The Dunroe Doctrine

Krugman is good on how the attack on Venezuela is better understood as organized crime territorial pissing than as regime change per se:

Almost everyone now sees Iraq as a cautionary tale about the lies of the powerful: We were taken to war on false pretenses. Almost everyone also thinks of Iraq as a prime example of the power of delusional thinking on the part of the powerful themselves. Slogans of the time — “We will be welcomed as liberators”; “Mission Accomplished” — are now routinely used ironically, to denote foolish projects doomed to catastrophic failure. And Donald Trump’s Venezuela adventure is another tale of lies and delusion.

But in other ways the Trump/Venezuela story is very different from the Bush/Iraq story.

Two days after the abduction, it’s clear that Trump wasn’t seeking regime change, at least not in any fundamental way. He’s more like a mob boss trying to expand his territory, believing that if he knocks off a rival boss he can bully the guy’s former capos into giving him a cut of their take.

If that sounds harsh, bear in mind that before Trump stepped in, Maduro and his fellow Chavistas — the movement founded by Hugo Chavez — faced strong opposition from domestic pro-democracy forces led by María Corina Machado. Edmundo González, a Machado ally, clearly won Venezuela’s 2024 election, only to have Maduro steal it. So, if Trump wanted regime change he would be supporting Machado and her movement.

But in his triumphal Saturday press conference, Trump sneeringly dismissed Machado, declaring that “it’d be very tough for her to be the leader, she doesn’t have the support. She doesn’t have the respect.”

Instead, he appeared eager to support Maduro’s second-in-command, Delcy Rodriguez, implying that she was ready to cooperate with his designs. Indeed, during the press conference and afterward Trump repeatedly declared that he was already “running” Venezuela.

Rejecting Machado at least in part because he thinks she stole his Nobel Peace Prize is evidently someone who isn’t serious about anything, but democracy is the last thing Trump is interested in, domestically or internationally.

It’s clear that Trump sees this much more as a war from oil, which in addition to not being a moral or legal justification for war makes no sense on its own terms:

Trump’s self-image as the ultimate dealmaker explains why he was so ready to believe, falsely, that he controlled Venezuela. It also explains his insistence that by, as he imagined, seizing Venezuela, he had gained a valuable prize in the form of its oil. “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.” Many Trump critics share his view that there’s a lot of money to be made from Venezuelan oil and condemn his intervention as an attempt to steal that money.

But you know who doesn’t think there’s a lot of money to be made in Venezuela? Oil companies. They see a dilapidated infrastructure that would cost billions to repair. They don’t see a stable political environment above ground. And while Venezuela has large oil reserves, much of its oil is “extra heavy, making it polluting and expensive to process.”

You can’t expect Trump to understand the unsubtle differences between the oil reserves in Venezuela and the oil reserves in Saudi Arabia, but he will find out the hard way.

He also probably thinks this will be good politics, and wrong again:

So, why did Trump have Maduro abducted? There were surely multiple motivations. Fantasies of dominance and control and dreams of oil-soaked riches played their part. So did ego. The snatch gave Trump an opportunity to strut, and assuage his Obama envy: Trump’s minions set up a “war room” at Mar-a-Lago that looks as if it was designed to let him emulate the famous photo of Obama and his officials tracking the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Obama’s team did not, however, have X/Twitter on the screen behind them.

Trump also surely hoped that abducting Maduro would help him politically. The abduction pushed the Epstein files out of the headlines for a few days. And Trump is definitely trying to wag the dog, seeking a boost in popularity as the nation rallies around the flag. However, he’s almost certain to be disappointed. Before the abduction, Americans overwhelmingly opposed military action in Venezuela. Early polling since the abduction remains highly unfavorable.

Elliott Morris has more on the strong public opposition to the war.

George W. Bush and his people were inept at governing but they were effective propagandists until the negative effects of the governance became too dire to explain away. They put a lot of work into selling the war and it showed in public opinion. Trump starts from the presumption that everything he does is inherently popular, and his plurality re-election has made that worse. There’s not going to be a significant rally around the flag here.