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What Could Go Wrong With The Felon's Gunboat Diplomacy

Not only do the Felon and the supine Republican Party want to bring back the worse excesses of the Gilded Age, but after this past weekend it's apparent that the Felon also wants to bring back the gunboat diplomacy the United States pursued in the 1890's through arguably the 1920's and beyond. Under this form of diplomacy, might makes right and smaller countries are demanded to cower before America while powerful nations carve out their spheres of influence if not outright colonies.  It's the formula that lead up to WWI that lead to the death of millions, both civilians and military members, and ultimately saw the fall of empires and monarchies (e.g., Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia). I suspect the Felon is ignorant of this history which was to an extent repeated in WWII, not that he cares.  It's all about strutting about like a bully and monarch and demanding nation's bend to his wishes. As a long column in the New York Times lays out, if the Felon is free to unilaterally  seize Venezuela without compliance with international law, then by extension Putin can seize Ukraine or other parts of the former Russian/Soviet empire, and China can seize Taiwan (and 60% of the world's semiconductor sources).  The Felon likely could care less about the harm done to America and the world long term as long as he and his billionaire cronies enrich themselves in the short term.  Here are highlights from the Times column:

“War,” the Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “is a mere continuation of policy by other means.” If there is one line that virtually every Army officer learns from Clausewitz’s posthumously published 1832 book, “On War,” it’s that description of the purpose of armed conflict.

Those words were among the first that popped into my head when I woke up Saturday morning to the news that the American military had attacked Venezuela, seized its dictator, Nicolás Maduro, and brought him to the United States to face criminal charges.

The reason those words occurred to me was simple — the attack on Venezuela harks back to a different time, before the 19th century world order unraveled, before two catastrophic world wars, and before the creation of international legal and diplomatic structures designed to stop nations from doing exactly what the United States just did.

It’s a mistake, incidentally, to view General Clausewitz as an amoral warmonger. He wasn’t inventing the notion he describes; he was describing the world as it has been. His statement is a pithy explanation of how sovereign states viewed warfare for much of human history.

When a strong state operates under the principle that war is just another extension of policy, it is tempted to operate a bit like a mob boss. Every interaction with a weaker nation is tinged in some way with the threat of force — nice little country you have there. Shame if something happened to it.

This is not fanciful. In a telephone conversation with The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer, [the Felon] President Trump threatened Venezuela’s new leader, Delcy Rodríguez, who served as Maduro’s vice president. “If she doesn’t do what’s right,” Trump said, “she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

Diplomacy and economic pressure are almost always still a first resort for powerful nations, but if they fail to achieve the intended results — well, you can watch footage from the American strike in Venezuela to know what can happen next.

But the Clausewitzian view isn’t the only option for nations and their leaders. There is a better model for international affairs, one that acknowledges the existence of evil and the reality of national interests, but also draws lines designed to preserve peace and human life.

In Summa Theologica, written in the 13th century, Aquinas outlined three cardinal requirements of what came to be known as just war theory.

Echoes of Aquinas are all over the U.N. Charter. Article 2 of the United Nations Charter bans aggressive warfare (taking away a key tool in the Clausewitz toolbox); Article 51 permits individual and collective self-defense to keep great powers in check; and Chapter V established a body (the Security Council) that’s designed to keep the peace.

No one would argue that the system is perfect. We’ve seen wars of aggression since World War II, but the system has achieved its primary goal. The world has been spared total war.

The Aquinas model, however, has to fight two foes — the will to power and the loss of memory. Just war theory demands restraint from the powerful. It asks great powers to forgo imposing their will — even to the point of subordinating their short-term national interests to the long-term aspiration of international peace and justice.

That’s where our loss of memory comes into play. Restraint is more persuasive when people actually remember a world war, and the people who built the United Nations and NATO had been through two. In that sense, the moral argument against aggressive war has practical application.

The world has seen what happens when the will to power dominates world affairs, and its leaders know (or should know) that the most catastrophic conflicts can start from the most modest beginnings.

When Gavrilo Princip took aim at the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, for example, and Austria-Hungary mobilized against tiny Serbia, how many world leaders grasped that more than 16 million people would die in the war to come?

When memory fades, the Clausewitz model grows more tempting — in part because it can achieve quick results, just as it did in Venezuela early Saturday morning.

The Trump administration — acting entirely on its own and without seeking congressional approval — decided it was in the best interests of the United States to remove Maduro from power.

But when it struck, it violated every principle of just war.

First, [the Felon] Trump acted unilaterally, turning his back on the sovereign constitutional requirements of American law. He did not consult with Congress. He did not secure a declaration of war. He simply attacked a sovereign country on his authority alone.

Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has argued that the administration’s action wasn’t an act of war, but rather a “law enforcement operation” and that the Defense Department merely protected the arresting officers.

