Emulating the Enemy
In Venezuela and Greenland, Trump’s strategy is to beat the bad guys by becoming the bad guys.
DONALD TRUMP SAYS HE’S USING the United States military to protect the world from China and Russia. He’s keeping an eye on those imperialist regimes, detecting their plots to abuse weaker countries, and deploying our armed forces to get there first. Before the Russians and the Chinese can invade vulnerable countries and steal their wealth, the United States is moving to head them off.
How are we doing this? By invading the targeted countries ourselves, or by using our economic and military power to steal their wealth. We’re beating the bad guys by becoming the bad guys.
Trump is hardly the first president to wield American power in geopolitical conflicts. His predecessors used it in the name of fighting communism, terrorism, and Russian encroachment in our hemisphere. But Trump says that’s not enough. We shouldn’t just beat the bad guys, he argues: While we’re at it, we should use our muscle and weaponry to extract profits.
This is Trump’s longstanding complaint about the Iraq war: He says we didn’t exploit it enough. “The Middle East wars . . . during the Bush administration were a disaster for this country, because it was $9 trillion out and nothing in,” he told the New York Times last week. “I always said: Don’t go in, but if you’re going to go in, keep the oil. But they didn’t keep the oil.”
In Venezuela, Trump is determined to rectify this mistake. Before authorizing the military operation to oust Nicolás Maduro and seize (through our “armada”) de facto control of the Venezuelan government, Trump consulted American oil companies. He invited them to go into post-Maduro Venezuela and extract its oil. On Friday, a week after the operation, he hosted oil executives at the White House to promise them shares of the loot. “You’re gonna make a lot of money,” he assured them.
At his meeting with the executives, Trump offered several rationales for this theft. In particular, he said his takeover of the Venezuelan oil industry was necessary because otherwise, our geopolitical rivals would have done the same thing. “If we didn’t do this, China or Russia would have done it,” he argued.
Beating China and Russia to the punch wasn’t even about depriving them of the oil, he explained. It was about controlling the oil and selling it. “We are open for business,” he told the world. “China can buy all the oil they want from us, there [in Venezuela] or in the United States. Russia can get all the oil they need from us.”
NOW TRUMP IS EXTENDING the same logic of preemption to Greenland. “If we don’t take Greenland, Russia or China will. And I’m not letting that happen,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday. “One way or the other, we’re going to have Greenland.”
A reporter asked Trump whether, instead of seizing Greenland—which belongs to Denmark, a NATO ally—he might accept an offer from Germany and the United Kingdom to collaborate in a “joint NATO mission” to protect Greenland. Trump rejected that idea. He made it clear that he would settle for nothing less than owning the territory, since that was what China or Russia would do if America didn’t act first. “We’re talking about acquiring, not leasing” Greenland, he insisted. “And if we don’t do it, Russia or China will.”
Sometimes Trump pretends that his policy of domination and plunder is confined to the Western Hemisphere. But he’s also applying it in Ukraine. Last year, as Russian forces advanced across Ukraine’s eastern provinces, capturing mineral deposits, Trump warned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that if he didn’t hand over much of Ukraine’s mineral wealth in a deal with the United States, Trump would abandon Ukraine, leaving Russia to take more land. Essentially, Trump offered Zelensky a choice between losing some of the minerals to Trump and losing more of them, or all of them, to Vladimir Putin.
Eventually, Ukraine signed the deal. And on Thursday, one of Trump’s billionaire friends, Ronald Lauder, scored a prize from the agreement: Ukraine authorized Lauder and his group of investors to mine one of the country’s biggest lithium deposits. But don’t feel bad: If Trump hadn’t secured this mining opportunity for Lauder, Putin would have secured it for one of his oligarchs.
From the standpoint of beating Russia and China, all of these moves look like wins. We’re taking the oil and minerals our adversaries would have taken. We’re demanding to seize the territory our adversaries would have seized. We’re doing exactly what they would have done. And that’s a disgrace America will never live down.
The next President will have a lot of splainin’ to do. We’re going to be Pariahs.