The Spectacle is the Point

Why Venezuela? To show we can

Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-muscle-back-view-50597/

This weekend’s raid / incursion / invasion into Venezuela has raised more questions than answers. Chief among these questions is—what next? Not far behind is—why?

The former will be answered because history ineluctably tells us what comes next, and it inevitably tells us that what comes afterward is rarely what was intended. It is, to be sure, difficult to guess what was intended. In the case of the Trump administration, it seems uncomfortably plausible at the moment that this was the 2003 Iraq war as farce: a brilliantly executed military operation followed by a disastrous post-invasion muddle. Listening to General Caine describe the intricate planning and coordination that involved more than 150 aircraft and (plainly) major supporting roles for cyber techniques, I was struck by—in the archaic sense of the word—how awesome the operation was; not bodacious, but inspiring awe or dread. And then I was shocked at how lackadaisical the president and administration’s answers about what comes next were—“We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” the president said. These are weasel words, not standards but the utterances of a Schmittian sovereign who revels in pronouncing and being the exception. They are also the words of an undergraduate who didn’t do the reading or a debtor who swears the check really is in the mail.

“Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute,” was the slogan in one of the country’s first foreign-policy crises. Thousands of man-hours for planning kinetics, not one neuron for follow-up might as well be the Trump administration’s motto.

The other half is why the United States—and, more important, the people of Venezuela—are in this situation. (It hardly needs observing that the welfare of the people of Venezuela should weigh more here than hot takes or slams on domestic U.S. political rivalries. It’s been interesting to see how observers have reacted to the plain variety of reactions in Venezuela and the region to the ouster of Maduro, incidentally; the neat script that the bad Yankees removed a beloved leader doesn’t quite jibe with reality, and not a few communities and classes throughout the region seem more than happy to see a red-blooded socialist removed. In particular, the observation that many Venezuelans inside and outside the country find the ouster to be welcome seems to have surprised many anti-Trump Americans.)

It’s plain that the administration’s stated justifications for the raid—the drugs, the external threat, the election fraud, and so on—are less reasons than rationales. None of them explain why this raid had to take place in this manner with this target and with that degree of (lack of) consideration. Further, it’s simply an old rule that the more reasons you list, the less persuasive any of them are— “I hit him because he called me a wuss” is more persuasive than “I hit him because he called me a wuss, and I didn’t like his shirt, and I was in a bad mood, and Mercury was retrograde” (even if, in some sense, the latter might be more strictly true, because who among us has just one reason?). The U.S. invaded Venezuela because Maduro was involved with narco-traffickers, and because he was indicted, and because of outside powers, and because of the oil, and because and because and because… As rationales proliferate, it becomes clear that nobody could agree on the why, even if they could concur on the what.

I think it is a fool’s errand to find any single reason and claim it was the reason. Each reason clearly appeals more to some of the king’s men than to others, and each brick formed part of the wall. The core reason, however, is likelier to be found in something deeper and more primal. Partly, I suspect, there’s the masculinity of it all—the posse bringing the “outlaw dictator” (verbatim!) to justice, “the very long arm of American justice all on full display in the middle of the night”, as the secretary of defense said. “Don't play games with this president in office because it’s not gonna turn out well,” said the archivist of the United States (who is also secretary of state, and national security adviser, and now apparently proconsul for Gran Colombia). Tough! Strong! Daddy’s home! And he’s going to deliver a paddling—or a beating.

Even beyond that, however, is the likelihood that the drama of the operation was, itself, the point. “No nation in the world could achieve what America achieved yesterday,” Donald Trump said, in the truest sentence of the briefing. A country that can do this is a country that should not have to put up with that. This was not an operation of law, but one of order.

Several years ago, the scholar Ahsan I. Butt made a similar argument in Security Studies about the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Bush administration similarly advanced a plethora of arguments for why Iraq had to be invaded: weapons of mass destruction, human rights, threats to neighbors, backing for terrorism, and so on. Butt argued that none of these were actually sufficient to explain the decision, even if each appealed to a particular group. Rather, he argued, the real issue was the U.S. need to “regain status and establish itself as an aggressive global power” after the shock and humiliation of 9/11, which required fighting and winning a war. “[T]he defeat of a recalcitrant foe like Saddam would serve this performative purpose,” Butt wrote. “Invading Iraq would allow the United States to reassert and demonstrate its strength in no uncertain terms to a global audience, crown itself king of the hill, and reestablish generalized deterrence.” As a result, there was no offramp for Saddam, no bargain that Washington would accept to accomplish its goals short of war—the war itself was the point: “states may be insistent on a fight because certain reputation- and authority-establishing benefits only accrue to violent actors.”

Viewed in this sense, General Caine’s just-the-facts description of the military operation makes more sense. Next to the images of the raid and the sheer fact of nabbing a head of state in his bedroom, being able to clinically describe the precision and layered effects of the raid—in pointed contrast to Moscow’s failure at the hands of the Ukrainians, or the apparent unwillingness to use force of the People’s Republic of China—was the Homeric epic of the Trump administration. Sing, muse, the wrath of Mar-a-Lago. Print the term Trump Corollary—or, heaven forfend, the Donroe Doctrine—in boldface in a million history textbooks.

“The cruelty is the point” went from insight to cliche without losing its truth. It is no less true to say of the weekend that the spectacle is the point. “What is next” matters less than What just happened—and I didn’t know you could do that, an expostulation that is both operational (the Tom Clancy-ness of it all) and normative (how shocking!). Above all, the raid was a flex.

Of course, that what comes next for Venezuela or the world at large matters less to Trump and his associates is not to say that it does not matter to thirty million Venezuelans or billions of others. But their lives are not spectacular, and caring for them is neither manly nor impressive to those who see only the mirror.

Butt, A. I. (2019). Why did the United States invade Iraq in 2003?. Security Studies, 28(2), 250-285.