The Mask Comes Off

In the days following Nicolás Maduro’s kidnapping last month, a curious debate took place in which some announced the definitive end of the postwar liberal international order, while others responded that the so-called “rules-based” system had never been anything more than a convenient mask for the true law, that of the jungle. Too critical to believe in lies, the latter camp has ended up seeming naive for failing to see that a rupture of some kind is underway. The former were right to recognize the change but missed the mark in naming it.

The mutation we are witnessing does not lie in the transition from a rules-based to a force-based system, seeing as force was always the last resort in the previous arrangement; nor does it lie in the complete and total abandonment of legalistic appeals, seeing as the administration continues to give legal-sounding rationales, however specious, for its actions. Rather, we are witnessing a transformation in the modality through which force is exercised, which we could define as a shift from hypocrisy to cynicism. What the January 3 operation signals is that, in the times ahead, the strongest states are free to exercise power without paying lip service to the familiar discourses and procedures that are supposed to legitimize the liberal order. For them, it is no longer necessary to give the pursuit of geopolitical objectives a veneer of mediation through the international community; the only reasons that really matter are those that matter to their national interest and domestic public—and this need not be hidden.

The shift we are witnessing could be defined as one from hypocrisy to cynicism.

In other words, what is new about what happened in Caracas is not that the United States is acting imperialistically, since this has never ceased to be the case, but that it is now doing so with far less subterfuge—openly signaling that this is what it is doing, even as it continues to engage in certain perfunctory routines of legal mystification, like the playground bully who tells the smaller kids to stop hitting his fist with their heads.

Such a change does not mean, of course, that mediation is completely over and from now on everyone can use force against everyone else all the time. Rather, it implies that we will increasingly have a three-tiered international system. At the top, the world’s great military powers, free to act in ever more unilateral fashion as long as they avoid direct conflict with each other. At the bottom, countries with little political and military clout, subject to the whims of stronger states and the plundering of their wealth. In the middle, finally, those states that may be able to afford to become more assertive in their zones of influence but which, unable to stand up to the United States, China, and Russia, will be constrained to negotiate with them and among themselves, maintaining the appearances and mediations of the old international order. In the masculinist language dear to the far right, this is a division between all-powerful alphas, betas destined to powerlessness and humiliation, and the cucks forced to continue playing a game whose rules the bigger players now treat as optional.

Understanding the attack on Venezuela requires seeing it not as a sign of irrationality but as an attempt to respond to historical trends and the material and symbolic demands that the United States government is facing. This, in turn, forces us to grasp how far-right leaders like Trump see the contemporary world—in order to then see how they are recreating it in their own image.

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Starting from the (very) beginning: no country has police power within another. Policing is a matter internal to a sovereign state; between sovereign states, what exists is either negotiation or war. Thus, even if the accusation used to kidnap Maduro were true—that he was the head of a drug trafficking network responsible for supplying the United States with tons of cocaine—the action would be, from the point of view of international law, an act of aggression against another country rather than legitimate law enforcement.

Why, then, did the Trump administration spend months building up the accusation against Maduro? The answer lies in domestic, not international law: so that it could claim it had not overstepped Congress’s prerogative to decide on acts of war. As Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser concluded in a memo produced by the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in December, “The president may unilaterally order such an operation, as the amount of force involved serves important national interests and involves a use of force that he could reasonably conclude does not rise to the level of war in a constitutional sense.”

Yet the real legitimacy, the administration clearly thought, would come less from this prior smokescreen than from its retrospective result. This presumption exemplifies one of the pillars of Trumpian politics: no one can prevent what has already happened, and in a situation in which it is debatable whether something can be done or not, doing it is the definitive way of winning the debate. That the indictment served only to create the context for a fait accompli is made clear by three facts. One is that the U.S. justice system quickly acknowledged that the so-called “Cartel de los Soles,” of which Maduro was allegedly the leader, is not a real drug trafficking operation but a journalistic convention created to designate a network of corruption within the Venezuelan state. The second is that, just a month earlier, Trump had pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, convicted with ample evidence of participation in a massive international drug trafficking scheme that ran for nearly two decades. The last and most important is that, once the action was completed, Trump himself immediately set aside its stated reasons to spell out its real motivation: securing privileged access to Venezuelan oil for U.S. companies.

