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As with much of the criticism of just about anything that President Donald Trump does, many, if not most, of the lamentations about the U.S. capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro are highly predictable.
The Marxist left immediately took to the streets in defense of the now-imprisoned leader of the narco-terrorist regime in Caracas with the same speed and determination with which they sought to support the Hamas-led Palestinian attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, or to oppose the Israeli and U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear program last June. The isolationist far-right, like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-Ga.), denounced the president's actions as a sign that Trump was implementing a neocon foreign policy. Antisemites on both ends of the political spectrum also echoed the reflexive claim by Maduro's second-in-command and putative successor, Vice President Delcy RodrĂguez, that the American strike had "Zionist undertones."
A debate that transcends Trump
A bitter debate about the American effort to both halt the flow of drugs from that country and to end the oppressive rule of a regime that has turned a once-prosperous and democratic nation into a failed state from which millions have fled has ensued. However, it is about more than just the usual knee-jerk opposition of the left to the president or conspiracy theories rooted in Jew-hatred.
The issue isn't just whether Trump has started something he can't finish or the legalities involved in the American arrest of a foreign leader, albeit a corrupt and tyrannical drug smuggler who stole elections, in his own capital. At stake is whether the administration's unilateral actions are destroying the establishment of what is generally referred to as the "liberal world order." That order is considered by many to have ended the anarchic great power rivalries that led to two world wars in the first half of the 20th century. The president is clearly seeking to topple a hostile government of a weaker nation for motives that may be as economic in nature as they are about stopping the flow of drugs to the United States, let alone restoring democracy in Venezuela. And that reminds some commentators of a bygone era of "imperialism" and the lack of international restraints on such actions.
But that's a tipoff that Trump is on the right track.
It's important to understand the context for the American effort in Venezuela as transcending the usual hand-wringing from the left or Trump-deranged establishment liberals about an out-of-control MAGA administration.
To the contrary, Trump seems to be responding to problems that the supposedly more responsible foreign-policy elites have not only failed to solve but have actually aided and abetted because of their belief in multilateralism. The complaints of the editors of The New York Times, whose editorial denounced the administration for a policy that was both "illegal and unwise," aren't really about the erosion of congressional checks on the use of force abroad. Nor are they about the growth of executive power, which dates back to the 1960s, or sensible reasons for concern about the ways the American effort could go wrong.
Their real argument is about a belief that the United States must always bow to the constraints enforced upon it by the United Nations or the fears of its NATO allies. That also comes from columnists like the Times' David French, M. Gessen and Michelle Goldberg, who thinks Trump is no different from a superpower mafia don.
It is for this reason that those who believe that the current priority must be to defend the West against both the red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists that the Maduro regime was an integral part of and the growing geostrategic threat from the Communist government of China should be cheering for Trump. And that goes double for those who rightly worry about the way that the international community and its institutions have sided with the ongoing war against Israel by those who seek its destruction.
Post-war myths
There are serious concerns about what happens next in Venezuela, or in related news about whether Trump's talk of acquiring Greenland will lead to a messy and unnecessary confrontation with Denmark. But the laments for a situation in which both the United Nations and America's NATO allies are powerless bystanders while Washington exerts its influence and power are misguided. The notion that the post-war order and the multilateral institutions that are part of it are indispensable to preserving peace holds enormous appeal to many around the globe who loathe or fear the United States. It also appeals to those who believe in it as an ideal apparatus for global governance. That remains the conventional wisdom embraced by the chattering classes and the foreign-policy establishment that views most of what Trump has done on the world stage with distaste, if not horror.
But they are wrong. The liberal orthodoxy that unilateralism is inherently misguided is the real problem, not Trump's willingness to use American power, whether or not anyone else approves.
While many on both the left and the right wrongly thought his embrace of the slogan "America First" amounted to isolationism, they clearly misunderstood what he meant by it. Far from withdrawing from the world, Trump is determined to defend American interests abroad, though correctly understands that structures created for that purpose in the late 1940s are obsolete.
What Trump is doing amounts to a return to what historian Niall Ferguson accurately analogized to the "gunboat diplomacy" and "big stick" foreign policy of President Theodore Roosevelt in the opening decade of the 20th century. This was made clear in the administration's National Security Strategy published in November, which essentially was the blueprint for freedom of action to defend American interests in South America, whereby the Monroe Doctrine is being updated and strengthened into a new "Donroe Doctrine."
