Yankee imperialism and neo-fascist spectacle

John Ganz acknowledges that, even though he has spent his career as a public intellectual arguing that Donald Trump represents a fundamental rupture in American political history, the coup to remove Maduro has many depressingly familiar aspects:

[Consider] the now seemingly forgotten U.S. Invasion of Panama in 1989-90, when we seized dictator (and former US intelligence asset) Manuel Noriega and brought him to the United States to face drug trafficking charges.

It was a unilateral invasion of a sovereign country resulting in regime charge and justified on the grounds of “promoting democracy.” As such, historian Greg Grandin persuasively argues it was part of the path to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As young leftist, I remember it was the “Panama Deception,”—the title of an acclaimed documentary critical of that war—rather than the Persian Gulf, that provided the paradigm of post-Cold War US perfidy and aggression and of the fateful interplay between mass media, militarism, and domestic politics. Even the name, “Operation Just Cause,” seemed to wink cynically at the double sided nature of American foreign policy: was it really a “Just Cause” or did we do it “’Just Cause we could.”

One could argue what’s new here is the baldfaced and shameless imperialism; Trump openly says we’re gonna take the oil. This has been his major critique of US wars in the past; In short, that they are not evil enough: We don’t pursue them for low enough motives nor with violent or underhanded enough means. All the pretenses about democracy promotion are now gone. The “deception”in question in Panama was that the United States pretended to care about Panamanian democracy and the human rights abuses of the wicked Noriega, when we really wanted control of the Canal. This is highly debatable. Historians now think domestic political worries about Bush’s image as a wimp contributed more than some grand strategic plot. As Grandin’s piece points out, it was a confluence of factors that pulled the administration towards intervention in Panama. Even the actors didn’t understand it in retrospect. Grandin: “Referring to the process by which Noriega, in less than a year, would become America’s most wanted autocrat, Bush’s National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft said: “I can’t really describe the course of events that led us this way… Noriega, was he running drugs and stuff? Sure, but so were a lot of other people. Was he thumbing his nose at the United States? Yeah, yeah.”

My father, who is 91 and an economic refugee of Franco’s Spain (my mother’s family were political exiles who barely escaped with their lives), told me this morning that all this reminded him vividly of the now even more completely forgotten than Panama 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala, when the democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz — I doubt one in 100 LGM readers or one in 10,000 American voters recognize that name — was removed at the all but explicit request of the United Fruit Company.

So, now we do not even practice to deceive. What then is there for us “critics of ideology” to do when there is nothing left to unmask? But even this kind of open admission of material motive is not really new, although perhaps not it was not as crude—no pun intended. For just one instance, in the run up to Operation Desert Storm, both President Bush and Secretary James Baker openly talked about our reliance on Middle Eastern oil and preventing a recession and therefore loss of US jobs. But then the administration’s rhetoric shifted, pointing to Saddam’s human rights abuses and how horrible his regime was in general. As the analysis of one historian contends, the public pretty much bought the oil explanation; the human rights stuff didn’t add much and may have even muddled the overall case, contributing to the rather short political gains of the war.¹ So maybe Trump has some good reason to believe that being openly rapacious is a better political pathn than making up fairy tales about democracy and human rights. He even dismissed the possibility of opposition leader María Corina Machado taking over and signaled openness to negotiation with the remainder of the regime. Some have surmised that such a deal must have already taken place and that the entire operation was part of an internal coup.

But Ganz goes on to point out that the oil rationale — that is, good old fashioned imperialism as a straightforward exercise in stealing the wealth of the colonized — doesn’t make a whole lot of sense even on its own terms. The US is now a net exporter of oil, and almost all US oil companies seem very reluctant to get involved in Donald Trump’s excellent adventure, not because of moral qualms of course, but because who wants to pour tens of billions of dollars of capital expenditure into Venezuela on the basis of Trump’s worse than worthless promises of how doing so will generate Wealth Uncountable?

A big part of all this is a neo-fascist spectacle of strength:

More immediately, there is the factional make up and political situation of the Trump administration to be considered. As the New York Times recently reported, the military strike in Venezuela was propelled by an unholy alliance between Marco Rubio’s neocons and Cuba hawks faction, Stephen Miller’s desire for an expedient to accelerate deportations through the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, and the administration’s campaign promise to do something about drugs, particularly fentanyl. The fact that Venezuela doesn’t produce fentanyl apparently wasn’t a real obstacle, which strongly suggests that mere spectacle is huge motive here. Look at the image at the top of the “war room.” They had Twitter-excuse me, X—open during the operations. As the administration struggles politically, the imagined propaganda value of this can’t really be underrated. They are desperate for “wins.” And they have a weak leader uncertain of his own aims likely to be swayed by factional intrigues, especially when the plots can provide some spectacular content—Trump was going on about how it looked like a movie while talking to Fox News.

Here I’m going return to the fascism analogy. Foreign adventures in the wake of domestic failure is a recognizable pattern. Mussolini was driven to the Ethiopian war out of the “domestic stagnation” of fascism. Like in the United States, the imperial project had existed under the previous liberal regime, but had stalled out and this was a way to Make Italy Great Again, if you’ll permit me. The real risk is that if this seems to buoy the Trump administration and the Republicans politically and solve rather than deepen their factional disputes. Then we can imagine more and more bellicose gambles of this kind. Despite Trump’s long vaunted shyness about conflicts, his hubris might get the better of him—and us. A war for oil might be more rational and coherent than what’s actually taking place.

Let us return to Robert Paxton’s classic formulation, the last part of which did not look like it reflected the first Trump administration, but which now fits the new one perfectly well:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a
mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Yeah yeah.