When Hitler swallowed Czechoslovakia in 1938 and then divided Poland with Stalin in 1939 my parent’s generation decided, coming home from the war, to place the sovereignty of nation states at the heart of the UN Charter. With the operation in Venezuela, our generation has to ask, and not for the first time, whether anything now survives of a legal doctrine designed to protect the weak from the strong.
Let’s not make the mistake of believing that it was President Trump who dealt sovereignty its coup de grace. We are not in a new and shocking narrative, but the culmination of a very old one. The Monroe Doctrine dates back to 1823, and when Monroe claimed Latin America as America’s exclusive sphere of influence, the doctrine made the sovereignty of any nation inside that sphere subject to Washington’s discretion.
America’s subsequent indifference to the sovereignty of Latin America is a matter of record. When the Americans decided to build the Panama Canal in 1902, and President Roosevelt asked what the legal basis was for their intrusion on Panamanian sovereignty, his Attorney General replied, so George Will reminded us, “Oh Mr. President do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.”
Every Latin American can recite the 20th century litany of American violations of Latin American territorial integrity. When in 1954 the democratically elected president of Guatemala launched a land reform program that damaged the interests of the United Fruit Company, the CIA, on President Eisenhower’s orders, arranged a coup that sent Jacobo Arbenz into exile. When Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista government in Cuba, President Kennedy ordered the abortive Bay of Pigs operation in 1961 to topple the Castro Regime. In 1973, Kissinger and Nixon’s CIA coordinated the coup with the Chilean military that overthrew the democratically elected Allende government and installed Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. In 1989, President Bush authorized the seizure of Panamanian ruler, Manuel Noriega and his extradition to the US on drug charges.
In seizing Maduro, the Trump regime claims it’s just executing a warrant for the arrest of a drug trafficker. In the next breath, the President claims he will now run the country until such time as he can figure out who to hand it back to.
Since the American and European left has had a congenital tendency to blame America for everything, it bears remembering the tanks in Budapest 1956, Prague 1968 and Afghanistan 1979. Those violations of sovereignty must be laid at Russia’s door.
As everyone can see, a world where the sovereignty norm collapses is a world that suits predators. Putin may have lost Maduro, his Venezuelan ally, but he has gained something more valuable, a green light for continuing his war of conquest. If Venezuelan sovereignty is fungible, so is Ukraine’s. Likewise, Xi Jing Ping’s China, currently conducting live-fire exercises around Taiwan, will conclude that if the Americans can get away with declaring an exclusive sphere of influence in Latin America, the Chinese can do the same in East Asia, with the same limiting effect on the sovereignty, not just of Taiwan, but Japan, South Korea and other allies who had banked on America’s now lapsing security guarantees.
A world divided into spheres of influence poses decisive new challenges to the sovereignty of the states inside them. Canada and Mexico will watch what happened in Venezuela and begin thinking the unthinkable. What if they have to defend themselves, not against Russia and China, but against their next-door neighbor?
The predators who promote spheres of influence promise us a more stable world: no more global policemen, no more universalist moral claims like human rights, warranting intrusion in the affairs of predators. Stability will be built henceforth on forthright moral relativism—what’s right for me is my business, what’s right for you is your business—and peace depends on armed deterrence in a law of the jungle.
In the world we’ve entered, weaker countries must learn self-reliance, resilience and guile to keep the predators at bay. A weak and divided Europe can’t continue to give America moral lessons, while trying to regulate America’s economic giants. Its entire rationale as a political project depends now on giving itself the capital markets to build their own economic strength and the military capability to defend themselves. Canada and Mexico must make a lot of new friends fast, establish new economic connections, and break down its internal barriers to an efficient and productive economy. If these middling powers face up to their own difficulties, a new multilateralism could take shape, brought into concert by their shared desire to hem in the power of the predators. If the middle powers band together, they might get through the 21st century with their sovereignties enhanced. If they go it alone or make the mistake of cozying up to one or other of the predators, they might find themselves swallowed up by one of the beasts.
What of the sovereignty norm itself, so often trampled upon that it is barely recognizable? Law and ethics share the same difficult fate: their norms fail so often that we have reason to wonder why they retain any force at all. Our private lives depend on the fragile proposition that those we live with and do business with will keep their word, not betray us and tell us as much of the truth as the situation allows. Yet we know only too well, that we live in a world of liars and betrayers. These facts don’t lessen the value of fidelity, truth-telling and honesty. The very fragility of these values makes them more precious to us and more determined to defend them when we can. The same, I hope, is true of sovereignty. Yes, it has been the alibi of dictators, from Saddam to Maduro. Yes, it has been violated by the predators. But it is the one norm we have to protect us from predation, and if we lose it altogether, neither we nor our children will ever be safe.
And the nuclear arms race has just been given a huge shot in the arm. Don’t be surprised if Michael’s own Canada, now a beacon of hope in this terrible world, decides that nuclear weapons are, after all, a vital necessity. Who would blame Canada? Or Denmark? I am biting my tongue trying to not include Iran. It’s a tough argument saying “ oh but responsible democracies can be trusted with nukes, but murderous tyrannies such as Iran’s current regime cannot”. When the USA behaves like this, it becomes an even more of an uphill argument when it comes to odious regimes such as Iran’s. Trump has turbocharged the rush to nuclear weapons by the world’s nasties. North Korean expertise is going to be in demand!
Right on the mark. It’s the green light / wink that this Venezuelan action gives to other autocrats that is the most sobering consequence. Buckle up.