(Spanish version: https://lacritica.ar/post/samuel-moyn/)
(by S. Guidi, for lacritica.ar)
1) Intellectual historian Quentin Skinner wrote that “what it is possible to do in politics is generally limited by what it is possible to legitimise. . . under existing normative principles.”
At least for foreign observers, one of the most striking features of Venezuela’s operation was precisely the almost non-existent attempt to legitimize the intervention under any legal or normative principle, at least any normative principle that could be shared outside the US. There were some mentions of the future of Venezuelans, but the focus was clearly set at US Americans’ interests. This is especially impressive when we see that there was a lot he could say about the illegitimacy of Maduro's regime, and yet he chose not to say anything. What do you see in this disregard for justification? Is this a display of raw power, showing that the US does not need any outside support, or is it an attempt at a new way of legitimizing state action?
ANSWER: I think there were normative principles, but they are noxious ones. They are broader than American self-interest, which is why many have found the events so troublesome. They look compatible with Donald Trump’s sense that great powers have their domain of control, something like Carl Schmitt’s Großraum (great spaces) theory; and no wonder that people have worried about the implications for the settlement in Ukraine or Chinese policy toward Taiwan. And it is a certainty that lawyers in the executive branch of the U.S. government were consulted, and that they continued their permissive history of affirming the lawfulness of the abduction (in a criminal law enforcement paradigm). Finally, perhaps the “realism” of the rhetoric coming out of the U.S. government at least dispenses with the neoconservative penchant to dress up and justify neo-imperial policies in the mode of high principle. Obviously if we have to choose between “raw power” and some sort of ethical and legal rationalization for it, the latter is better. But not much. And the brutal honesty of the articulated reasons do remind us of what may have generally been the case in American and other great power foreign policy, so that we can face it without confusion or misdirection.
2) If we assume Trump is asserting some form of right to act with no justification towards the international community, the immediate fear is that the universalization of this principle would lead to anarchy. This assumes that international law was not only rhetoric, but had also some effect in actually restraining states’ conduct. If this is so, is the world Trump seems to be proposing sustainable? Wouldn’t such a world actually harm US interests, by making the world more unpredictable?
ANSWER: Well, if you buy that Trump is a Großraum thinker of a kind, then it bars most states from following suit. It remains hotly debated whether constraints on the use of force ever had purchase. I believe there is a case they did, but they were always weak. And so I’m of the school that refuses to concede the novelty of such current events, as if the past did not involve much worse ones both from the perspective of good and evil (how many died, to begin with) and from the perspective of whether law was followed. And indeed, the law in these domains is permissive enough that the trouble has more regularly been how easy it is to claim to follow it. So we should repudiate all nostalgia for a “rules-based international order” (a term coined in 2015!) without, at the same time, giving up the aspiration for the constraints on power that have been achieved in the past, and decrying their erosion.
3) In June last year, commenting on the origins of the Russian war in Ukraine, you wrote that “no more can anyone believe in the credibility of American power to advance [emancipatory values], or in its capacity to do so”. Indeed, in US history, there was a lot of intellectual production regarding the justification of foreign intervention by appealing to universal values: from the white man’s burden to emphatic support for R2P. These ideas, however, were part of grander ideological narratives concerning the United States’ self-understanding as a “beacon of hope” for the world. There have been versions of this both in conservative thought and liberal thought, under Republican and Democratic governments. Apart from changing how the US acts with respect to the rest of the world, could the Venezuela affair change how the US (or different factions within the US) sees itself?
ANSWER: I think Americans are much readier — in part because Trump forces them — to see their country as less principled than was once believed. That doesn’t mean it can make no difference for the better. But, as countries of the global south have long argued, it could do so more credibly if it shared power and wealth, and confessed to its crimes and mistakes. One trouble many of us have had with the response to the rise of Donald Trump is that a small subset of American elites have responded to him both by relying on him to wash away their own sins, while represented him as some kind of unprecedented transgressor. He isn’t, which doesn’t mean he isn’t worse than came before. But I firmly believe American elites still have a lot to learn about the complicity in his rise (and many other crimes and mistakes before it), and I worry that Americans are never far from demanding a return to to the illusion of their own beneficence and innocence.
4) In your book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, you argue that in the last few decades the United States have managed to render war, and expectations about war, more “humane”, with the consequence of making more tolerable at least to audiences in the US. At the same time, I quote, these “increased expectations of humanity in warfare. . . came with a cost: the moral improvement of belligerency could risk merely prettifying it.”
