At the start of that surreal period of history which was the Covid Pandemic, we did have a run on toilet paper. I, like most other people, went out of my way to acquire as much toilet paper as I could, not knowing how long the crisis and the shortage would last.
But I was a little more relaxed about it than most people, because I already had a large stash of toilet paper put away in my spare room next to my wine collection.
You see, when there was a toilet paper shortage in Venezuela circa 2010, I decided that I needed to take proactive steps to protect myself and my comfort.
My reasoning was that if a communist government like that of Chavez or Maduro could cause a toilet paper shortage through the incompetence of their economic policies (these criminal morons went as far as naming their kleptocratic economic policies ‘The Great Leap Forward’ in honour of Mao’s similarly titled plan which killed fifty million people through famine), then a communist government like that run by Julia Gillard might similarly cause us to have a toilet paper shortage.
Metaphorically perhaps, I was tongue in cheek in my reasoning, but when the Covid happened, our own answer to Maduro, Dan Andrews, took technocratic rule to its logical extreme and we did have our own toilet paper shortage. Thankfully I was prepared, and I have the communists in Venezuela to thank for being forewarned.
The intervention by the USA in Venezuela to detain and depose the detestable criminal Maduro is not something I will shed too many tears about. He and his co-conspirators, such as the late and unlamented Chavez, have run a dictatorship for many years, one which has forced 8 million people to flee their country. The number of extrajudicial killings under this regime has not been properly measured, but some of the sources online suggest that the numbers stretch into the tens of thousands. Maduro and his henchmen lost an election in mid 2024, and then merrily ignored the results.
Apparently, he is so unpopular that his bodyguards were exclusively Cuban army officers, given that he cannot trust his fellow countrymen with his safety.
But having said that, is intervening in Venezuela appropriate either morally or under International Law? I very much doubt the latter. But my understanding of International Law is mostly limited to the Rome Statute and the Refugees Convention & Protocol, so I will not rabbit on about the legal arguments. [As Socrates might imply, I know nothing, so I am a wise man not to assert that I do know.]
Let’s look at the morality of the matter.
Maduro is a criminal – one of the worst sorts because he is part of a gang which has seized control of a country and brought untold misery to its people. Him now sitting in a cell in the same detention block as the highly annoying P Diddy is not a cause for sadness, although many of the AI generated videos on social media about the two sharing a cell are cringeworthy.
But there are many appalling regimes around the world who enslave and murder their own people. Take North Korea for example, or Iran. Or many of the places in Sub Sahara Africa. Or Pakistan. Why not take action on the leading sponsor of fundamentalist Islamic theology, Saudi Arabia?
It is hard to argue that acting in Venezuela alone rather than taking a similar mission to the other dark places on the Earth is particularly moral. Unless the USA is going to embark on a Woodrow Wilson-like mission to try and make the world safe for democracy, then any action in Venezuela lacks any real moral basis.
The morality of such action is further undermined by the open talk about controlling the oil production in Venezuela, with the fig leaf of ‘narco terrorism’ to justify taking the regime’s leader on a trip to New York. And did not Trump recently pardon another former Latin American president who had been sentenced by an American court to many decades in prison for drug related offences?
Nor has the leader of the Opposition been installed as interim president. Instead, the existing regime has been allowed to appoint the vice president as interim president. There is no regime change, just another of the criminal gang who has been looting Venezuela for the past 20 years getting a chance to be put in charge. Will anything really change? I doubt it.
The main reason that the USA under Trump has intervened in Venezuela is because it can, and because it does not want its rivals Russia and Communist China to have ready access to those oil reserves.
What Trump has done is not unique in American History. There has been regular intervention, almost since the foundation of the United States, in other nations, mostly to protect their interests. As a student of History, I am well aware of what they have done over the past 225 years.
What happened this week is not about right, it is about might. It rarely is about right.
When the USA intervenes in other sovereign nations, it does so with its own interests first and foremost.
