Regime collapse

A new paradigm

A Financial Times report on Donald Trump’s latest offensive against Venezuela is admirably honest. To start with, there is a description of motives:

At stake in Venezuela are the world’s largest proven oil reserves and valuable deposits of gold, diamonds and coltan. A US ally in the last century, the South American nation moved into the orbit of Russia, China and Iran under Hugo Chávez, the ex-army officer who led a “Bolivarian” socialist revolution from 1999 until his death from cancer in 2013.

This is a handy guide to the driving forces behind U.S. interventions abroad. First, straightforward economic concerns. Second, geopolitical contcerns and the question of U.S. power. Third, a commitment to a liberal economic system and opposition to socialism.

Now, U.S. officials are also motivated by the commitment to democracy and human rights that is the official justification for everything the state does abroad, and indeed constitutes something like a civic religion in the country. But any serious historical analysis demonstrates that this fourth goal is easily dropped when it gets in the way of the first three. It’s like a bonus that they hope they can get. In a sense they are only pretending to hope for it, but I find they are often pretending to themselves, too.

Then, I was even more impressed by the following statement, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

“It’s clear that the mission is evolving to become more of a regime collapse or regime change operation,” said Ryan Berg, head of the Americas programme.

Emphasis mine. This I think is a crucial way to understand U.S. foreign policy over the last twenty years. Donald Trump is not pursuing regime change in Venezuela. He is pursuing something much worse. It would be enough if Maduro’s government were replaced by a smoking crater, and if the entire northern third of South America became a gaping, horrifying wound, making real governance of the region impossible for a generation. If there are any sane actors in the U.S. government, they know that this is one of the most likely outcomes of military action.

In 2002, the U.S.-backed coup installed Pedro Carmona, President of the Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce. This might have worked; he could have actually governed. This time, the U.S. President is just talking about punishment and elimination. That is a classically Trumpian move: he is revealing dynamics that everyone else had sought to hide.

Now, I believe that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton believed that they were trying to advance the cause of democracy when NATO began bombing Libya in 2011. Somewhere in their heart of hearts, they hoped that somehow the country would become Singapore or Finland after its leader was tortured and murdered on YouTube. There was no plan for this of course, no credible account of how it might happen, but I bet they were rooting for it. We can only speculate. It is, however, incredibly easy to demonstrate that state collapse was an acceptable outcome: they accepted it.

The FT piece notes that Venezuela is not Libya, which it is not. Things would go differently. Every happy state is the same, but every collapsing state collapses in its own way. What is U.S. policy towards Iran? Is it to facilitate transition, or destruction? The upside of pursuing destruction, for contemporary imperialists, is that if you fail to engender collapse, at least you weaken.¹

I am not saying that Trump is going to try this in Venezuela. They may kick the tires on the Maduro government and back away. I am not saying they would necessarily succeed. I am saying that the implicit goal of military action is not to create a government; it is to destroy one.

State collapse creates some problems for the United States, of course. It “destabilizes” the region, and accelerates the flows of migrants and drugs that Trump and Rubio say they care about. But it’s pretty easy to see how it helps to advance the three causes listed above. As Ali Kadri has demonstrated, the wholescale destruction of a society pushes down the costs of raw materials and labor. With no sovereign power, there are no barriers to extraction. Desperate people are easier to exploit. And there is no government left to be in alliance with your enemies (like Cuba) or challenge your power.

As a phrase, I think “regime change” gives too much credence to what George W. Bush said he was doing back in 2003. More often, what we are talking about is the pursuit of regime collapse.

1. Washington’s global sanctions regime does not make sense if you believe its goal to be “change” of target state behavior. If, however, we conceive of a spectrum with “weaken” and “destroy” as its endpoints, the sanctions fit perfectly.