Maduro Abducted

Trump’s lawlessness overseas will accelerate his lawlessness at home

By Peter Beinart, The Beinart Notebook

Transcript

So the news that the United States has abducted Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela. When I heard it after Shabbat ended, it immediately brought me back to the debates about the Iraq War. I supported the Iraq War, and I kind of obligated, whenever these kind of things come up, to say that. Partly just because of a sense of obligation, I feel, to all of the people who suffered as a result of people like me who supported such a catastrophic and immoral exercise of American imperial power, but also because I feel like it was in the wake of that experience that I came to understand some things that I didn’t understand before, and that I often come back to in moments like this.

One of them is that when the United States overthrows foreign regimes, lots of different justifications are thrown out at the particular time. Sometimes the justifications are about democracy, or human rights, or various moments, communism, or drugs, or weapons of mass destruction, or terrorism, and then one gets sidetracked into these debates about the particular nature of this regime, right?

And so, one can say all kinds of things about Nicolás Maduro, who was a dictatorial authoritarian leader who did terrible things. I think, sure, many, many Venezuelans have very good reason to think he was doing terrible things to them and their country. Just like many Iraqis had reasons to believe that about Saddam Hussein, and many, many people around the world have many reasons to believe that about their governments. And the United States also, at any particular moment, has a particular kind of ideological framework in which to justify the reason that it needs to have domination over all these other parts of the world.

But I think the critical thing, if you look at the history, the long history of American behavior, is it becomes really clear that none of these justifications, the justifications of the moment, are what these things are really about. And none of these actions really have anything to do with the well-being of the people in the countries whose sovereignty the United States violates, even if the United States is acting against governments that have done bad things to their people, that unless… that the fundamental principle is, unless those governments are actually threatening the safety of Americans, right? Which is almost never the case.

In the case of very, very weak governments like this that have historically been pushed around by imperial powers, and more recently by the United States. Unless they pose a genuine material threat to the United States of a kind that has emerged very, very rarely over the past century or so, given the United States is a nuclear- armed superpower, which has oceans separating it, right? That there is absolutely no justification for the United States giving itself the right to violate other countries’ sovereignty, depose leaders and then put in leaders that we like better, regardless of what the pretext is.

And so I think it’s just really important that regardless of what people say about Nicolás Maduro and the particular justifications that will come out here, this is not about those particular justifications, because it’s about the long history of the United States assigning to itself the right to violate the sovereignty of other countries in a way that we would never, for a second, permit if it was done to us, and in fact, we would denounce and do denounce wholeheartedly if it’s done by other powers, be it Russia or China or anybody else.

The second thing that I think is really important to remember about things like this is this… this lawlessness does not remain abroad. The lawlessness of the United States, when it goes to war and opposes other governments, also threatens the rights of Americans. And this is going to happen in a very, I think, direct way here, because the Trump administration is so clearly looking for pretext to violate the rule of law even more in the United States. The New York Times reported that Stephen Miller, who’s been looking for ways to circumvent legal restrictions on his ability to deport hundreds of thousands of people, has been basically trying to find a way of proving that the United States and Venezuela are at war, because that would allow the United States government to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, and it might get around certain judicial limitations on mass brutal deportations in the United States.

So just as we saw after September 11th with the Patriot Act, we saw during the McCarthy period and the early Cold War, and particularly during the Korean War, we saw during World War I, that these things almost always occasion crackdowns on the rights of Americans who happen to be of the wrong racial, religious, ethnic group, or who oppose U.S. policy.

I think one difference between this action and some previous actions is that the Trump administration is actually much less capable, I think, than prior U.S. administrations of constructing any reasonably coherent, larger ideological justification for this. Trump is so naked in his desire for domination, personal and national, that in some ways, the justification for this is even thinner than it was during the Cold War, when the United States overthrew governments, helped overthrow governments in Chile or Guatemala, for instance, or during the, you know, after September 11th. And in a way, I think that represents an opportunity, right? Because no one could possibly take Donald Trump seriously when he talks about creating a Venezuela that treats its people better. Fucking Trump, right? I mean, a guy… the idea that anyone would suggest that Donald Trump is genuinely offended by the human rights abuses of Nicolás Maduro, given the way he behaves himself and all of the friends he cultivates around the world, the brutal dictators he cultivates.

I actually think it makes it easier for people to see through all of these things, and it gives the Democratic Party an opportunity to do something the Democratic Party didn’t do after September 11th, and often has not done as the opposition party, which is what the fourth rightly and wholeheartedly denounce this, not get sucked into a conversation about whether Nicolás Maduro was a good guy or not, but sticks to the basic principles of international law, the basic principle that one country does not have the right to intervene and overthrow the government of another country because it decides it doesn’t like that government. That that is a path to an even more dangerous and an even more lawless world. And when the United States does this, it not only wreaks havoc generally for people in the countries that the United States overthrows, but it undermines the already very, very fragile norms that prevent other powers from doing that as well. And this is an opportunity to say that very forthrightly, and I think it’s a test for the Democratic Party establishment, whether they can do that or not.