Juan Pablo Villasmil argued here yesterday that there is much expedient in the administration’s bellicose approach to Venezuela. The U.S. has a strong interest in Venezuela—in terms of geography, in terms of natural resources, in terms of denying America’s adversaries a toehold in this hemisphere. So far, so good. He makes the case that the administration’s Venezuela policy, rather than being a mess improvised amid palace factionalism, is actually coherent and may prove effective at securing a better American position in the Bolivarian Republic—specifically that the use of force could well nudge Venezuela towards an agreeable change of management, although just getting some deals would be an acceptable outcome, too.
I will give him a point for introducing me to a new euphemism for regime change. “A deal is better than paralysis, and a power transition is better than a deal. The two approaches are, at least practically, not contradictory but complementary… A managed transition, however difficult, is still preferable to the stagnation of indefinite, adversarial autocracy… If and only if a transition proves unattainable or needlessly dangerous, which it may, a transactional détente that expands American access remains a worthy fallback.” Villasmil supports regime change, that is to say, “transition,” so long as it remains expedient—so long as we get the goodies we want at an acceptable material cost: “A limited, calibrated form of pressure can continue to catalyze internal fracture without putting Americans in harm’s way.” How far out the line for “acceptable material cost” is drawn is not entirely clear, but “coercion” and “force projection” are explicitly within it.
In the usual reasonable tone self-christened “realists” use when they’re about to carve up your brain to eat it, Villasmil sniffs at opposition to the administration’s course: “What makes this realist framework distinctive is that it neither romanticizes democracy promotion nor demonizes coercion. It sees both as tools in a hierarchy of needs. In this hierarchy, U.S. national interests—migration control, resource security, regional stability—take precedence over moral theatrics.”
Well, all right. Lay aside whether “regional stability” is really fostered by regime change, or “resource security” is a particularly good reason to let slip the dogs of war. (“Blood for oil” wasn’t a prescriptive slogan when I was growing up.) How about the fact that the administration is lying all the time about what we’re doing here? The White House has gone to extravagant lengths to avoid making its case to the public or even to Congress, or even just describing what it’s actually up to; it has put out patent nonsense about drug control and “determining” that we are at war while it ratchets up force posture in the Caribbean.
For Villasmil, the only concern here is that the administration might get high on its own propaganda supply: “Yet, as one source familiar with these matters in the State Department privately disclosed, they know the numbers well. Drug talk is a vehicle, not the sole foundation. One must hope that this view is widely shared throughout the administration.” Oh. OK.
One might be forgiven for thinking that this seems a little beside the point. Under what legal authority is the president doing any of this? What even does the president think he’s doing? (We touch lightly on the fact that Villasmil’s piece is in fact analysis, that is, speculation, and not reporting, that is, fact. To Villasmil’s credit, his own case for the Venezuela policy is far more explicit and cogent than anything emanating from Washington.) Why are the president’s men lying to us about it, and is that actually all right? Reasonable people of goodwill might set aside such niceties during a true national crisis, but in fact Venezuela is a nuisance rather than a threat; even the dubious Wilson-era adventurism in the Western Hemisphere rose to a more serious standard for action. It’s not histrionic to think this all seems somewhat irregular, and “irregular” in a constitutional system is another word for “bad.”
These practical matters inevitably lead to questions about what is the distinct goodness—one might almost say greatness—of America. Perhaps naively, I had thought it had something to do with self-government and freedom, and the concomitant responsibilities. My contention is not just that the administration’s policy is stupid, although it may well be, but that the way it’s going about it compromises what is actually good and distinctive about America. Do you want to live in a country where the government lies to you—deliberately and flagrantly—in order to justify using your tax dollars to pursue its own private ideas of how best to use American power? Does it make you feel better if they know they’re lying? Do you like that the powermen are improvising novel theories of international conflict on the fly so they do not have to come to you to make the case for whatever it is they’re doing down there?
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I am not an anti-imperialist as such; I merely have noticed that the special qualities of America, which are intimately bound up in its political traditions and structures, sit ill with imperialism. There are countries without our political traditions where imperial foreign policies have been successfully pursued without internal political contradiction—Russia, the United Kingdom (up to a point, and with some fancy legal footwork), Belgium. But, in America, imperial adventurism has always resulted in the distortions and degradations of the body politic. The problem with the War on Terror wasn’t just that we did it poorly, although that is true; the problem was that it vitiated the American legal system and introduced sweeping, unchecked powers to the executive. Whatever is going on with Venezuela is kicking up the same clouds of political dysfunction that have attended every such adventure since the Spanish–American War: public lies, legal improvisation, camarilla politics. The fear is less about what a quasi-war would do to Venezuela and its neighborhood, and more about what it will do to us.
Realism is a fine interpretive framework for international relations so far as it goes. But, by assuming the shared subjectivity of the nation as its basic unit, realism concedes that there are in fact distinctions among nations that are not rooted in the mere quanta of power. Those differences condition particular national interests, and those particular national interests in fact constrain and differentiate how power is pursued and used. An American national interest is, I think, the preservation of our political and legal traditions; otherwise, what’s the point of this country? If we conduct a “successful” war on the basis of unlimited executive war powers and a total disregard for what the American people actually want, well, haven’t we lost something more fundamental and important?
These are not “moral theatrics.” These are questions about what America is, and what its core interests are. Are a few puddles of oil or a gravel patch with some nickel worth selling off the remaining tatters of constitutional government? Isn’t this way of doing business a little, well, un-American? If Villasmil wants unaccountable politicians with unlimited powers for doing violence, policy and law made by decree and padded by propaganda, and a fundamentally passive, subject population, he might be better off taking a flight to China—or Venezuela.
