The Trump-ordered coup in Venezuela reminded this Kentucky historian of Thucydides, the famous historian of ancient Greece.
“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” the celebrated Athenian wrote. (Thucydides was also a general.)
Trump, the practitioner of what Murray State University historian Brian Clardy calls “petulant diplomacy,” has reestablished the US’s old reputation in Latin America as the “Colossus of the North,” the big country that does what it wants with little countries.
“We’re the overbearing Gringo again,” Clardy said.
Since he attacked Venezuela, Trump has all but stopped talking about making Canada the 51ststate. Greenland, Columbia, and Cuba are the main objects of his current saber-rattling.
But in a recent story in Global News, a Canadian publication, Bob Rea, a former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations. warned: “We’re on the menu.”
Added Rea, who stepped down last November: “If you don’t think we’re on the menu just because he hasn’t mentioned the words ‘51st state,’ I think that’s really missing the boat in terms of what this administration is about.”
Rea said, “We’re basically being told (by) the Americans, ‘We will do whatever we can get away with, and who’s going to stop us?’ Which is a license to take over any country that they feel is getting in their way.”
Canadian Tod Maffin, one of my favorite Internet commentators, likes Americans, but he didn’t pull punches about Trump and Venezuela. “Let’s be clear about this,” he said in a recent video. “What the U.S. did is an act of war. And it should be a stark warning to nations like Greenland and yes, Canada, with all our oil reserves the U.S. wants, and the critical minerals it desperately needs.”
Maffin didn’t just aim his fire southward. “The Conservative Party of Canada is squarely in Trump’s corner,” he said.
America’s full-bore Thucydidean foreign policy goes back to the 1890s, when Uncle Sam joined the old European powers in embracing global imperialism. (Just as many Americans are protesting Trump’s assault on Venezuela, many Americans opposed imperialism, William Jennings Bryan among them. “The command, ‘Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature’ has no Gatling gun attachment,” said the Democrat Bryan during his unsuccessful 1900 bid to unseat Republican President William McKinley, an ardent imperialist.)
In a recent post, Maffin said Americans — meaning “the overbearing Gringo” type — remind him of a big kid named Brian who bullied him and other kids in the seventh grade.
“He would walk up, take food straight out of your lunch, no asking, no eye contact,” Maffin remembered.
One day at school, Brian, escorted by the vice principal, approached Maffin and two of his buddies. The bully was in tears. “Brian wants to know why you hate him so much,” the vice principal said.
Americans often don’t get why other countries think they’re the Brians of the world, Maffin added.
“I’ve always thought the most clear example of this was 9/11. Here, outside the states, we watched news reports of Americans being interviewed and almost every one of them was a variation on, ‘Why would someone do this to us? What have we ever done to them? Don’t they like freedom?”
He added, “What we don’t like is arrogance and hypocrisy.”
Between 1898 and 1994, the U.S. successfully intervened to topple Latin American governments at least 41 times. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was a murderous dictator. But historically, American presidents — Republicans and Democrats — have been more into deposing left-wing, freely elected governments that tried to stop the exploitation of their natural resources and people by U.S. corporations.
Trump, like other interventionist-minded presidents, isn’t about spreading democracy. His motivation is the same as theirs: making the world safe for corporate America. Examples are plentiful.
Trump is gifting Venezuela’s oil to big American oil companies, Maffin pointed out. He also cited U.S.-backed coups in Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973.
President Dwight Eisenhower approved covert CIA help for Guatemalan rightists who wanted to remove Jacobo Arbenz, its freely elected president who dared to nationalize — with compensation to the company — land owned by United Fruit. He fled the country and was replaced by a rightwing dictator who gave the land back, made Guatemala even more U.S. business-friendly, and silenced all opposition.
After Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile in 1970, he proceeded to nationalize U.S. businesses that were getting rich off his country, notably copper mining companies.
Three years later, President Richard Nixon supported CIA involvement in a rightwing coup against Allende, which included his murder. He was succeeded by pro-American dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who was even more of a homicidal tyrant than Maduro.
Pinochet’s bloody brutality led David Popper, the U.S. ambassador to Chile, to complain to the State Department. “Tell Popper to cut out the political science lectures,” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger snapped.
America’s longstanding failure to practice what it preaches about democracy and self-determination is why “my American friends, and you are our friends … the world doesn’t trust your country,” Maffin said. “It’s not about freedom. It’s about decency. Being strong doesn’t mean you get to ignore the rules. Being strong means that you are strong enough to follow them even when you don’t like the outcome.”
He said his schoolmate Brian didn’t see himself as a bad guy. “He thought he was practical, efficient, above the inconvenient rules of the classroom. Teachers spent years cleaning up his messes while the rest of us learned to keep our lunches close and our expectations low. No one trusted Brian, no one wanted to be around him even when he needed help and eventually everyone noticed that wherever Brian went things got worse.”
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