President Trump’s attacks on Venezuelan targets hit a culminating point January 3, with U.S. forces’ capture of dictator Nicolas Maduro and his removal to the U.S. The news is fresh, and everything about it is TBD. Still, a certain perspective might be helpful.
Of course Maduro is a tyrannical dictator, a prop for the Cuban dictatorship, and corrupt mis-manager of his own country’s economy, kept in power by force of arms masked by falsified election. No tears for him; strictly in itself it’s good that he’s out of power.
There will be many implications, and many channels of argument around this incursion. Politicians will levy their partisan charges, lawyers will argue its legality, strategists will debate its global implications, Latinists will re-parse U.S. conduct in the hemisphere, and so forth. This post points out another American problem around this action: do our international conduct and policy processes display a cogent sense of national purpose?
To be sure, we don’t like bad guys, and we want to defeat any who act against our interests. But the world is full of bad and equivocal actors; friends as well as foes will have divergent interests from ours; and reality doesn’t always accommodate sentiment, however righteous. We must concert our might by durable priorities, that best effect our core purposes. So America needs to know, if only for ourselves, what our priorities are, what risks we face and which are greater than others, what costs as well as “wins” will follow from armed force, or any other action. What conventions, norms, and rules do we respect – which help us in the long run as we pursue our ends? Underlying it all, what are our goals in international conduct, and what is our national purpose behind them?
No clear enunciation of goals, or driving purpose, preceded the actions in Venezuela. Trump himself has pointed to a range of disparate gains we might reap – from “running” Venezuela for some time to gaining access to oil to fighting drug trafficking to enhancing national security in an unnamed way. As observed in this blog, even the National Security Strategy is long on means to win but short on naming the fundamental ends to be won.
No one doubts Maduro’s badness, but what good, or which of several possibilities, are we after? Does it justify crossing the taboo against naked aggression – or is there objective reason to say it isn’t such aggression? Doing something because a sundry lot of benefits could be gained amounts to acting on whim. Armed intrusion into another country, of any stripe, justified just because I have the power to do it, is an abuse of that power. And post facto rationalizations will not undo this problem for this Venezuelan incursion.
If we don’t specify our objectives, we tell the world we are just out to win, perhaps to fortify our ability to win. In a world of Realpolitik, yes all are out simply to win, and the determinant of wisdom in any action is the level of my power. Yet if we do not enunciate what we aim to win, against whom, and why, then we invite all to oppose us, for fear that they may be next. If we announce a practice of taking capricious action against unspecified target nations, then anyone, democracy or tyranny, rich or poor, culturally alien or genetic twin, could become an enemy. The whole world may be moved to oppose us, if only in fear for their own security.
But America was conceived in a principle, of personal rights and government that exists to serve them. That founding was revolutionary, and contested – and even today much of the world doubts either our sincerity in this purpose, or the possibility that free persons can actually sustain such a nation. We do need to secure the security and prosperity of our society, against the critics and doubters; we also must imperatively do so in a way that projects our creed of freedom. The revolutionary nature of this nation, whose sovereignty rests on its citizens’ maintenance of creedal principle, flies in the face of the Realists who still run most nations. If we unite the world against us, or if we play Realpolitik without regard to our creedal bedrock, we risk our tangible viability, our existential moral premise, or both.
Outcomes of the January 3 incursion are entirely up in the air. This blog adds nothing by speculating on our ability to govern in Venezuela, on Chinese assessments of our resolve to defend Taiwan, on Russia’s or Europe’s or Mexico’s next moves. It does seem that success for Trump will hinge on whether American power, in all its aspects, can override the protests of interest, invocations of international law, and rivals’ own power resources. That said, resolutions of conflicts and issues can take all kinds of shapes, of unknowable effects.
The question for America is whether we judge principle, like the one on which we declared ourselves, to be important to us. If it does, we actually carry an overriding influence, in the desires of free will that is endemic to humankind.
Common Conviction 