The assumption of the foreign-policy professionals during the last 80 years was that such behavior was just the sort of high-handed great power actions that led to disaster in 1914 and again in 1939. They thought that the high-minded ideals of world governance and collective security articulated in the U.N. Charter and the rhetoric of post-war American presidents could ensure that aggressors could be stopped and wars avoided.
They point to the fact that the great powers never went to war against each other from 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall — and even to the present after the Soviet Union collapsed — as proof that the liberal world order was not just preferable but an absolute necessity.
The creation of the United Nations, and a few years later, NATO, made sense as the planet emerged from the nightmare of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The West then faced the need to resist the aggressive expansionism of Soviet communism. But neither the world body nor the fashioning of a Western alliance that sought to prevent Moscow from bringing other nations inside its totalitarian Iron Curtain prevented World War III from ever being fought. It was, instead, the possession of nuclear weapons by both rival global superpowers that deterred them from war, even when confrontations, like the one over the Soviets installing missiles in Cuba in 1962, took them to the brink. The new order didn't abolish the basic truth uttered by Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz about war being "the continuation of policy by other means" or end great power politics. Nuclear weapons just made the cost of escalating direct confrontations too costly to consider.
NATO served a purpose in ensuring that the Soviet aggression of the late 1940s was halted. So, too, did the U.S. resolve in Korea, when the South was invaded by the Communist North. But what the architects of the United Nations failed to realize was that the structure they created could be taken over by the very forces opposed to Western ideals. That the United Nations is today a bastion of antisemitism — and it and its agencies spend so much of their efforts and energy undermining and attacking Israel — is not an anomaly. It's the natural outcome of a world body that is largely controlled by nations and movements that are opposed to Western ideals and values.
Winning the Second Cold War
The simple and unavoidable truth is that the only way to defend those values, American interests, as well as the existence of Israel, is to go around or supersede multilateral institutions. Their preservation cannot be allowed to depend on the ideas of a now bygone era. The United States, as Ferguson has also accurately noted, is locked in a new Cold War; only this time, against China and its allies in Moscow, Tehran and Caracas. It should learn from the past, but it won't win this conflict solely by working with the tools, like NATO, that were invented to cope with the challenges of the last one.
It's only to be expected that the assertion of American power in South America or elsewhere, such as Iran — where Trump joined the Israeli campaign to destroy its nuclear program and which he has now also threatened should it violently suppress protests — will be opposed by ideologues who think international institutions are more important than national sovereignty. The point being is that if you don't want rogue regimes to be allowed to export illegal drugs that kill Americans or to be used as bases by Iran or China, the only answer is for Washington to act. Waiting for a global organization to undertake operations that most of its members oppose or the assent of NATO allies is almost always going to lead, as it has on so many fronts, to inaction.
Some administrations, like that of Barack Obama, turned that dependence on multilateralism into something of a fetish. The result was, among other things, the catastrophe in Syria (where Obama walked back his 2013 "red line" threats) and the 2015 Iran deal that set Tehran on a course to have nuclear weapons, with which it could dominate the Middle East and threaten the rest of the world.
The argument that American unilateralism will encourage Beijing to attack Taiwan is nonsense. As Russia showed in Ukraine and Iran proved when it fomented its multifront war against Israel on the watch of a Biden administration that was similarly wedded to multilateral myths, it was U.S. weakness — not tough-minded Trumpian strength wielded unilaterally — that is likely to lead to more wars.
It may well be that Trump's every utterance and act will continue to send liberals and leftists over the edge, no matter how sound or reasonable his policies (such as his success in halting illegal immigration) may be. It's equally true that there are no guarantees that American intervention in Venezuela will work. Although by not committing to a full-scale invasion, Trump appears to be heeding his own criticisms of the George W. Bush administration's blunders in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The most important conclusion to be drawn from this latest instance of Trump's freelancing while the global establishment clutches its pearls is that it is only by Washington's willingness to act on its own that the threats to America, the West and the State of Israel can be effectively met. Far from the greatest peril being an erratic Trump let loose on the world stage, the president's single-minded belief in defending American national interests is the best hope for fending off the machinations of enemies of the West. A mindless belief in the transcendent importance of the solutions that were believed necessary in 1945 to prevent another global war is not going to protect us in 2026 and the years to come.
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Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of Jewish News Syndicate. He's been a JWR contributor since 1998.