recently announced the closure of airspace over and around it.
The most advanced aircraft carrier in the world hovers around the country; destroyers and guided missiles; amphibious ships and fast attack boats; a nuclear submarine; state-of-the-art fighters that carry out training bombing raids from the aircraft carrier; strategic bombers demonstrating in Caribbean airspace; special operations surveillance and reconnaissance helicopters; and between 13 thousand and 15 thousand soldiers in concentration.
All of this under the pretext of combating drug trafficking in the Caribbean and the Pacific, but, obviously, to force him to leave power.
If the Venezuelan dictator resigns, he will not be missed. But what Trump’s tactics will do to free Venezuela from authoritarianism — getting rid of it, which is not assured — is an evil many times greater than that which Chávez’s successor has been imposing on his people.
It will mean the legitimization of the use of brute force in international conflicts. Everything that law, regimes and international organizations have tried to avoid, more or less successfully, in the last hundred years, especially after 1945.
Analysts disagree about the existence of a doctrine to support the American president’s destructive foreign policy. There are those who argue that a person incapable of uttering two coherent sentences and who seems driven by his most primal instincts would be unlikely to be able to articulate a set of principles to guide his international initiatives. At most, Trump would be guided by the simplistic formulas he organized in the manual “The Art of Negotiation”, prior to his arrival in the White House.
Contrary to those who believe that there is no need to seek doctrine where there is a lack of logic, American political scientist Ronald Krebs, in a recent conference at the London School of Economics, argued that it is possible to discern a set of reactionary ideas, nourished by deep-rooted feelings in a portion of the American public. They inspire both the foreign policy and the domestic initiatives of the occupant of the Oval Office, many of his aides and the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement.
They are reactionary because they refer to an idealized past, a Golden Age, when the USA was a rising power —strong, respected and white—, before being eroded by globalization, immigration, multiculturalism and multilateral institutions.
In this retrograde fantasy, the country would be a victim of its parasitic allies: international organizations, traps that drain internal resources. In the global arena, conflicts would always add up to zero, producing winners or losers; and each relationship with another State is a transaction, in which it is only worth pursuing immediate gain. Therefore, foreign policy would be an instrument to reverse supposed losses and establish a global hierarchy in which the USA rules and the others obey.
Only reactionaries imagine that history is going in reverse. If Professor Krebs is right, Trumpist foreign policy will not promote a return to a golden past, but the twilight of American influence in the world.
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