This defense is laughable. Under that reasoning, a president could transform virtually any war into a law enforcement operation by indicting opposing leaders and claiming that the large military forces needed to secure the leader’s arrest were simply protecting law enforcement. That’s not an argument; it’s an excuse.

Second, Trump struck without a casus belli, without just cause recognized by international law and the U.N. Charter. . . . . the attack “pretty clearly violates the charter,” even if there is no clear way to enforce the charter’s commands.

Third, while removing a dictator from power can be a just end, Trump’s decision to turn his back on the democratically elected opposition is profoundly troubling. That the remaining elements of a corrupt regime still govern the country — subject to American demands to negotiate oil deals with American companies — risks perpetuating corruption and oppression at the expense of freedom and democracy.

Nothing here is new. . . . . Trump’s attack on Venezuela was a piece of a much larger whole, the restoration of the politics and diplomacy of 1900 — the years before the catastrophe of the First World War.

The gunboat diplomacy of the Gilded Age certainly meant that the United States dominated Central and South America. It imposed a quasi-colonial reality on the region. Each nation developed under at least some degree of American oversight. Every nation was only as sovereign as the United States allowed it to be.

Trump’s attack on Venezuela didn’t take place in a vacuum, either. In December, the administration released its National Security Strategy paper that put the Western Hemisphere first.

The document addressed the Americas before it addressed Asia, Europe and the Middle East, and it declared that the United States will “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.” . . . the paper created a dangerous distance between the United States and its European allies. It declares that Europe must “stand on its own feet and operate as a group of aligned sovereign nations, including by taking primary responsibility for its own defense.”

In isolation, that statement isn’t terribly problematic. The nations of Europe are rich enough and strong enough to shoulder most of the burden of collective defense. American allies, though, contribute more than many Americans may think. According to a recent RAND study, America contributed roughly 39 percent of the total defense burden by 2023 — a number that has dropped substantially since the end of the Cold War.

If Americans wonder why any South American regime would seek closer ties with other foreign powers, perhaps we should ask what their history has been with the United States and what the people of South America think about an aggressive revival of the Monroe Doctrine.

There are better and worse ways to argue about Trump’s approach.

The worse argument is to say that Trump set a precedent with his intervention in Venezuela — a precedent that nations such as Russia, China and Iran will be eager to follow in their own respective spheres of influence, and we will have no standing to object when our adversaries take the same approach to countries in their spheres of influence that we took in ours.

But Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China and revolutionary Iran have never had the slightest concern for just war theory or any moral argument. They’re held in check (to the extent they are) by deterrence, or, when deterrence fails, raw military force.

We can barely keep the world order together when only three of the five permanent members of the Security Council — the United States, Britain and France — comply with the U.N. Charter and international law. But if the United States joins Russia and China in their approach to armed conflict and international relations, then the Western postwar consensus is truly dead.

America First isn’t necessarily isolationist — there’s nothing isolationist about arresting the leader of a sovereign nation and pledging to “run” it, but it is myopic.

It pursues the sugar high of national power at the expense of justice and peace. You can see that Trump is on that sugar high right now. On Sunday night, NBC’s Sahil Kapur reported that Trump was still saying, “We’re gonna run” Venezuela. “If they don’t behave,” Trump added, “we’ll do a second strike.”

But [the Felon] Trump wasn’t just thinking about Venezuela. “Colombia is very sick, too,” he said. Cuba is “ready to fall.” He also threatened to strike Iran if Iran kills protesters and brought up Greenland again: “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.”

If there is anything that could decisively wreck NATO, it would be an attempt to annex Greenland. Annexation could conceivably empower Denmark to invoke Article 5, the collective self-defense provision of the North Atlantic treaty, against the United States.

But there’s a further problem: The true international norm is that when the strong dominate the weak, the weak try to become strong. That can mean alliances with enemies. That can mean global rearmament. That can mean nuclear proliferation. It can also mean that a foolish world once again endures the high cost of forgetting what it’s like when great powers go to war.

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A Happy Love Story Between Two Men - Revolutionary

As more details leak out about the Felon's illegal attack on Venezuela - and perhaps even more frightening, the Felon's announced plan to run that country - I'm taking a pause from politics for a day and waiting for more factual details.  In the meantime, I am again focusing on HBO's hit "Heated Rivalry" which is based on two of a series of books by Canadian author, Rachel Reid.  I've read the books and am happy that the show has attracted so many non-LGBT viewers and fans.  Each of the books is at essence a love story that faces the hurdles of homophobia, bigotry and negative stereotypes - things that every "out" LGBT individual has had to face and consciously overcome.  If one reads the early years of this blog, my own "coming out" journey was anything but easy and at darkest points included two suicide attempts - something that still takes the lives of LGBT individuals who buckle under the strain of stereotypes and too often family rejection.  In the past, gay characters in movies or television are either homogenized, depicted as superficial witty "best friends" of other characters, or the stories end in tragedy.  The reality is that being gay involves more than mere physical sex and involves love and intimacy - and regular boring lives of work and and social involvement with family, friends and co-workers.   Yes, there is plenty of sex in Heated Rivalry, but the real story is lovie and intimacy as demonstrated by Ilya saying to Shane in Russian that he loves him too much and doesn't know what to do about it.  A column in the New York Times looks at the series and how it goes beyond mere representation of gay characters to show lives, love and intimacy. Here are column excerpts:

