Trump and the return to yesterday's world
Trump's order is a return to the past. He sheds the cumbersome constraints of international law to unabashedly embrace the colonization of territories and the appropriation of their natural resources. The Monroe Doctrine, in its Trumpian version, is an imperialist reinterpretation of the US right to control its sphere of influence. The triumphalism at Mar-a-Lago during the announcement of Nicolás Maduro's capture and the takeover of Venezuela through a military intervention without authorization from the US Congress exemplifies this new reality.
Donald Trump has taken de facto control over Venezuela, and its Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has become –according to the Washington Post in the new "viceroy": charged with steering the formation of a new government, guaranteeing the country's stabilization, and distributing the oil assets that the United States has rushed to seize. Mercantilism applied without qualms. Trump's expansionism seeks the appropriation of natural resources and enshrines force over law.
Stefan Zweig's world of yesterday was a world disintegrating rapidly and violently. Today's world is dismantling, brick by brick, the multilateral institutional architecture that emerged after the Second World War. Donroe doctrine It is a mutation of that colonial order imposed by pipes in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it does not renounce its claim to a continental dominion imposed, if necessary, by military force. Venezuela is the starting point. That is why it is accompanied by warnings in Colombia and Mexico, with Cuba in Marco Rubio's crosshairs and with Trump's declarations in The Atlantic over the weekend reiterating his desire for the United States to take control of Greenland and its natural resources.
Trump, who came to power denouncing America's endless wars, does not, however, renounce the imposition of his strategic interests by force. Iraq fell into a bloody war after the US invasion in 2003, and in Afghanistan, two decades and billions of dollars later, the Taliban have once again imposed the cruelty of a regime that the world now legitimizes through the back door. However, the current occupant of the White House feels no need to disguise geopolitical aggression as the forced imposition of democracy, nor does he feel pressure to build coalitions of interests. In just one year in power, since his return to the presidency, Trump has ordered more than 600 airstrikes worldwide, more bombings than all those carried out by Joe Biden in four years; none of them authorized by any international body.
We are moving toward an order enforced by brute force. Without international law, the law of the jungle prevails.
China, which considers control of Taiwan a national priority, may interpret the US action in Venezuela as a precedent that legitimizes any operation on the island. For its part, the European Union, which was quick to condemn Russia's 2022 ground invasion of Ukraine, has now been much more ambiguous about the illegality of the kidnapping of the Venezuelan leader. Once again, the EU is bowing down for fear of damaging the last shred of engagement that Washington may still feel toward Ukraine. The obsession with securing the eastern border has even led the EU to refrain from making any statements of support for Greenland so as not to anger Trump. The sense of helplessness is becoming increasingly evident because, in the order of spheres of influence, Europe fears becoming Russia's backyard.
In the world of hard power, the Union is becoming increasingly soft. Its decision-making structures are designed for a legalistic international order, now in accelerated erosion. Multilateralism, norms, and international law have entered a crisis not only because of Trump, but because those who still believed in them are incapable of raising their voices or only invoke them where it suits them, while turning a blind eye to human rights violations in other parts of the world. We are witnessing the disintegration of a system built on the ruins of global destruction, a system that seemed to have become obsolete in the face of the world's transformations. Meanwhile, the great powers reign in the power vacuum.
