The Thinning Aegis of American Hegemony
Venezuela moves to exploit a weakening international order by preying upon Guyana
There are Americans, millions of them, who will earnestly tell you that our history is uniquely bloody and oppressive and that our state was and is devoted to the maintenance of power of a small group of white men. This is a narrative taught (in whole or in part) in elementary schools on up through universities, all over the country, and if you spend time on social media you will see the fruits of those lessons: a generation of anxious and pessimistic young people who regard humanity and capitalism and America and traditional values and modes with contempt. We probably have tens of millions of citizens who derive some status and ego fulfillment from playing the role of the cynical social critic, all while benefitting constantly and enormously from the systems they disdain.
The truth is that Western civilization fought wars and amassed colonies and enslaved others with no more (and often considerably less) brutality and zeal than any other civilization. Western countries colonized the world not because of their unique rapaciousness but because of economic and cultural advances that allowed the development and spread of technologies and organizational modes in a way that had never before happened in human history. We are still living with and profiting from those innovations and they weren’t just useful to improve sailing vessels and firearms and government administrations-they also gave us the concepts of human rights and feminism and the worth and potential of all people and the wild potential of progress and meritocracy and the practices of state-level democracy. None of those ideas had ever existed in anything like their modern forms. The young ideological critics of the West revere ‘indigenous’ people (which in their usage really just means non-Western) but promote none of their values or ideas and completely ignore their medicine and building methods and political forms. They actually have no knowledge of or love for indigenous cultures-they only romanticize them in the abstract because they’re not Western.
The people most critical of our civilization have almost nothing to say about the challenges of international relations and that worries me. Nations are both prey and predator in the ‘dark forest’ of international anarchy and an elite class riddled with feelings of national inadequacy and unwilling to believe in or work toward or sacrifice for a basic, shared national vision will prove unable to defend itself when the inevitable time arrives. Young people might think they nurture criticisms of our capitalist imperium… just wait until they see what will supplant it if it falls.
The narrative of good (indigenous, queer, BIPOC, non-hierarchical) vs bad (Western, patriarchal, capitalist, white, scientific) is a fanciful story created by thinkers who cared little for understanding history and who were mainly concerned with seizing future power. Any honest reading of history will reveal worlds of stunning complexity and nuance where most groups consider themselves righteous and well-intentioned and people mix ideas and moral values and material incentives in order to puzzle a way forward. The notion that history can be neatly divided into oppressor/oppressed is far too wrong to simply be called simplistic, but it is that as well. Similarly there are dozens of operative factors which guide and affect the behaviors of classes and elites and states, not just power.
Why did Great Britain (supposedly a bastion and global purveyor of white supremacy) make slavery illegal in all its possession sin the 1830’s and devote a large share of its naval and colonial resources to ending the slave trade in neighboring territories and on the high seas? Why the the United States fight a civil war which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of white men and resulted in the abolition of chattel slavery in our country? Why did a patriarchy develop technologies and embrace ideas and values which led to the blossoming of women’s social roles in the public sphere and then export these technologies and values around the world? Why did Europe send doctors and missionaries and teachers to a hundred different countries to improve the lives of local people? None of these developments can be fit into a model of pure power contest and group domination and so the model should be rejected entirely.
European countries extracted natural resources from colonies and used the locals as labor, sometimes under duress. European colonialism probably didn’t net Europe great wealth, though and the undertaking was always more about national primacy and great power manuevring though. In return for their status as colonies the affected areas received thousands of schools, hospitals, railroads, technology, medicine, institutions, and educated administrators. Colonies were almost always managed with the assent and active assistance of many native groups as well. The idea that colonialism or capitalism or American military dominance are immoral and harmful situations is a naive and foolish view. You may notice that the most strident critics of these structures are never forthcoming with improvements or substitutes…
More recently, why did the United States fight a real white supremacist empire (and a Japanese supremacist empire, something which should be impossible within the simple narrative vision we teach our young people) in the 1940’s and why did we devote massive economic resources to rebuilding the conquered nations after our victory? Why did France and Great Britain surrender their sprawling networks of colonial possessions and why did the national debates about these questions feature concepts like political equality, self-determination, and national dignity? I could ask these questions all day. It’s not that the answers are troublesome for Critical Theory, it’s that the questions are never asked. Most depressingly, most of the tens of millions of young anti-Westerners apparently never ask themselves these questions. It’s far easier to force the history of the planet into a neat kindergarten heuristic and it’s politically advantageous for the interests trying to rapidly erode or remake our society but it’s not accurate. It’s the laziest and most inaccurate and most moralistic historical narrative on offer, and its appeal seems to grow by the day.
