiavellian foreign policy of the mid-Cold War. (Remember that Lyndon Johnson invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965.) This is the world of the domino theory — hence Mr. Trump’s warning this weekend that the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, should “watch his ass.” It is also the world of spheres of influence — hence the frequent comparison of Mr. Trump’s posture to that of President Vladimir Putin of Russia. “This is the horrific logic of force that Putin used to justify his brutal attack on Ukraine,” the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders said last weekend.
Horrific or not, the logic is indeed the same. Mr. Putin’s assessment of Ukraine in February 2022 was that a hostile power aiding and arming one of its neighbors might soon present Russia with a strategic fait accompli. Mr. Trump, looking at a Venezuela increasingly inseparable from China, may well see the same thing.
To say a military strategy has a logic is not to say it is wise. Mr. Trump lost a chance to make a winning case for the invasion on Saturday, frittering away the minutes in boasts about crime rates in major cities and showing an outright incuriosity about how the United States would constrain Venezuela. Oddly, it may be the party’s less Trumpian wing, those for whom the old George W. Bush-style human-dignity arguments are still persuasive, who will rally behind the president now, on the grounds that he has ousted a dictator. Senator Susan Collins, the pre-Trump Republican from Maine, backed the raid in a statement, even while objecting that Congress had not been informed.
Among longtime Trump loyalists, though, the Venezuela operation has deepened fissures. “This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end,” the retiring Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X. “Boy were we wrong.” Rejecting the idealism of the neoconservatives who backed the war in Iraq, many Trump supporters rallied to the harder-headed views of those who opposed the war — in particular, the isolationism of Pat Buchanan, who also claimed to be fighting for “America first.” But Mr. Trump has never claimed that isolationism is what he means by “America first.”
Mr. Trump has a more realistic view of America’s strategic ends than George W. Bush did, but just as stunted a vision of its strategic means. Every new president, it seems, arrives in office thinking that war has up till now been waged in the wrong ways and at the wrong times. He will wage it less, and where he must wage it, wage it better.
But there is something tragic about the process. Empires seem to deploy their powers to the maximum, desisting only when they no longer have the wherewithal. We may soon be reminded that it was American decline that put Mr. Trump in a position to set American foreign policy in the first place.
Source images by Yoan Valat, mikroman6 and Kena Betancur/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images
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