It would be a mistake, however, to see these admissions as something like a Freudian slip. Making the lie visible is part of the message, as is the poorly constructed nature of the excuses presented afterward to threaten Cuba, Panama, Colombia, and Greenland. What is being communicated is that the strength of a superpower implies not only the ability to do what it wants but to do so without ultimate justification. Transparent insincerity—claims to law that are explicitly undermined by other things the administration says and does and could not possibly be countenanced by even the closest allies of the United States—is almost as good as bluntly speaking the truth. Since sending helicopters and bombers to Caracas, Trump has systematically doubled down on this, as if taunting the international community: We can continue to give reasons, but we all know that they do not matter—if we really want to do what we say, who is going to stop us? Compare this attitude with the discourse of military interventions in the 1990s and 2000s, whose public justification—preventing humanitarian crises, spreading democracy—presupposed a tacit agreement between the United States and the international community, or at least that part of the latter that are the biggest cucks of the newest world order: their NATO partners. In the previous arrangement, the United States assumed the role of world police against undesirable elements such as terrorist groups, “failed states,” and (some) genocidal regimes; in return, it reserved itself the right to use this function for its own benefit. To reap the profits from the “nation-building” processes it sponsored, it bore the costs of regime change and what came after. It was a protection racket, but an agreement nonetheless—a contract whose terms and conditions the United States undertook to at least appear to respect, resorting to bodies such as the UN and NATO and presenting its interests as converging with those of the “free world.” What the attack on Venezuela indicates is that the U.S. government no longer sees this contract as binding. The sheriff has gone rogue, become a cattle thief, and from now on is entitled to use force exclusively for its own benefit, without even pretending to answer to anyone. This shift, by extension, communicates to those whom the sheriff might have been called upon to coerce in the past, such as Russia in Ukraine and China in Taiwan, that, as long as there is no direct conflict with U.S. interests, they are now freer to try to do as they please—a lesson that the Israeli government, increasingly unfussed with providing reasons for actions that go far beyond even what might be deemed acceptable in a context of war, has already been putting into practice for more than two years in Gaza.

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To understand the new type of interventionism that may have been born in Caracas, however, one must look at the domestic political scene in the United States. The January 3 attack seems tailor-made to respond to three internal constraints. The first is the America First isolationism of the MAGA base, whose complaint, forged in the resounding failure of the forever wars that the United States got itself into after 9/11, basically consists of asking why the country should bear the burden of protecting distant nations that often fiercely resist being rebuilt. The second is Trump’s now consistently low approval ratings, largely a consequence of his inability to respond to the cost-of-living crisis hitting Americans’ pockets. This is a problem for which controlling Venezuelan oil reserves presents a possible solution, at least temporarily: an influx of low-cost fuel can help reduce prices, increasing affordability without improving the income of the majority of the population.

Trump is essentially taunting the international community: we can continue to give reasons, but we all know that they do not matter.

