The Dumb-roe Doctrine

In 2004, The New York Times Magazine quoted an unnamed advisor to President George W. Bush saying: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” The Bush administration learned, soon enough, that reality can prove a stubborn thing, and the result was tragedy. Now, history is repeating itself, and just as Marx quipped in his famous riff on Hegel, the second time is farce.

While the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq was hideously misguided, at the time the justifications provided for it seemed to have at least some plausibility. Saddam Hussein did in fact have a history of trying to develop weapons of mass destruction. He had a record of supporting terrorists. He was a brutal dictator. The US, meanwhile, seemed at the apex of its power, and thus perhaps capable of bringing reforms to a troubled part of the world. A lot of very smart people bought into these arguments (for the record, I didn’t). And even Bush’s opponents mostly characterized the war as a terrible blunder, not as an act of absurd insanity.

Donald Trump’s strike against Venezuela, and his threats against Greenland, belong in a different category. In neither case do his arguments have even a remotely plausible basis in fact. As critics have pointed out ad nauseam, Venezuela is not a major source of fentanyl for the United States and poses no other serious threat to us. Nor does it make the least sense for US companies to spend tens of billions of dollars or more to rebuild Venezuela’s dilapidated oil industry when the US already has energy self-sufficiency and the oil market is glutted. As for Greenland, the US already has access to everything it needs there, including mineral resources and the ability to station forces. Taking the island over by force, far from improving our country’s strategic position, would shred it by dissolving NATO and thereby, among other things, ending our strategic cooperation with the largest country in North America. The idea that the US needs somehow to reassert strategic control over the Western Hemisphere makes little sense in the twenty-first century, given our dependence on global networks of trade and global supplies of natural resources, and our long traditions of cooperation with allies on every continent. Trump may boast of updating the Monroe Doctrine as a “Donroe Doctrine.” It is more of a “Dumb-roe Doctrine.”

And of course, Trump doesn’t actually have a strategic vision of any sort. The only reason he has adopted these particular absurd policies is because he acts on impulse and delights in doing things, however nonsensical they might be, just to show he can, especially if doing so leaves his opponents howling in impotent fury. He might as easily have decided that we need to occupy Panama (the canal!) or Bimini (just fifty miles from Mar-a-Lago!). And what about that stretch of British Columbia that divides Alaska from the lower 48? A clear and present danger, obviously.

In a country with a functional political system and a sane public sphere, the dangerous nonsense indulged in with respect to Venezuela and Greenland would, by itself, already have led to Trump’s removal from office. Unfortunately, we don’t live in one.

In the country where we actually live, Republican officeholders neutered by the fear of Trump’s electoral vengeance and spellbound by his crude machismo defend his every demented utterance as brilliant and prophetic. A massive right-wing propaganda network that terrifies its aging viewers with stories about migrant murder gangs and transsexual pedophiles and then reaps the profits of polarization by selling them gold, testosterone pills and overpriced identity theft prevention likewise insists on the absolute sanity and righteousness of whatever oozes out of Trump’s mouth. And a mainstream media inured to Trump, reliant on access to government figures, and disposed by long tradition to respect the office of the president, treats his most absurd actions and pronouncements with almost the same seriousness it once gave to the policy proposals of his predecessors.

The mainstream journalists and most of the officeholders obviously know better. They simply hope that nothing much will actually come of Trump’s adventurism. Having reaped applause for snatching Maduro out of Caracas, he will allow the Chavista government to stay in power as long as it makes a few token concessions. Negotiations with the Danish government will lead to the US purchasing additional mineral rights in Greenland and stationing a few more military personnel there. In both cases, with luck, Trump will declare victory, lose interest, and go on to some new, equally absurd cause (“The canal is ours!”).

But bluster and buffoonery are not always harmless, and events have a nasty way of sliding out of control. The Venezuelan government could collapse, putting pressure on the US to stage a serious military intervention, and not just a quick raid. A breakdown in negotiations could prompt Trump to take an irreversible step toward military action in Greenland. And even if we avoid disaster this time, the man has three more years in office, and plenty of opportunities for more nonsensical mischief. Farce can turn to tragedy with frightening speed.