\n<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump\u2019s fans<\/span> like to cheer on his most audacious moves by declaring, \u201cI voted for this.\u201d It is safe to assume, though, that very few people who pulled the lever for Trump in 2024 expected that he would soon announce that he had seized control over Venezuela. One of Trump\u2019s most popular qualities has always been his supposed opposition to foreign wars, his anti-imperialist isolationism. Yet J. D. Vance, who once wrote an op-ed headlined \u201cTrump\u2019s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,\u201d now declares the new war in Venezuela to be a glorious and necessary exercise of America Firstism.<\/p>\n MAGA is primarily a personality cult, the objectives of which evolve to suit Trump\u2019s capricious moods. Yet his pivot to new wars of conquest is not some shocking reversal. The \u201cDonroe Doctrine,\u201d as he calls his assertion of regional supremacy\u2014a Trumpian extension of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, which established the United States\u2019 claim over the Americas in order to keep Europeans out\u2014is in fact consistent with his deepest beliefs. In some ways, it represents the ultimate expression of the world order he hopes to engineer.<\/p>\n A desire to dominate\u2014an eagerness to bully his counterparties into submission\u2014is perhaps the essence of Trump\u2019s character. Trump\u2019s unexpected political resurrection and return to the White House have emboldened his ambitions, which have spread outward. His threats against Canada, Panama, and Greenland, and his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, have little to do with national interest and everything to do with reifying a new order in which he\u2019s the boss and the leaders of neighboring countries are his cowering subordinates.<\/p>\n Other administration officials have tried to depict the Venezuela intervention as a limited operation, but Trump\u2019s constant claims that these moves are about oil, and his constant boasts that he is \u201cin charge\u201d of the country, clarify his motives. In invading Venezuela and capturing its president, Trump is asserting dominance not only over the hemisphere, but also over energy resources.<\/p>\n This is in keeping with Trump\u2019s view that wealth and power are always zero-sum contests, and his belief that control of natural resources will dictate who wins. \u201cThe future will be determined by the ability to protect commerce and territory and resources that are core to national security,\u201d he announced in his prepared remarks on Saturday. \u201cThese are the iron laws that have always determined global power, and we\u2019re going to keep it that way.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s faith that controlling Venezuela\u2019s oil fields will deliver wealth and power to the U.S. is so profound that he has ignored all evidence to the contrary. For starters, oil prices are currently low\u2014a fact that Trump is fond of pointing out in other contexts, but that limits the financial upside of opening more oil for development. Trump insists that Venezuela\u2019s oil fields will provide a windfall to the United States (\u201cIt won\u2019t cost us anything, because the money coming out of the ground is very substantial\u201d). Yet analysts project that any profit from Venezuelan oil will require a massive up-front investment.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s conviction that American wealth demands siphoning or stealing natural resources from other countries is of a piece with his winner-takes-all worldview. But this rather retro understanding of economics is readily defied by examples around the world. Many of the nations that have seen the fastest economic growth\u00a0 in recent decades have few natural resources, such as Japan, Israel, and the \u201cAsian Tigers.\u201d Meanwhile many of the nations that are richest in resources remain trapped in poverty, such as Venezuela.<\/p>\n This paradox is so long-standing that economists have coined the term resource curse to describe it. According to this theory, natural resources perversely impoverish nations by concentrating economic and political power in the hands of a kleptocratic elite. This discourages the formation of liberal democratic systems with accountable governments that follow the rule of law, which in turn discourages investment and entrepreneurialism.<\/p>\n A kleptocracy does, however, seem in line with Trump\u2019s Donroe Doctrine. Asked by reporters what the main priority should be for Venezuela\u2019s new government, Trump replied, \u201cWe need total access. We need access to the oil.\u201d When another reporter wondered whether the new government should liberalize opposition or free political prisoners, he demurred: \u201cRight now what we want to do is fix up the oil, fix up the country.\u201d<\/p>\n To the extent that Trump intuits an inverse relationship between wealth extraction and liberal democracy, he may see it as a benefit rather than a cost. The countries he most admires around the world, including Russia and the Gulf kingdoms, are neither the most affluent nor the most free. But their leaders are disproportionately wealthy and powerful. What economists call the resource curse seems, to Trump, to be a resource blessing.<\/p>\n Trump thinks about economics less like a businessman, as some of his supporters say, than like a warlord or a gangster: He imagines wealth as something to be plundered and hoarded by the strong. As a formula for amassing a personal fortune, this view has delivered beyond his wildest dreams. As a blueprint for national success, however, his crude ideas offer little more than an outdated fantasy of hemispheric supremacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" President Donald Trump\u2019s fans like to cheer on his most audacious moves by declaring, \u201cI voted for this.\u201d It is safe to assume, though, that very few people who pulled the lever for Trump in 2024 expected that he would soon announce that he had seized control over Venezuela. One of Trump\u2019s most popular qualities<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40410,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[1671,8728,18655,71],"class_list":{"0":"post-40409","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-atlantic","9":"tag-imperialism","10":"tag-retro","11":"tag-trumps"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40409\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}