Venezuela marks a new era for US hegemony—and its absence
This weekend’s news from Venezuela leaves old US allies floundering. The US intervention there should be no surprise: the National Security Strategy published last year signalled the administration’s thinking clearly to anyone who bothered to read it. But it is still a shock to see how fast and furiously actions are following words. Forget international law. Forget the US constitution. This administration will do what it wants in its own hemisphere, and do it the way it wants. Other countries can help, or shut up.
True, this neo-imperalist US approach has deep roots. The Monroe Doctrine was outlined in 1823. The US has habitually interfered in Latin America ever since. The coup in Chile in 1973, the right-wing death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s; and the invasion of Panama in 1989 all exemplified US administrations’ willingness to play hardball when necessary, for both geopolitical and nakedly commercial reasons. The US also supported a bloody crackdown in Indonesia in the early 1960s, and a disgraceful putsch in Congo in 1965.
But these flaws, mis-steps and outright atrocities came in the context of a global struggle against Soviet communism, in which the US shouldered the burden of leadership, both as a security hegemon and as a moral lodestar. It matched geopolitical clout with vision. For the captive nations of eastern Europe, and for west European and other countries threatened by Kremlin subversion, it was better to have the United States fighting for freedom, however patchily, clumsily and even brutally, than not. Post-1991, US administrations of all stripes explicitly endorsed values and common goals, and tried (again, with mixed results) to lead the fight against terrorism, Russian revanchism and Chinese economic warfare.
The kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela this weekend marks the definitive end of that era. Now we are left with a US policy based not on global leadership, but on naked self-interest, always and everywhere. It shamelessly indulges autocratic allies in the Gulf region, for example, while ostentatiously snubbing (or even threatening) its oldest and closest friends in Europe. This is the new power politics, in which the powerful do what they want, and the weak accept the fate that they must. It won’t stop with Venezuela.
Europeans, along with other erstwhile allies in Asia and elsewhere, can humbly accommodate themselves to this new era. They can continue their policy of wishful thinking (key elements: “it’s not that bad”, “wait until after the mid-terms”, “try flattery”). Or they can try to build an alternative to the US-led alliances which sheltered them for the past 70 years.
The easier part of this is replacing American muscle. The rich democracies can afford robust defence and deterrence. They may have to skip a few public holidays, retire a bit later, spend less on welfare and accept a bit more competition in cosy corners of their economies. They will need a bigger risk appetite. The voters won’t like it. Political leaders will have to explain that the alternatives—surrender and satrapy—are even costlier. But a shortage of willpower coupled with abundant means is a nice problem to have.
More difficult is finding a moral compass, to replace the principles articulated by past US presidents such as FDR and JFK. Appeals merely to preserve the status quo will offer little to vitally needed new allies in the emerging democracies and economies of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Western democracies will have to talk convincingly about global justice, too. The biggest problem is that the democracies’ adversaries, Russia, China and now an aggressively self-interested United States, will want them to fail.
Edward Lucas
Photo credit: Photo by Aboodi Vesakaran on Unsplash