It is Walmart warmongering, Bargain City blitzkrieg, the Kmart coup. Donald Trump’s kidnapping of the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro is immensely serious. But it is also an attempt to do imperialism on the cheap. As such, it speaks much more of senile bewilderment than of muscular empire-building.
First, let’s not pretend there is anything shocking or unprecedented about what Trump has done. Violent US interventions in its southern backyard are, to use a metaphor that Trump would approve, par for the course. They are as American as the Grand Ole Opry or Dunkin’ Donuts.
Democracy has always stopped at the Rio Grande. The US has generally preferred its proxy Latin American and Caribbean rulers to wear a fig leaf of legitimacy. But if necessary it has enabled and sanctioned naked fascism and brutal dictatorship. Mass murderers such as Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Carlos Castillo Armas in Guatemala, Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina, Emílio Médici in Brazil and Augusto Pinochet in Chile are good guys, so long as they are our guys.
Historically, there are three ways of using US power to effect regime change. One is for the CIA to encourage and help organise an internal putsch. Democratically elected leaders such as Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala (1954) and Salvador Allende in Chile (1973) were overthrown by well-planned coups.
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This playbook is well-thumbed. The military is brought largely onside. Civil unrest is fomented. Sweeping internal and external propaganda campaigns are mounted. The economy is crippled. The generals move in to “restore order”. Murder and torture do the rest of the job. The country is saved from communism and anarchy, and US corporate interests are protected.
The second tried and trusted method is outright US invasion. Just move in with massive US firepower, overthrow the government and install a replacement more to Washington’s taste. Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada in 1983 and George H Bush’s overthrow of Manuel Noriega (a CIA stooge gone rogue) in Panama in 1989 are the obvious precedents here.
And the third model is US support for a long-term armed insurgency against an existing government. Think of the way that the US, under Reagan, used the Contras for a proxy war against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua (a campaign that involved, as well as active support for terrorism, some staggeringly egregious breaches of US law.)
Which of these models does Trump’s intervention in Venezuela follow? The obvious answer is none of them. What is distinctive about it is what it is not: not a CIA-orchestrated internal coup, not a US invasion, and not a proxy war. Morally and legally it is not very different from what has gone before. But tactically and strategically it is starkly so.
It’s different because it is, in political terms, all hat and no cattle. It’s a demonstration of power, a show of force in which the show is more salient than the force. It is, in this, very Trumpian – the performance is everything. This does not make it less dangerous. But it does require us to try to disentangle gesture from substance, the signifier from the signified.
Explainer
Who is Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s ousted president?
What Trump wants to signify is obvious enough: I can do anything I like, anywhere I like. Capturing Maduro and putting him on display is his version of a Roman emperor’s triumph (it is not irrelevant that he is currently planning a Roman triumphal arch in Washington to celebrate his own greatness): behold the barbarian king I have conquered and humiliated!
But beyond the increasingly anarchic and feral narcissism of the current occupant of the Oval Office, what is the actuality? Breathtakingly, so far as we can tell, very little – not even regime change.
Here we have to try to distinguish between what is going on in Trump’s head and what is real. Trump described his own experience of the operation to snatch Maduro: “I mean, I watched it, literally, like I was watching a television show.” This is the essence of the event: it was a show staged by his courtiers to please and flatter the bored and decrepit king. Trump was not in the situation room in the White House – he was in his holiday home at Mar-a-Lago being treated to a lavish entertainment, an extravaganza arranged for him by minions competing with each other for his favour.
And in Trump’s head, this TV show has a series finale: the US now owns Venezuela. He and his “team” will “run” it. American companies will reclaim “their” oil and billions of dollars will flow, not least into his own coffers.
This is the off-the-peg endgame. It’s called imperialism. But in this case all the crucial intervening episodes are missing. The showrunners, knowing their leader’s short attention span, have skipped straight from the pilot to the grand finale. The actual work of imperialism – the taking of control over a foreign country – is not being done.
Astonishingly, Trump is not even doing the most obvious thing, which is to insist on the installation of the opposition leader (and effectively the winner of the most recent election) María Corina Machado as president of Venezuela. Unlike most of the leaders placed in power after US-led coups, Machado actually has democratic legitimacy. It is utterly bizarre that Trump has dismissed her, saying she “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country”.
What’s really going on here is something the world (and especially the EU) should note: Trump has contempt for those who suck up to him. Machado has been slavishly sycophantic towards Trump. But in his logic, that makes her weak (“a nice woman”) and unworthy of respect.
So we seem to have no regime change, no real institutional coup, no invasion, no proxy armed faction – and, critically, no US boots on the ground to “run” the country and protect the oil companies that are supposed to go in and take control of the world’s largest reserves.
[ How would Donald Trump tap ‘tremendous’ wealth from Venezuelan oil?Opens in new window ]
This is not empire-building. It’s an imperial Squid Game – entertainment for a rambling emperor staged with actual killings.
