The US Is a Weakened and Dangerous Empire
The kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro is a crude act of Trumpian aggression. Yet it also illustrates the US leadership’s weakness, as it moves to lock down control of the Western Hemisphere.
Donald Trump used to pose as an antiwar president. Yet as the United States asserts its control of its backyard, its government asserts an ever-more blatantly imperialist policy. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
In the depths of a winter night, US airborne forces scream over Caribbean waters. Jets rain fire on key infrastructure, while attack helicopters deliver raiding parties of special operatives to targets on the ground. Amid the spectacle of shock and awe, a president is kidnapped and indicted on drug-trafficking charges. It’s a key test case for how an ambitious Republican administration intends to handle an era of seismic change.
This was December 20, 1989; the operation in question was the ouster of strongman Panamanian leader and erstwhile CIA asset Manuel Noriega. But there’s an unmistakable parallel with Donald Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife. It illustrates everything that has changed, and stayed the same, in the three decades separating these two acts of aggression. The first occurred at the start of a new age of American hyperpower. The second is a symptom of that age’s chaotic and violent decline.
Two Abductions
George H. W. Bush’s deposition of Noriega signaled a new, post–Cold War age of American world-making. Within a few years, the United States let rip in the Persian Gulf (like Noriega, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein would quickly learn that serving US interests is no guarantee of protection), alongside new wars on three continents.
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