The first example that comes to mind was in 1801, when the United States entered into a war in the Mediterranean against the Barbary pirates. The first lines of the US Marine Corps hymn talk about the ‘shores of Tripoli’ as one of their early battle honours.
That war probably was justified, given that it involved opposing a pirate kingdom who enslaved their hapless captives. But given that the USA was still 60 years away from the point in time where they addressed their own slave owning situation, their actions and those of President Jefferson, a prominent slave owner, do reek of hypocrisy.
A much later and more insidious of their interventions, which was mostly about oil (as is the case right now), was the CIA led overthrow of a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953. That regime was determined to nationalise the oil industry, threatening the interests of American petroleum companies and also making the USA nervous about possible Iranian realignment towards the USSR.
The Shah, who had been just a figurehead, was then enabled to rule as an autocrat for the next 26 years, with thousands of people murdered by his secret police.
The result was that the USA, who had been regarded in the Middle East, possibly due to Woodrow Wilson’s idealism , as a beacon of democracy and decolonialisation lost all its prestige and became seen as just another sinister Great Power, only bigger.
Who knows what would have transpired if Iran had continued on a democratic and secular path? Perhaps the current theocracy would never have arisen.
I will leave the tragedies of the invasion of Iraq and the ultimate resurrection of the Taliban regime alone. They have been talked about enough in the past 25 years. Nor will I talk about the debacle of Vietnam, something which has been almost unanimously seen as a catastrophic mistake in policy (the main exception to this view being that of Professor Philip Bobbitt, who happens to be a nephew of Lyndon Baines Johnson).
Most of America’s interventions have been in Latin America and the Caribbean, and given what has just happened, I will reflect more on that. Just in my lifetime there have been the intervention in Grenada in 1983 (a place which until then was only known to me through my postage stamp collection), and the deposing of Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989. The latter dictator was very involved in drug trafficking, and also had benefited for many years from close cooperation with US intelligence agencies, which does undermine the morality of his removal from power.
Such interventions have been occurring for well over a century. The US Government was a prime mover behind the independence of Panama from Columbia, principally to facilitate the construction of the canal. Theodore Roosevelt intervened regularly during his presidency, asserting the right of the United States to intervene in the affairs of Latin American nations in what became known as the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
Then of course, during the Mexican Civil War, border incursions by gangs of Bandidos provoked Woodrow Wilson, a man who combined idealism with spitefulness, vanity, and deep vindictiveness, to order a US Army expedition into Mexico. This was a complete failure, an embarrassment which is only briefly touched upon in American History and biographies of Wilson.
Of course, we have Cuba, where America probably would have been better served by annexing it after the Spanish American War. The failed attempt to remove the Castro regime during the Bay of Pigs invasion provoked Castro into requesting the USSR to place nuclear weapons on the island and thus almost led to nuclear war.
All of this stems from the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, which was drafted by John Quincy Adams, one of the most brilliant statesmen of his time.
So let’s look at what it says:
The occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.
It continues on to state:
We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power, we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.
Theodore Roosevelt, the first American president to look further than the horizon, then elaborated somewhat further in his corollary:
All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.
So when we look at what has just happened this week, this is not a situation unique to the current Presidency, or to any erratic behaviour on the part of Trump. This is just the latest of a long history of interventions by the United States in Latin America. American foreign policy has, for the past 203 years since President Monroe spoke in his State of the Union address, asserted with growing clarity, what rights the United States considers that it has to protect its interests in the Western Hemisphere.
Is this behaviour morally right? Is this legal? Probably not. But the USA can do this because it can, and because whilst we talk about the burgeoning power of international law, there remain three major world powers who, provided they do not directly confront each other, can operate virtually unrestricted by such talk of rule based interaction between nations.
As TS Eliot put it in ‘Choruses from the Rock’ (and I quote this way out of context but still find it apt):
It is hard for those who live near a Bank
To doubt the security of their money.
It is hard for those who live near a Police Station
To believe in the triumph of violence.
Do you think that the Faith has conquered the World
And that lions no longer need keepers?
Lost For Words! 