Donald Trump has gone from fawning over Vladimir Putin and seeking his favor and support to actively emulating him in almost every possible way.
With America’s unprovoked and illegal attack on Venezuela and the seizure of its president, Nicolas Maduro, Trump has taken the Putinization of U.S. foreign policy to the next level.
Trump is attacking our neighbors while showing a complete disregard for international and U.S. law. He is doing so based on fabricated grounds that do not stand up to even casual scrutiny. His reasons for doing so are likely corrupt and certainly are not in the national interest of the United States. In ordering the military to be the vehicle for his aggression, he is degrading them and inviting our military’s leaders to debase themselves by agreeing to his illegal orders.
That has been Putin’s playbook in Ukraine. It is now America’s playbook in Venezuela.
Of all the leaders Trump could have chosen as role models in the world, Trump has chosen the most brutal, corrupt dictator on the planet to imitate. We cannot be surprised at this point. Trump has often spoken of his admiration for stark autocratic displays of power. He envies the dull-eyed displays of loyalty it wins from cowering aides and military officers. He sees laws as restrictions imposed on little people, beneath him. Further, as a deeply greedy man who sees money as the only metric of success in life, surely Trump is awed by Putin’s status as possibly the richest man in the world, a man who has raised kleptocracy to an art form and made the enrichment of himself and his oligarch friends the primary goal of his government.
But there is a dimension to Trump’s imitation game with Putin that should be deeply worrying to the world in the wake of Saturday morning’s attacks on Venezuelan military targets and the capture and extradition of its president that is even more ominous—hard to imagine though that may be.
Putin sees the countries that were once part of the former Soviet empire as within his country’s “sphere of influence.” He believes that because Russia is powerful, it should be able to exert unchallenged control over the destiny of the region once known as its “near abroad.” With reported U.S. efforts to win permanent land gains for Russia as a result of its unprovoked and unjustifiable war against Ukraine, the U.S. has been working to essentially ratify Putin’s idea of what he and his country are entitled to do within that zone, sovereignty and international law be damned.
But in recent months, statements by Trump and his aides and the release of the National Security Strategy late last year, have suggested that Trump seeks to build on Putin’s views and to reorient U.S. foreign policy around such spheres of influence. This is a view that essentially grants major powers the ability to exert their will on their weaker neighbors. The so-called “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, now brought starkly to life with the assaults on Venezuela, is an extension of this view. Surely, China is watching and wondering whether this is a green light for them to impose their will on Taiwan.
Embracing and allowing the implementation of such a new order for the world would essentially erase the efforts of the past century to move towards a more rules-based international order where the sovereignty and self-determination of nations large and small was left to their people.
Admittedly, that ideal has never been completely fulfilled. During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union actively sought to build out—often via covert, violent or illegal means—the areas they controlled on the planet.
Further, though the U.S. has preached a higher-minded approach, it has regularly used “exceptionalism” or just outright lies to allow it to flex its muscles globally. Indeed, every Republican president since Nixon has illegally invaded a country or waged a war somewhere without justification and in violation of international law. Cambodia. Laos. Grenada. Panama. Central America. Iraq. It is a long ignominious list.
But in the past more care was given to get Congressional approval for such actions and to provide justifications for the actions that passed the laugh test. Such efforts were not always successful and sometimes were obscene (Iraq) or laughable (Grenada). Saturday’s attack was taken without any support from the one branch of the U.S. government with the power to okay an act of war, the Congress. In framing the attack, Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested it was undertaken to enforce a warrant for the arrest of Maduro (presumably on drug trafficking grounds.) Senator Mike Lee suggested via social media post that the military action was necessary to “to protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant.”
Of course, the U.S. does not have any right to grab any leader anywhere in the world for anything it deems a crime. If that were a right all countries had, for example, Trump would likely have to spend the rest of his life in hiding. Further, while Maduro is a terrible guy and a bad leader and very likely has committed many, many criminal acts, the case that Venezuela posed a special threat to the U.S. because of the export of drugs is flimsy to the point of nonsensical. It is a secondary or tertiary actor in that regard and has been pointed out, not only is the U.S. not going after bigger threats, Trump released and granted a pardon to a Honduran ex-president who was actually, provably, a big time drug lord.
What happens next poses many big questions. One has to do with Maduro, any trial that may take place, and whether or not Trump and his minions cut a deal with the Venezuelan leader in the course of or anticipation of such proceedings. Further, what will happen next in Venezuela and what will the U.S. do, if anything, about it. Will there be elections? Will the Vice President simply replace Maduro and continue the regime? Will the U.S. back a different candidate and what deals with the U.S. (presumably regarding oil and minerals) will the U.S. cut? As we know, Trump let slip several weeks ago that his reason for going after Venezuela had to do with reclaiming what he alleged were U.S. oil, corporate, and land assets.
Answering these questions will reveal Trump’s near-term motivations. We need to keep a close eye out for the likely outcome that Trump allies are big beneficiaries of any negotiated asset deals—because that is how Putinesque kleptocracies work.
That said, we need to keep our eye on the bigger picture as well. What does the naked U.S. aggression in Venezuela suggest our next moves in the hemisphere will be? And what does it suggest for how we will implement a more “spheres of influence” and “might makes right” foreign policy going forward? What happens in Ukraine? In Taiwan? What happens in places Trump covets like Greenland or Panama? In places Trump has recently launched attacks like Africa or the Middle East?
To find the answers to these questions we will have to not only keep a close eye on Trump, but also one on the man who is the inspiration for and a driver of this new, ugly, disgraceful, U.S. approach to world affairs: the architect of Trump foreign policy, Vladimir Putin.