What happened on Saturday can dispassionately be described as an act of armed conflict. Not only that: President Trump has since stated that the US would “run” Venezuela, in ways that resemble what an occupying force would do after an invasion. Trump even openly threatened acting president Delcy Rodriguez with what could happen to her should she not abide by US desires. And yet, probably because of the precision of the operation, it seems to lack the moral condemnation normally associated with wars. The US government even defined it as an act of “law enforcement”. So I’m curious about how much rupture and how much continuity do you see. Does this fit the pattern you describe in Humane? Is war so “humanized” now that it can be conducted without even being recognized as such?
ANSWER: There’s more discontinuity than continuity. If the abduction of Maduro was similar to the policies of prior presidents, it was so in its concern for the near absolute immunity of American forces from harm, which the public won’t tolerate. Trump knows this, and it has been observed that, uniting all his aggressive foreign policy choices, the commonality is avoiding exposure of American troops to much harm. The operation was “precise” mainly in sparing American troops, since we still don’t how many Venezuelans died, and whether any were civilians. It is probably how he squares his acts with his earlier reputation as a critic of the Iraq war and U.S. warmongering in general. As for the representation of the events as policing, that allowed the president to avoid Congressional approval, and it allowed him to treat one criminal mastermind as the problem he was solving, leaving the rest of the regime in place in spite of its own relationship to the drug trade. I think the syndrome I wrote about of excusing belligerency if it is humane to potential foreign victims is something American liberals (such as Barack Obama) are more apt to care about - and Trump’s Secretary of State, Pete Hegseth, has actively criticized the rise of legal constraints on the conduct of hostilities. What I think is happening in Venezuela is an extension of Trump’s mafioso or “racket man” approach to politics to war - it is useful to decapitate a rival if it allows creating a client who will owe permanent debt. Trump is hoping Delcy Rodríguez and her cronies are willing to play this role, and if not he will replace them.
5) In all this process, it is hard to ignore the personality of President Trump. It looks silly, but commentators have speculated (this is just an example) with the possibility that Trump’s personal desire of winning the Nobel Peace Prize conditioned his attitude towards Venezuela. This, despite the fact that Trump ran on an “America First” platform, and that there are important wings in his government that are decidedly anti-interventionist. To what extent do you think developments in Venezuela were shaped by Trump’s idiosyncratic features? Or, to put it in other terms, to what extent do you think this represents a consistent new approach to international relations and international law and, if so, which parts of it will outlive Trump’s second presidency?
ANSWER: The events are decisively shaped by Trump’s idiosyncrasies, but I’m not sure his desire for a Nobel (his own, since he has accepted Maria Corina Machado’s gift of hers) played a big role. It has done so in his “peacemaking” in Israel and, perhaps above all, in his cross-pressuring of the leaders of Russia and Ukraine to reach an accommodation. That doesn’t sit well with Trump’s other obsession, which is showy uses of force to establish or reestablish my country's hemispheric supremacy. Of course, it is only fair to note that many Nobel peace prize winners have been warmongers, credited for taking a break from their usual approach, so Trump is probably not wrong to sense that he doesn’t need absolute consistency in this regard. I do think Trump illustrates American exhaustion with neoconservative warmongering, and its cousin “liberal internationalism” that prettified American empire. But his acts suggests a lack of ability or desire to break from them entirely, except in the direction of a more brazen and lawless and unpredictable resort to violent tools when he feels like it.
6) Although this is not the first time an attack is not authorized by Congress, the opposition has emphasized the unconstitutionality of the attack for that reason. To cite another example, close to home, Democrats heavily criticized Trump’s 20 billion-dollar bailout of Argentina in October, because it was considered more of a personal project than a national one. If this is true, foreign relations in the US are suffering from the same ills as other areas: an increasing disregard for constitutional law and concentration of powers in the Executive. What do you see in this transformation of the presidency? And what can we expect from international relations that are managed in this way?
ANSWER: Yes, and it is fascinating that Republican politicians have also voted in comparatively high numbers for reclaiming their responsibilities over war and peace in the face of Trump’s adventuring. The sad fact is, however, that both the American and global trend has been presidentialism — empowerment of the executive in relation to the legislature — for at least a century. And it is almost interrupted, with the counterexample in this country of the horrified response to Richard Nixon’s crimes and excesses. The situation is so dire now, with no comparable attempt to constrain president’s after Trump’s first term, that it has to be a multigenerational project to return to a democratic project rooted in parliamentary initiative and responsibility. Until then, even if “normalcy” is restored after Trump, we can expect an imperial president indefinitely, with choices for war made on a whim and lawyers in government signing off.
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