In this vacuum of meaning, key administration figures have taken to network television and social media, offering their own theories on the case after the fact. They are like sweepers in curling trying to coax a runaway stone into an advantageous lane. In this case, the runaway stone is Trump's decision to attack and everything that follows.
Among Trump's advisers, Rubio's vision is the clearest. His intentions are anti-communist. Cuban officials, Rubio told NBC, “are the ones who supported Maduro. His entire internal security force, his internal security apparatus, is completely controlled by the Cubans.” The day before at Mar-a-Lago, Rubio said: “If I lived in Havana and was in government, I would be worried.” Was this a war plan for Havana? If so, the president was not entirely convinced. On Sunday night, Trump told reporters at Air Force One that when it comes to Cuba, “I don't think we need any action” because the country is already “ready to fall.” Trump has also made some critical comments about the presidents of Colombia (“a sick man who likes to make cocaine and sell it to the United States”) and Mexico (“need to get it together”), suggesting his sights may be less methodically aimed at the region's communist regimes.
Meanwhile, Stephen Miller indulged in a grander historical vision of a renewed imperial program. “Shortly after World War II, the West dismantled its empires and colonies and began sending colossal amounts of taxpayer-funded aid to these former territories,” he wrote on social media. “The West opened its borders in a kind of reverse colonization, providing wealth and therefore remittances while giving these new arrivals and their families not only full voting rights, but preferential legal and financial treatment over native citizens. The neoliberal experiment, at its core, was a long-term self-punishment of the places and peoples who built the modern world.” Speaking to CNN's Jake Tapper on Monday, he said the US could take Greenland if it wanted. “We live in a world, a real world, Jake, that is controlled by power, that is controlled by force, that is controlled by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
Are the president's intentions truly colonial or, simply put, a kind of hostage-taking gunboat diplomacy? According to Financial Timesthe brother of Rodriguez, Venezuela's interim leader, held talks with officials in Washington last year, a detail that smacked of Cold War client statism and raised questions about what Rodriguez might have promised them. Trump himself continued to talk not about anti-communism or drug trafficking, but about oil. Regarding Air Force One, he said that “the oil companies are going to rebuild this system.” (The companies themselves said they were not consulted; flooding the market with new supply would not be in the interests of corporate profits.) The President told the public that rebuilding Venezuela's oil industry would require “billions” in infrastructure investment – in Venezuela, not in the US. Curt Mills, magazine editor American conservativeremarked, “Democratic talking points are writing themselves right now.”
Vance's complete absence from the Venezuela initiative was taken as an expression of his ideological identity. He's a dove, at least in the relative sense of Trump's world, and this was a hawks operation. But his more visible position may be that he is Trump's political heir, and the Venezuela adventure is beginning to look like a very hard political bargain. A CBS/YouGov poll conducted before the attack found that seventy percent of Americans opposed military action in Venezuela; A snap poll conducted by YouGov immediately after Maduro's capture found that only thirty-six percent of respondents “fully or somewhat” supported the operation. If Trump intends to convince the American people of the wisdom of an attack in an attempt to provide them with cheaper Venezuelan oil, it would mean becoming much more deeply involved in a conflict that he might prefer to see as a random hit-and-run. And then a difficult international question arises: why exactly does the US have the right to simply take the oil reserves from Caracas? Rubio may have achieved a long-held anti-communist goal. Miller can celebrate the blow to the liberal order. But the most likely person to inherit Trump's mantle will be someone who stays on the sidelines. Vance noted that there is national concern “about the use of military force.” Let us assume that this anxiety has a moral dimension. There is also a political one. ♦
