When the Law Falls Silent, Force Speaks

It is perfectly clear that, no matter how democratic a country may be domestically, its foreign policy borrows very little from the rule of law. This is also the case of the United States, which—however much it claims to be democratic and morally superior to, say, Russia or China—has far too many moments in its recent history in which it acted exactly as it wanted, not as it should have. Obviously, when you criticize someone, you should look not at who is doing the criticizing, but at what is being said. But sometimes—and this is such a case—it is also worth looking at who is speaking, at the one pointing the finger, always at others.

The arrest of the Maduro couple by U.S. special forces represents a blatant violation of international law. Anyone with even a superficial knowledge of the field knows this. Yes, by all available evidence, Maduro was—if he no longer is—a dictator. If you asked me, everyone should live in countries governed by democratic regimes. But no one asks me, and no one ever will. That being said, we must be realistic and relate to what is, not to what we would like to be. Maduro should have been overthrown by his own people, if they could and wanted to do so. I know, it sounds cynical, but what is the alternative: for the United States to come and “set things right” anywhere, anytime, and however it wishes?

Let us do a thought experiment. Nicolae Ceaușescu was a loathsome dictator. He ticked every box on the job description of a tyrant perched at the head of a totalitarian regime. If the Romanian people had not managed to remove him from power, if the army had not, at some point, disavowed him and instead continued the repression, and if, seeing this, Soviet troops—who, according to some indications, were even called in for help by General Nicolae Militaru—had intervened to remove him, overthrow him, and execute Ceaușescu, how would the Romanian people have reacted? Would they have been happy to see their country invaded, their leader killed by foreign hands? Would they have overlooked the violation of international law for the sake of a greater good? Would they have gladly accepted a new Soviet occupation simply because they had rid themselves of Ceaușescu’s clique? Hard to say. What I can say for certain is that it is good that this did not happen and that the communist beast no longer rules Romania.

Let us return to Maduro’s case. What the United States did is exactly what Vladimir Putin would have liked to do to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but failed to achieve. How can the United States criticize, in any way, what Putin is doing in Ukraine—not that Donald Trump would do so—given its own behavior on the international stage? The United States, under Trump, is a bully you must avoid both when it is drunk and when it is sober and apparently lucid—not that Trump offers us very much evidence of lucidity.

The current American military adventure in Venezuela fits into a long tradition of arbitrariness and hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy: from the failed attempt to remove Fidel Castro from power in 1962, to the invasion of the island of Grenada in 1983, to the invasion of Panama in 1989, which led to the arrest of Manuel Noriega, accused—like Maduro—of drug trafficking. Let us not forget, however, that Noriega was initially one of the CIA’s favorites before becoming an enemy of the free world. Moving closer to our own days, we recall the case of Iraq, invaded on the basis of pretexts related to weapons of mass destruction—weapons that proved to be as nonexistent as morality in the foreign policy of any great power, including, or especially, the United States, even if George W. Bush Jr. at least had the decency not to “plant” them to be discovered.

Trump triumphantly declared that the United States would lead Venezuela until it makes the transition to democracy. In what just world does one country decide that it can run another’s destiny, for as long and in whatever manner it sees fit? Trump spoke to us—probably to move us to tears—about the poverty and suffering of the Venezuelan people, but he said nothing about the fact that these sufferings were, if not caused, then at least intensified by the sanctions imposed by his own country on that state, and not just recently. Who is most affected by sanctions imposed on a regime like Maduro’s: the clique around him or the ordinary citizen?

This too is a method of pushing people toward revolt, but if it does not work, there is a supposedly 100% democratic instrument called Delta Force. In Iran, it seems to work: citizens are in the streets. But if the regime in Tehran does not fall under the pressure of its own people, what will happen? Will Trump come to “do justice”? And if he does, what would stop him tomorrow from invading Greenland, attacking the sovereign territory of Denmark, a democratic state and ally? What will he mumble before a lethargic world, hypnotized by a foreign policy that looks increasingly like the 1930s and increasingly unlike the principles proclaimed by U.S. presidents? And what will he say if the People’s Republic of China attacks Taiwan, considered by Beijing a rebellious province? Or, more correctly, we should ask whether, after everything it has done, it still has the right to say anything at all.

Author: Ghețău Gheorghe-Florin