If you doubt neoconservatism is dead, take note of how little attention not only President Donald Trump but even the American press is giving Edmundo González. González won Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election. Now exiled to Spain, he’s ready for his close-up. But if the bookers at CNN and Fox News and MS NOW have been calling, I can find no video evidence. The poor guy is devolving, right before our eyes, into a trivia question.
It’s enough to prompt nostalgia for—God help me—President George W. Bush’s “commitment to the global expansion of democracy,” a central pillar of what became known as the Bush Doctrine. Not that I ever fancied these principles as Dubya or the neocon hawks whispering in his ear applied them, but at least they demonstrated a proper regard for democratic governance.
To jog your memory: The anti-Chavismo Plataforma Unitaria Democrática party, or PUD, chose González after President Nicolás Maduro barred the Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado from running for president. There’s no doubt that González won the election—The Washington Post calculated that he got twice as many votes as Maduro—but Maduro, in a maneuver one worries Trump may someday emulate, claimed victory and refused to leave office. The United States, the European Parliament, and various other countries recognized González as the rightful winner. Since the invasion, Machado and French President Emmanuel Macron urged that González be installed as president.
González himself posted a video online Sunday saying, “As the president of Venezuela, I call on the security establishment to enforce the mandate that the people elected on July 28, 2024.” Hardly anybody covered this; I learned about it from reading The Jerusalem Post. (There was also, I later learned, a five-paragraph squib in The Wall Street Journal.) Is that any way to treat Venezuela’s rightful president?
To the limited extent American reporters ask why Maduro’s (and Hugo Chavez’s) Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela party, or PSUV, remains in power after Trump’s invasion and removal of their standard-bearer, it’s to suggest that Venezuela’s president should be Machado—who, yes, probably would have won the presidency had Maduro let her run. Still, she was not the victor.
The problem is not only an American president who can’t be bothered to justify an oil-motivated invasion by paying lip service to the promotion of democracy, but a press corps that no longer expects democracy to matter in the conduct of American foreign policy. That expectation was killed by the Iraq War, in which, as I noted yesterday, the price of deposing a dictator and establishing some semblance of democracy was 9,000 American lives and $3 trillion. Still, it’s one thing to understand that expanding democracy abroad isn’t worth paying that price (especially when the war is really about oil). It’s quite another to believe democracy is never worth paying any price or bearing any burden, even when these are pretty close to zero, as seems the case in Venezuela.
The Washington Post reported Sunday that Trump vetoed Machado as president because he’s annoyed she accepted a Nobel Peace Prize that he believes he should have won. (On Monday, Machado offered to give him the medal.) But Trump’s lunatic grudge doesn’t apply to González. Apparently, Trump threw his support to Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, because the CIA told him only Rodríguez, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino could maintain order. Never mind that Cabello and Padrino were indicted alongside Maduro for drug offenses (and presumably will continue to commit them as Trump allows them to consolidate power).
How’s this for references: The New York Times calls Cabello “the face of the country’s repression apparatus.” Padrino is Venezuela’s top military official; his parents named him after Vladimir Lenin, according to The Wall Street Journal, and, after an infantry training trip years ago to Fort Benning, Padrino said he’d witnessed “the monster in its entrails.” Did I mention the State Department is still offering a $25 million reward for Cabello’s capture and a $15 million reward for Padrino’s?
We’re a long way from the justification (if you prefer, posturing) that shipped our troops to Iraq. “We need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values,” said the 1997 manifesto for the Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative group that guided Dubya’s Iraq strategy. That word “challenge” ended up doing a lot more work than perhaps even the signatories anticipated. But the overall sentiment was hard to argue with. “Lasting peace is gained as justice and democracy advance,” Dubya said in November 2003. “We will raise up an ideal of democracy in every part of the world.” Wouldn’t it be nice to hear an American president say that now?
I don’t want to take this argument too far. As Peter Steinfels pointed out in his classic 1979 book, The Neoconservatives, the neocons’ idealism about promoting democracy abroad accompanied a certain wariness of it at home. Answering Al Smith’s dictum that “the only cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy,” Samuel Huntington wrote in 1976 that “applying that cure at the present time could well be adding fuel to the flames.” As for Bush, Trump’s electoral strategy of disenfranchisement through bogus voter-fraud claims was born in Bush’s White House. The Bush Doctrine that sang the praises of democracy less attractively rejected multilateralism (more Trumpism avant la lettre) and rationalized pre-emptive military attacks.
But Trump doesn’t even pretend to care about democratic values—he flamboyantly abjures them. As TNR’s Michael Tomasky observed earlier this week, Trump is affirmatively against “the idea that America’s military might needs to be tethered to some positive-sum goal that positions the United States as a force that fosters global security and Western democracy.… War is fine, provided it’s just about what everything is, to him, really all about: raw power in the service of plunder and conquest.” Even when Trump takes the legalistic high ground that this intervention was merely a police action to arrest an indicted drug criminal, consider that when President George H.W. Bush claimed the same thing in Panama about Manuel Noriega he made sure that Guillermo Endara, whose ascent to the presidency Noriega had blocked, got sworn in on the day of the invasion. Poppy Bush’s invasion defied domestic and international law just as much as Trump’s, but Panama has been a democracy ever since. Venezuela will remain a dictatorship.
Were neoconservative sermons about advancing democratic ideals abroad inconsistent when applied to foreign nations? Certainly. But at least they acknowledged some need (most famously in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards”) to justify these inconsistencies. For all its many faults, there was an idealistic strain to neoconservatism, and an intellectual rigor that made it somewhat accountable to respectful counterargument. I find myself sorely missing these things now. I bet González does, too.