The fact is that we live in a world disproportionately built and maintained by American power. Our military and economic predominance in the aftermath of World War II allowed us to fashion a system of national states operating in a loose structure of rules and institutions and bound by diplomacy and, more and more as time went one, trade. The Pacific Rim and Western Europe were directly secured by American military power, and the US navy guaranteed the safety and openness of the high seas. We have consequently had a more peaceful 80 years (in terms of people living in peace: people affected by conflict) than any period in world history. Poverty has dropped precipitously. Technology has grown and spread apace. Globalism describes dozens of different trends rather than one but it has dominated global change for the past 8 decades.
Now, it seems, globalism may have reached or be reaching its high-water mark. Liberal democracy is no longer considered to be the inevitable end of historical political progression. Some share of the reasons for that involve a political wing in Western countries becoming obsessed with systemic oppression and intergoup frictions, not because these are huge or growing problems (they’re the opposite on both counts) but because such ideas are an Achilles’ heal for decent and tolerant people and societies and because inflaming senses of victimization and oppression will destabilize the political and economic status quo. Globalization has accrued many grave costs in terms of jobs and immigration (and related questions of identity and citizenship, especially in Europe). The global order created and maintained by the US and her allies maybe be fraying and political and military advisers warn us about the growing enfeeblement of our armaments industry and the recent relative weakness of our navy (etc.). The ascendance and global aspirations of China and the regional neo-imperialism of Iran are both contributing factors and symptoms of this fraying and the invasion of Ukraine is perhaps the clearest example of a modern challenge to Pax Americana since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait more than 30 years ago.
…and, now…
Venezuela has publicly signaled that it intends to annex a huge chunk of Guyana, which is sparsely-populated but under which large fossil fuel deposits were discovered 8 years ago. Venezuela already has access to potentially the largest oil reserves on Earth and squandered that incredible bounty building a parasitic state which ruined the economy and erected a vast structure of corruption: criminals and party insiders and smugglers, many of them in uniform or in office. They haven’t even been able to import the necessary capital machinery and retain the necessary engineers and managers to extract oil at anything above a paltry 20% of capacity or so for years. What good is a generous income as a pipeline maintenance worker when your currency is constantly devalued by hyperinflation and the stores have no goods on the shelves available for purchase? How appealing is a respectable career in your home country when murder and kidnapping rates are soaring and your industry is used to prop up a kleptocratic government and enrich powerful criminals?
The United States is a greedy and paranoid nation (as they all are) and we usually go where our self-interest takes us. The difference between us and nearly every other world power which has ever existed is that we also incorporate political goals of trisecting human rights and upholding democracy and maintaining global order. We are often hypocritical and sometime rash and foolish and rarely strategic in our actions… but we are the kindest and fairest hegemon that has ever existed and it we fall there’s no gaurantee of another like us for a long time. Imagine a world run by the Chinese communist party, or (more likely) a multipolar constellation of warring and fractious nations without any supranational coherence. I am hopeful that we will take a hard line with Venezuela (despite our recent partial reliance on its fuel imports to keep domestic prices down in the context of the Ukraine war) and continue to uphold the norms of border integrity and national sovereignty and non-aggression.
I’ve copied and pasted an article about the Venezuelan move to interfere with the corporeal existence of its small neighbor, below (‘Venezuela’s autocrat, Nicolás Maduro, threatens to annex Guyana’, The Economist Magazine, Dec. 4, 2023)
Venezuela’s autocrat, Nicolás Maduro,threatens to annex Guyana
An unpopular president holds a referendum to distract voters from his failings
Dec 4th 2023 | CARACAS
It is the one issue that almost all Venezuelans agree on. For generations, they have been taught that the correct map of their country should include a large chunk of next-door Guyana. The dispute has gained more prominence since 2015, when ExxonMobil, an American oil giant, started making a series of massive discoveries of the Guyanese coast, some of which are in waters that Venezuela claims.
So when the propagandists inside President Nicolás Maduro’s regime were pondering how they could demonstrate that their unpopular leader, who faces a presidential election next year, could still mobilise the masses, a referendum on the centuries-old border dispute seemed like a promising tactic. On December 3rd, with much patriotic fanfare and blanket coverage on state tv, the vote was held.