“Heated Rivalry” has become a breakout hit. The hockey drama — adapted from an erotic romance novel for the Canadian streaming service Crave — just ended its first season on HBO Max and has left gay men crying at watch parties that feel more like 19th-century religious revivals.

If you want to understand why this show has become our community’s equivalent of a cultural earthquake, the answer is that watching a gay couple be mildly boring and in love is still radical. . . . in the season finale, which landed last week, the two men are secluded in an intimate cottage — grilling burgers, lying by firelight, taking daytime swims, scrolling through their phones on the sofa.

Culture has not kept up with queer people, despite major political strides, legal victories (including marriage equality) and growing social acceptance. Stories and art explicitly about queer life are being made, but they rarely find a wide gay audience. They’re not typically embraced the way “Heated Rivalry” has been.

For years, queer representation in mainstream culture was driven by a political imperative. We needed to be palatable, monogamous and mortgage-ready to be tolerated. You could see this impulse in “Will & Grace,” where queerness was domesticated through friendship and slapstick, and later in “Modern Family,” where the suburban gay couple were beloved precisely because they reassured straight viewers that nothing about them was too strange, too erotic or too much. A lot of what is being produced about gay men, even now, replicates a straight world in rainbow colors.

Maybe what we ache for now is not culture built to serve a political end but a focus on the intimate — someone on top of us, breaking down in tears as he confesses his love. What is turning us on is not the thrill of naked bodies but the shock of being emotionally known. That is what some of us have been missing.

“Heated Rivalry” often focuses on the flirtations queer people recognize instantly: the charged eye contact at the opening face-off, boyfriends nudging feet under the table during a coming out, a glance across a crowded gala. The literary critic Richard Kaye has argued that flirtation has long been central to Western literature, a serious erotic mode in novels from Jane Austen to E.M. Forster. Seeing that tradition evolve onscreen between two men — not as subtext but as text — feels like a revolution.

What feels especially new is the way that flirtation becomes true intimacy. When another player in the league comes out by kissing his partner on the ice — a game changer in every sense — Shane’s phone rings. Ilya tells him he’s coming to Shane’s secluded lakeside cottage. Not for a night. Not for a postgame hookup. He’s choosing to step into Shane’s life, transforming their yearslong relationship into something with a future.

“Heated Rivalry” resonates because it embodies our lives. After the religious right pathologized us during the H.I.V./AIDS crisis, we reclaimed the sex story by reviving bathhouses and sex parties, by unapologetically embracing hookup culture on apps like Grindr, by celebrating eroticism in our fashion and nightlife. And slowly, we became more visible in family life and at work. There are queer politicians and lawyers, Olympians and celebrities. But representation is not the same thing as intimacy. We still need more stories about us, our relationships, our romances, our desires.

As the show has gained popularity, the cultural conversation has veered, perhaps predictably, toward straight people’s responses to the show. Articles, TikToks and morning shows have fixated on the thrill of being, say, a straight woman witnessing two men falling in love. This commentary has felt uncomfortably reminiscent of bachelorette parties in gay bars — our spaces becoming someone else’s spectacle, our bodies becoming someone else’s backdrop.

But if straight women like the show, that is fine. They should enjoy it. After all, it was adapted from a novel written by a woman. Her stated goal — to make a sweet, sexy, happy love story between two men in which, as she says, “the sexual tension and romance isn’t subtext or a tease or something that ends in tragedy” — fits what so many of us have been missing. Her willingness to write toward our joy feels rare, and so does the result: our intimacy made central, not symbolic; love scenes that are not lessons; desire that doesn’t apologize for itself.

We do not need more stories to prove that we exist. We need stories that capture how we live — in the touch, the embrace, the everyday if boring intimacies that were never meant to be translated. Our next frontier is not mere acceptance but depth.