The form the operation has taken is an attempt to resolve the apparent contradiction between these two constraints. For years, scenarios projected by the Pentagon for regime change in Venezuela pointed out that any attempt at intervention would end in disaster: the population would be divided, the opposition would not have the support of the military, paramilitary groups would fill the vacuum, and the country would plunge into chaos. A month on from Operation Southern Spear, it is clear that the way around this problem was an agreement whereby what is left of Chavismo agreed to sell its leader down the river in exchange for the U.S. government throwing the opposition under the bus. The regime has been decapitated, but its body remains in place, with the threat of further attacks compelling it to yield to North American designs on the oil industry. It is a risky gamble: the new government might resist, the regime could descend into infighting, and boots on the ground may become necessary at least to protect oil infrastructure. But it has the potential of handing Trump’s base a material gain while avoiding the long and costly international interventions his voters no longer desire. At the same time, it delivers something that those who elected him desire very much indeed: a raw and spectacular demonstration of U.S. power. Offering such a display was the third constraint. The Maduro kidnapping, like Trumpism more generally, must be understood from the point of view of the intersection of two historical trends: the decline of U.S. empire and the colonization of politics by the attention economy. It is this decline that explains why the United States no longer has the resources or the willingness to continue acting as the world’s police (except, maybe, through isolated acts of intimidation, as in Iran). It is why the country, having lost the race for green technology to China, is doubling down on fossil fuels, willing to see the world burn in order to secure the way of life of a declining economy. It is also what leads Trump, aware that the United States lags far behind China in the strategic control of rare earths, to set his sights on Greenland. Finally, it is what drives the nostalgia for lost potency that is converted into the fantasies of imperial and imperious virility that the far right exploits and stirs up. At the same time, Trump’s mastery of the attention economy is what makes him understand that, while such fantasies may no longer be materially achievable, they can still be the object of symbolic compensation, offering his base the feeling of winning even when the final outcome is highly uncertain. It is also what helps explain his passion for tariffs, measures of dubious outcome that are nevertheless effective as shows of strength, giving the impression that major changes are taking place even if they are reversed shortly thereafter. Last but not least, it is what tells us that, in this new era of international politics we are entering, power is more than ever inseparable from its projection, and actions must be sudden and spectacular so as to make both enemies and erstwhile allies wonder what might happen next. It is not necessarily true that the United States will be able to get everything it wants in Venezuela, Cuba, Panama, Colombia, and Greenland. As the lack of strikes in support of Iranian protesters and the climbdown in rhetoric around the Danish territory suggest, the reason for preferring the minimal plausible deniability of transparent cynicism over out-and-out truth-telling is that much of the bombast is for show, a bluff on which a fading giant cannot follow through. But making everyone think he might try is essential to Trump’s “art of the deal,” as it inspires fear and makes other countries willing to negotiate terms that would previously have been unthinkable simply because no one is sure of the ground they are standing on anymore.

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Throughout the world, the message of the far right is one of decline: people feel lost, institutions fail to provide answers, and the economy no longer serves the majority. In the background is the great crisis that dares not speak its name: ecological collapse, with the prospect of extreme weather events, resource crises of all kinds, and a rise in armed conflicts and mass migration. The far right embraces the ambient anxiety stirred by a menacing future but displaces it on present enemies, real or imagined. Still, it is in the light of the actual threats that we must read the shift from hypocrisy to cynicism: it is ultimately a politics guided by the struggle over an increasingly inhospitable planet, in which nativism, the closing of borders, and a new extractive colonialism become defensible for the citizens of countries that are in a position to guarantee to their people better conditions for survival in a world with shrinking horizons. Being an alpha, in this case, is no longer just a matter of male pride but of ensuring a better chance in a dystopian scenario.

It would be a mistake to see these admissions as something like a Freudian slip. Making the lie visible is part of the message.

Whether real or projected, force thus becomes a rational response: the most efficient way of getting the best deal out of the fall, the most appropriate game theory for the endgame. This is what Trump has understood. A large chunk of his base wants to see him flex his muscles, wants to hear him say bluntly and unblushingly that he is doing so in order to extort other countries in pursuit of what is best for the United States, because that is what they elected him for. By acting in this way, he tends to progressively remake the international order in his image: prompting other countries to embark on their own neocolonial adventures; encouraging richer nations to increase military spending, as Europe is doing, and poorer nations to invest in irregular warfare; inciting non-state sovereign actors, such as militias and cartels, to prepare for the opportunities that geopolitical chaos may open up. In addition to intervening directly to favor his candidates in other countries, as he did recently in Honduras and Argentina, his example tends to bolster figures who adopt the same aggressive foreign policy discourse (in stronger countries) or those who advocate automatic alignment with North American interests (such as the Brazilian politicians who reacted to the attack on Venezuela publicly wishing the United States would invade their own country). This is an especially stark warning to present European leaders, who reacted to the attack on Venezuela by pretending it was still part of the old agreement and, at least initially, hummed and hawed their way through the threats against Greenland. Voters may soon show they prefer empty bluster to weak hand-wringing.

Years ago, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips warned that the worst thing about Trump was that he awakened the inner Trump even in people who disliked him. Soon we may see this observation confirmed on the largest possible scale. Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.

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