In the five days since the U.S. kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and began to “run” the country—an operation that President Trump said heralded a new “Donroe Doctrine”—Trump and his administration have threatened to attack, invade, or fully colonize four countries: Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, and Greenland. If you extend the timeframe to a week, you could add Iran to the list. If you pull back a full year, it would include Canada, America’s northern neighbor—and arguably closest ally.
Greenland, which is a Danish territory—and therefore protected by the NATO alliance—seems most at risk. Trump has made seizing the resource-rich country in the north Atlantic a priority since the start of his second term. “The United States should have Greenland as part of the United States. There’s no need to even think or talk about this in the context that you’re asking, of a military operation,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday. “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.” The threat seems serious: An official statement from the administration said it wasn’t ruling out “military action” to acquire the island, even though doing so would instantly dissolve NATO and risk war with America’s European allies.
There is some strategic coherence to the administration’s belligerent approach to foreign policy. It suggests a reorientation to American interests in the Western hemisphere, a general pullback from Europe and the NATO alliance, and a return to great power politics—a world dominated by the strategic “interests” of the United States, China, and, to a lesser extent, Russia. But the belligerence itself increasingly seems to be the point, an end in and of itself.
A day after Maduro’s kidnapping, Trump told The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer that he’s ready to do the whole thing again. He claimed that he told the acting Venezuelan leader, Delcy Rodríguez, that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” It’s a striking posture from a president who first came to power by denouncing the post-9/11 regime-change wars and who spent most of the past year campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize. But it’s a revealing one, as well. Trump and his closest allies in the administration believe that they can achieve their goals—to rule their hemisphere, and whatever parts of the world they feel like—via spectacular acts of violence that somehow stop short of full-scale war.
As the reporter Michael Weiss observed shortly after Maduro’s kidnapping, Trump has long thought of American military power as a kind of spectacle. And he has embraced daring one-off attacks since the beginning of his presidency, starting with the decision to drop the “Mother of All Bombs” on Afghanistan early in his first term. The assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force—which Trump ordered exactly six years before Maduro’s kidnapping—marked a transition to riskier and more dramatic acts. Trump appears convinced that he can now commit brazen acts of violence abroad with no political, geopolitical, or military repercussions.
Trump’s increasingly bellicose deployment of the American military and his expressed isolationist “America First” agenda are often depicted as being contradictory or hypocritical, but I think that misses the point. First, as with Trump’s insistence that the U.S. should have “taken the oil” during the Iraq War, his larger theory of American power is that it should be used in short, destructive bursts that achieve (often stupid or pointless) strategic objectives—like taking the oil. Second, his larger theory of international relations is that whatever country has the more powerful military should basically be allowed to do whatever it wants. One of his main criticisms of American foreign policy is that U.S. power is often used on behalf of the interests of other countries—which is significantly different from saying it shouldn’t be used at all.
Trump’s use of the American military has grown bolder, which is partly a reflection of the minimal response it has received from its victims, like Iran and now Venezuela, and partly of the fact that, unlike during much of his first term, he is now surrounded by cronies who have successfully purged what he referred to as the “Deep State” during his first term. But, as I wrote earlier this week, it also points to a growing symbiosis between the Republican Party’s MAGA wing and more interventionist friendly figures, many of whom, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, predate Trump and his political movement.
Guiding all of it is Trump’s steadfast belief that the United States can engage in destructive and (for him, at least) thrilling military operations that are designed to compel adversaries to do what we want via intimidation, terror, and violence. There is a belief that America’s tactical military superiority can achieve strategic ends in and of itself. But the strategic ends themselves are, in every case, fuzzy and dangerously optimistic—there is no consideration of worst-case scenarios or, for that matter, long-term interests.
In Venezuela, for instance, there seems to be no plan whatsoever. Yes, U.S. special forces conducted a remarkable operation, but it was one that removed the leader of the nation and kept in place everyone else in power. The plan right now appears to be to threaten the current leader and get her to do what Trump wants. If she doesn’t, we’ll do something “worse.” But what then? No one seems to know.
What’s most disturbing—if you discount all of the death and illegality, I suppose—is the larger sense that Trump increasingly understands that there are no consequences for invading and destabilizing other nations. Not only that, he sees them as powerful tools in U.S. foreign policy. Deploying the military is good, in his mind, because it achieves the most important objective of them all, which is reminding the rest of the world that we are strong and they are weak. As Trump grows weaker domestically and as the economy continues to sputter, military adventurism will grow even more attractive.
But it’s also clearly attractive to Trump in and of itself. The president is 79 years old, and when he appeared before reporters on Saturday morning, he was clearly—and understandably—a little sleepy. He had, after all, stayed up late the previous night watching a live feed of the U.S. raid in Caracas. But even before that press conference, Trump had called in to Fox News—and his demeanor was decidedly more upbeat.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he gushed to host and longtime ally Maria Bartiromo. “I was able to watch it in real time,” he said. “I watched it, literally, like I was watching a television show. And if you would have seen the speed, the violence.
“It was just amazing,” he continued. “[Maduro] was in a fortress. It had steel doors, it had what they call a safety space where it’s solid steel all around. He didn’t get that space closed, he was trying to get into it, but he got bum-rushed so fast that he didn’t get into that. We were prepared with massive blowtorches to get through the steel, but we didn’t need them.”
To Trump, who is famously a TV addict, this raid was very good TV. And he was the director.
That may be the ultimate driver of last weekend’s events. The president—or, more accurately, his advisers—can claim all they want that the Venezuelan invasion is an expression of something called the Donroe Doctrine. But there is no real coherence to Trump’s foreign policy and no justification for the violence he’s unleashing. What is much clearer is that Trump really likes unleashing that violence. That’s why America might invade Greenland, destroy NATO, abandon Ukraine to Russia, or even spark a regional war in the Middle East by striking Iran. Yes, this would cause chaos and devastation, and quite possibly a lot of death. But to our nitwit-in-chief, it would be a gripping show.