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The Felon's Risky War In Venezuela

Overnight the Felon authorized military attacks in Venezuela and the seizure of Nicolás Maduro and his wife.  All was done without advising Congress or Congressional approval - a requirement for going to war against a foreign nation.  The Felon's supposed justification was that Maduro has federal warrants out against him for allegedly being a drug kingpin.  Never mind the fact that the Felon just recently pardoned  the former president of Honduras who had been convicted of bringing hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States and numerous polls showing the vast majority of Americans oppose war in Venezuela. With the disasters of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq still in recent memory where wars were launched (albeit with Congressional approval) with no real plan for what would follow regime change.  The Felon's statements that "we would be running Venezuela" - which possesses the world's largest oil reserves - are troubling and suggest several possibilities: (i) another Iraq like debacle in the aftermath, (ii) the Felon and his cronies enriching themselves with plundered oil, and (iii) further distrust of America by South American and European allies. Will Greenland, Panama or some other country be the Felon's next targets? Pieces in both The Atlantic and Politico look at the illegality of the Felon's unauthorized war against a sovereign nation and the concern that chaos or the rise of someone even worse than Maduro.  First, this excerpt from The Atlantic:

This morning, President Trump unilaterally launched a regime-change war against Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, ordering strikes on multiple military targets in the country and seizing its leader and his wife. They were “captured and flown out of the country,” Trump stated on Truth Social.

After Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed Congress and asked it to declare war on Japan. Prior to waging regime-change wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, George W. Bush sought and secured authorizations to use military force. Those presidents asked for permission to conduct hostilities because the supreme law of the land, the Constitution, unambiguously vests the war power in Congress. And Congress voted to authorize force in part because a majority of Americans favored war.

The probable illegality of Trump’s actions does not foreclose the possibility that his approach will improve life for Venezuelans. Like too many world leaders, Maduro is a brutal thug, and opposition figures have good reason to insist he isn’t the country’s legitimate leader. . . . . But “toppling Maduro is the easy part,” Orlando J. Pérez, the author of Civil-Military Relations in Post-Conflict Societies, warned in November. “What follows is the hard strategic slog of policing a sprawling, heavily armed society where state services have collapsed and regime loyalists, criminal syndicates, and colectivos—pro-government armed groups that police neighborhoods and terrorize dissidents—all compete for turf.” Two groups of Colombian militants “operate openly from Venezuelan safe havens, running mining and smuggling routes,” he added. “They would not go quietly.”

Now that the United States has involved itself this way, its leaders are implicated in securing a stable postwar Venezuela and in staving off chaos that could destabilize the region. Yet Trump is best suited to military operations that are quick and discrete, like the strikes on the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani or Iran’s nuclear sites, as they do not require sustained focus or resolve. He is most ill-suited, I think, to a regime-change war against a country with lucrative natural resources. I fear Trump will try to enrich himself, his family, or his allies, consistent with his lifelong pattern of self-interested behavior; I doubt he will be a fair-minded, trusted steward of Venezuelan oil. If he indulges in self-dealing, he could fuel anti-American resentment among Venezuelans and intensify opposition to any regime friendly to the United States and its interests.

Whether the outcome is ultimately good for Venezuelans, as I hope, or bad, Trump has betrayed Americans. He could have tried to persuade Congress or the public to give him permission to use force. He didn’t bother. He chose war despite polls that found a large majority of Americans opposed it. Perhaps, like me, they fear America is about to repeat the mistakes of its interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, where brutal regimes were ousted, then ruinous power vacuums followed.

This theme continues in the piece in Politico:

“Congress did not authorize this war,” Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) wrote on X. “Venezuela posed no imminent threat to the United States. This is reckless, elective regime change risking American lives (Iraq 2.0) with no plan for the day after. Wars cost more than trophies.”

“Maduro is an illegitimate ruler,” Himes wrote. “But I have seen no evidence that his presidency poses a threat that would justify military action without Congressional authorization, nor have I heard a strategy for the day after and how we will prevent Venezuela from descending into chaos.”

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, announced Saturday he would again force the chamber to vote on his effort to constrain Trump’s war powers next week.

“Where will this go next?” he wrote. “Will the President deploy our troops to protect Iranian protesters? To enforce the fragile ceasefire in Gaza? To battle terrorists in Nigeria? To seize Greenland or the Panama Canal? To suppress Americans peacefully assembling to protest his policies? Trump has threatened to do all this and more and sees no need to seek legal authorization from people’s elected legislature before putting servicemembers at risk.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a combat veteran who deployed to Iraq as an infantryman in 2005, wrote on X Saturday that “the American people did not ask for this.” And he wondered aloud about what comes next for the South American country, asking on X, “so who is in charge of Venezuela now?”

A December Quinnipiac poll found that Americans overwhelmingly oppose military action against Venezuela, with just 25 percent of respondents saying they supported an intervention inside the country. Even the White House’s strategy of targeting boats with alleged drug traffickers proved broadly unpopular.

“I fought in some of the hardest battles of the Iraq War,” Gallego wrote. “Saw my brothers die, saw civilians being caught in the crossfire all for an unjustified war. No matter the outcome we are in the wrong for starting this war in Venezuela.”

The sad reality is that the Felon sees himself as an absolute monarch - something that threatens every America.  He is a clear and present danger to the nation.

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