When Spain and other European empires took over entire regions and continents, they claimed that their objective was to spread Christianity. Another argument, emphasized to subjugate parts of Asia, was that colonialism constituted a self-imposed burden, assumed to bring the values of whites to the world. Or as Kipling wrote:
“Take up the White Man’s burden,
send forth the best ye breed,
go bind your sons to exile
to serve your captive’s need;
to wait in heavy harness
on fluttered folk and wild
your new-caught sullen peoples,
half devil and half child”
In recent decades, the United States, supported by its Western allies, has maintained that the objective of its military interventions in other countries is to spread democracy.
Thus, historically, the powers have justified imperial aggression as a noble task, attempting to conceal the true objective, which has been none other than the appropriation of land, gold, timber, silver, or other minerals; the enslavement of local populations; or competition among colonial metropolises.
Then Trump arrived. His boundless arrogance finally allowed the world to hear the truth: his objective is the oil business and preventing other countries from strengthening economic relations with Venezuela. The invasion was prepared with the usual propaganda about the evil emanating from the Caracas regime; however, once it was carried out, those real reasons came to light.
The dictator Maduro has indeed been disastrous for the Venezuelan people, and it is almost certainly true that, at the very least, he turned a blind eye to drug trafficking. But as an argument for invasion, his direct or indirect association with cocaine exports to the United States lacks credibility, considering that Trump recently freed a former president of Honduras who had been sentenced in U.S. courts to 45 years in prison for facilitating drug exports to the United States.
Even before Trump made the true reasons explicit, we were obliged to doubt the relevance and veracity of the epithets with which Maduro had been labeled. That is, unless we forget the lies of former President Bush Jr. and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, brandished to justify the invasion of Iraq. It was false that Hussein was about to produce atomic bombs or that he had ties to Osama bin Laden. It was evident—and clarified, for example, by a prominent figure in the Washington establishment, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan—that the real reason was Iraq’s oil.
Trump and the Republican Party feel so legitimized in their economic greed, their disrespect for the sovereignty of other countries, and in granting the United States a global policing role, that the word democracy was not even uttered at the press conference in which the invasion was explained. Moreover, Trump openly ruled out a role in the post-Maduro era for the democratically elected leadership in Venezuela following the July 2024 elections.
It is true that Maduro and that detestable demagogic, disordered, corrupt, and populist socialism—which has confused so many people and caused so many misfortunes in Latin America and the world—have been an obstacle to Venezuela’s progress. Far from the eclectic socioeconomic model, alien to both communism and neoliberalism, that has been so successful in Singapore, China, the Republic of Korea, and the island of Taiwan (and that led Western Europe to its high levels of development), Venezuelan Chavismo continued and deepened the serious errors, corruption, and squandering of oil wealth that characterized the governments that preceded it, those of COPEI and AD. But from there to a power breaking all the rules of global coexistence in order to appoint itself gendarme, police officer, and judge of the world is another matter altogether.
For this reason, the invasion must be condemned urbi et orbi, but especially by militarily weak countries or those without an army (such as Costa Rica), since as weapons to defend their sovereignty they have only the norms of international law.
It could be argued that the world needs a universal police force and judge, given that the United Nations and international courts lack the muscle to carry out that task. That ineffectiveness is real, but it is due in large part to the fact that the powers neither respect nor obey them. In any case, if the United States were a neutral, fair police force that adhered to the rules (incidentally, the very rules its leaders frequently proclaim), it would not only kidnap Maduro to put him behind bars, but also—and with far greater reason—murderers of the stature of Putin, Netanyahu, and Mohammed bin Salman (the strongman of Saudi Arabia). But instead, it has been, at a minimum, ambiguous toward Putin, and toward Netanyahu and MBS, an unconditional ally.
One positive result of Trump’s actions and words is that at least now we are beginning to understand that the true meaning of MAGA is Make America Global Gendarme Always.
Autor
Politician and economist. Professor at IE University (Spain). He holds a Master's degree in Economics from the University of Manchester (England). Former Congressman and Minister of Planning and Economic Policy of Costa Rica.