Voters were asked five questions, exploring in some detail how the existing border, agreed to in 1899, could be declared illegal and redrawn. The most provocative question came last, asking people if they agreed that two-thirds of the current land mass of Guyana, an area almost the size of Florida known as Essequibo, should be absorbed by Venezuela, forming a new state.
The result of the referendum was predictable, especially since the regime holding it has a reputation for fiddling elections. Indeed, there was no organised “no” campaign. According to the overnment-controlled electoral authority, the CNE, 95% of answers to each of the questions was yes. “The ‘tick here to make my country bigger’ option was always bound to win,” quips a Western diplomat in Caracas.
The question of turnout was more controversial. The CNE declared on December 5th that 10.4m Venezuelans had voted. That was an unbelievable figure. In the presidential election in 2018, which was widely seen as rigged and which Mr Maduro claimed he won, the official turnout was 9.4m. tv footage of that vote showed large crowds of people waiting to cast ballots.
On the day of the referendum, by contrast, barely any queues were seen or reported outside thousands of polling stations. Even government broadcasters, practised at giving the impression that Venezuela is a thriving democracy, struggled to find voters to film. True turnout was probably fewer than the 2.4m who voted in October in opposition primaries, which were run without government resources. Those were won with 93% of the vote by María Corina Machado, a fierce critic of Mr Maduro. She is banned from office.
Did such apathy over the referendum worry Mr Maduro? Seemingly not. “The Venezuelan people spoke loud and clear,” the autocrat declared, wearing a bespoke white referendum tracksuit top as he addressed supporters at a rally after the vote near the presidential palace in Caracas. Jorge Rodríguez, the president of the regime’s rubber-stamp National Assembly, said the mandate was so large that the government had no choice but “to abide by it”.
And that is what it is doing, at least on paper. On December 5th Mr Maduro ordered a new Venezuelan state to be created, called “Guayana Esequiba”. He appointed Rodríguez Cabello, a general, as its chief. A new map of a now larger Venezuela has been published. Mr Maduro, whose rule has been marked by mass emigration and soaring poverty, said that Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the state’s oil company, should begin granting operating licences for the exploitation of crude oil, gas and mines in Essequibo, and that “social care“ should be organised for its inhabitants.
This has all the hallmarks of “the fairytale stage” of a dictatorship, says the Western diplomat. In reality, the exercise has backfired. If Venezuelans could not be persuaded to vote in large numbers for a profitable slice of Guyana, what hope might Mr Maduro have that they would re-elect him in a fair election, assuming the regime decided to hold one?
The timing of the referendum also appears to be something of an own goal for the usually savvy Mr Maduro. In October representatives of his regime signed an agreement in Barbados with members of the opposition over how the presidential election might be held in 2024. In return for some modest pledges, the United States lifted a raft of sanctions for an initial six months, most significantly on PDVSA. This means that it can expand production and the regime can begin selling its oil at market prices.
President Joe Biden’s administration recently reminded Mr Maduro that he needed to fulfill his part of the deal, by releasing American prisoners and beginning the process of rehabilitating banned politicians, including Ms Machado, by the end of November. Mr Maduro’s government appeared to be partially complying with that demand, hours before the deadline expired. It announced on November 30th that opposition politicians could appeal against their bans until December 15th.
But now Mr Maduro has chosen to be a pariah once more. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, has long avoided blaming Mr Maduro for the economic disaster that Venezuela has been through under his decade-long rule. But Lula showed irritation on December 3rd at the COP28 summit. “If there’s one thing South America doesn’t need right now, it is conflict,” he said.
Before the referendum Vladímir Padrino López the defence minister ominously claimed that the dispute “is not a war, for now”. Nevertheless, Venezuela is unlikely to invade its neighbour. It “has a massive military advantage over Guyana, but Venezuela would not be confronting only Guyana,” says Rocío San Miguel, a military analyst. The United States and Brazil would swiftly come to the small nation’s defence with military help, she thinks.
Mr Maduro, who had no doubt convinced himself that the referendum was a brilliant idea, has in fact confirmed his unpopularity. Could this threat of a phoney war against Guyana be his Waterloo? Might those close to him decide he is a liability? Maybe. But he does have an uncanny ability to survive. 7
Great read!