The Donroe Doctrine
What was immediately a joke is no longer. The Atlantic lays out what the U.S. attack on Venezuela means for U.S. foreign policy, at least for those on Donald Trump’s “naughty” list (gift link):
In Marco Rubio’s telling, the stunning events in Venezuela on Saturday illustrate an essential truth—possibly the essential truth—about Donald Trump’s presidency: Global leaders cross him at their peril. “I don’t understand yet how they haven’t figured this out,” Trump’s secretary of state told reporters at Mar-a-Lago just hours after the capture of Nicolás Maduro.
World leaders could be forgiven for not understanding the simplicity of the Trump Doctrine, especially those who assume that the world’s dominant superpower still possesses complicated mechanisms for the manufacture of foreign-policy strategies. The country that gave the world the Truman Doctrine and the Reagan Doctrine as well as Trump’s apparent favorite, the Monroe Doctrine, now embraces the plainest and most ostentatiously bellicose of national-security policies: Fuck around and find out. Trump’s own Pentagon chief, the self-styled (until Congress approves the title change) secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, said as much when he told the nation that Maduro “effed around, and he found out.”
That’s when Hegseth wasn’t snapping towels with the boys in a Pentagon shower room.
If the Fuck Around and Find Out Doctrine doesn’t sound like a concept for a stable and predictable foreign policy—one purpose of Washington’s doctrine-articulation complex—then maybe you can sympathize with those who Rubio says are still struggling to get it. Some experts reject the idea that something this crude even earns the right to be called a doctrine. As John Bolton, currently a Trump nemesis but once one of his first-term national-security advisers, told us, “There is no Trump Doctrine: No matter what he does, there is no grand conceptual framework; it’s whatever suits him at the moment.” Kori Schake, the director of foreign- and defense-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, cautioned us that “we shouldn’t ennoble Trump policy by saying there’s a doctrine.”
Many on the left are still attempting to understand the U.S. action against Venezuela in rational, geopolitical terms. A lengthy post at Renegade Resources posits: The Venezuelan Oil Narative [sic] is PURE THEATRE. Our true goal is to eliminate threats in Venezuela posed by Chinese, Iranian, and Russian activities in our hemisphere.
Tracy Shuchart argues:
The Pentagon approved this operation because Venezuela presented a convergence of strategic threats from all three major US adversaries that exceeded the threshold for military action, with each adversary establishing operational presence that created compounding strategic vulnerabilities.
Read the detailed analysis for why this makes sense: strategic minerals exploited by China, Iranian drone manufacturing, and Russian weapons and training.
This convergence transformed Venezuela from a problematic narco-state into a strategic threat that exceeded the Pentagon’s tolerance threshold. Critical minerals are the foundation of modern weapons systems in the same way that oil access was foundation of 20th century military operations. Chinese monopolization of processing creates supply chain vulnerability that sanctions and market mechanisms cannot resolve, equivalent to hostile control of Persian Gulf chokepoints. Chinese operational control at extraction sites in the Western Hemisphere represents strategic encirclement. Iranian drone manufacturing 1,200 miles from Miami represents unacceptable adversary power projection. Russian military integration provides intelligence capabilities and force projection platform.
The Renegade Resources post is a sobering read and news to me. Not my area. I do not preclude the possibility that someone from Hegseth’s office came across Pentagon planning for addressing these strategic threats. Perhaps they took it to Hegseth who eagerly said, “Hey, let’s do that” and presented the idea to Trump.
Except. Trump 2.0 has lobotomized any government that could pull off any vaguely Mission Impossible strategery. I see no one in Trump’s inner circle (or left in the Pentagon) who possesses that depth of strategic understanding in the Renegade Resources post. As for Trump, his understanding of the world arrested its development in the late 1970s or early ’80s. Trump is the very image of a man who thinks with his dick. So is Hegseth.
So I’m still skeptical that we aren’t intelligent people pursuing our rationalist need to impose logic on Trumpish chaos. And perhaps to find it where it doesn’t exist.
Trump’s natural instinct is to pitch Venezuela as a rich source of oil, whatever strategic objectives may have been born deep in the Pentagon before he regained office. “Trump talks about oil because voters understand oil and the narrative has been established since Iraq,” writes Shuchart. The oil narrative may be theater, but it’s also the kind of simple bedtime story Trump reads to himself, and the only way he’s capable of understanding it. Others in his orbit, like Rubio (he’d like to topple the government in Cuba), have their own agendas that don’t involve oil.
Trump 2.0 is grifter’s all the way down, led at the top by Trump’s avarice, grievances, and his feral instinct for self-preservation. And by Miller’s raging xenophobia. And Trump is still desperate to join an international autocrats club that wouldn’t have an idiot like him as a member. Maybe a little muscular showing out will get him past the membership committee.