Since the brazen and criminal attack by US imperialism on Venezuela, the liberal press and Democratic Party politicians have been sounding the alarm. The action on January 3 provided political fodder for the Democrats who would like us to believe that they, unlike Trump, are representatives of a measured, peace-loving wing of the American ruling class.
To this end, they have evoked the memories of the quagmires in both Afghanistan and Iraq in an attempt to score points with American workers who are vehemently opposed to the potential of yet another endless war. Trump himself capitalized on this antiwar sentiment to win the presidency, only to reinterpret the “America First” agenda as the attempt to reassert US dominance over its “backyard,” i.e., Latin America.
For their part, leading Democratic Senators like Chuck Schumer, Jeanne Shaheen, and Jack Reed railed against the Trump administration for not briefing Congress beforehand on the administration’s plans for regime change and the lack of a clear plan for what’s next.
To be clear, they are not miffed by the imperialist aggression itself—which they themselves helped to prepare—merely the manner in which Trump conducted it. The Democrats object that the action was not properly stage-managed to maintain the façade that US imperialism fights to uphold democracy and justice on a global scale.
In his day, George W. Bush at least had the decorum to present his bogus “weapons of mass destruction” claims to Congress before the trigger was pulled on Iraq. The eventual invasion enjoyed the near-universal approval of both ruling-class parties. The Democrats would prefer to see similar consideration given for future imperialist adventures, and to at least conceal the naked imperialist interests behind a thin veneer of “freedom” and “democracy.”
To this end, Senate Democrats advanced a War Powers Resolution aimed at curtailing Trump and requiring the President to defer to Congress for future military action in Venezuela. Initially, it was backed by five Republican senators, but two of them flipped under pressure from the White House, and the resolution was defeated by one vote.
The irony is that the Democrats have long been among the loudest representatives of aggression against Venezuela. The blunt hypocrisy was seized upon by the White House which released an article highlighting the contradictory statements of leading Democrats over the years. “Democrats spent years howling that Maduro was a ruthless tyrant who had to be delegitimized, pressured, and removed,” says the statement, “But the instant President Trump succeeds where they failed, they erupt in furious hypocrisy.” The selected quotes from nine leading Democrats that follow speak for themselves.
Elizabeth Warren, for example, recently denounced Trump’s “military adventurism.” But in 2019 she called for US intervention against Venezuela: “Maduro is a dictator and a crook who has wrecked his country’s economy, dismantled its democratic institutions, and profited while his people suffer. The United States should lead the international community in addressing Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis and supporting regional efforts to negotiate a political transition.”
Hand in hand with the Democratic Party, the mainstream liberal press has also long functioned as a gun rest for some of the most blood-stained, reactionary figures of the Venezuelan opposition, from Juan Guaidó to María Corina Machado. The very same day that we were treated to the absurd spectacle of Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, the New York Times published an article by the leading Venezuelan opposition figures in American academia, Ricardo Hausmann and Jose Morales-Arilla. Hausmann, who now works at the Harvard Kennedy School, once served as chief economist under former Venezuelan president Carlos Andrés Pérez—the administration that oversaw the bloody Caracazo massacre of 1989, when the government murdered thousands of anti-austerity protesters.
The article, with the dovish title “Trump Picked This Fight With Maduro. He Can’t Back Down,” insists that intervention in Venezuela would not turn out like “an Iraq-style morass or a Libya-style civil war.” Why? Because Machado and co. represent a “new order-in-waiting.”
The authors call for a military attack on the country they once governed by appealing to Trump’s imperialist interests: “If, at this point, the United States flinches … the precedent will be read carefully in Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, and beyond.”
In the end, Trump bypassed Machado’s opposition current and went directly to the forces that lay behind it and constitute the genuine “new order in-waiting”: the big oil corporations.
In the days following January 3, a flood of “experts” took to the pages of major newspapers to condemn the attack for its illegality and to complain about Machado’s sidelining. One NYT op-ed, which captures the essence of so many others, described the military adventure as “a blatant assault on the international legal order” which “threatens to end an era of historic peace and return us to a world in which might makes right.” The impression given is that things were just fine before Trump was at the steering wheel.
The brutal reality, however, is that we have always lived in a world in which might makes right. It’s just that for the last 75 years, the military and economic “might” of US imperialism seemed relatively stable. That era is over, and the celebrated “international legal order” that US domination underpinned is crumbling with it. With the flailing of US imperialism in the face of the rise of Russia and China, the gloves are coming off.
Seeing no need to maintain the fig leaf of so-called “international law,” Trump blurts out US imperialism’s interests crudely: We need it, we’re taking it. However, while Trump certainly leaves a unique stamp of chaos and “shoot-from-the-hip” bravado, make no mistake: there is no choosing between one wing of US imperialism versus another. We can trust in only the international working class, which, if provided the necessary leadership, could put an end to the nightmare of endless war and immiseration.