Betrayal

 If there is any constant at all in Donald Trump's ever-shifting foreign policy positions, it's that genuine friends to any pro-democracy movement, anywhere in the world—no matter how much it might appear to align with U.S. interests—should never trust him. The people of both Iran and Venezuela are having to learn that cruel lesson all over again this week.

The Iranian protest movement the past few weeks has been waging a heroic struggle in the teeth of overwhelming and brutal repression. 

And Trump—for a time at least—seemed uncharacteristically supportive. 

This would not generally be seen as odd in a U.S. president (most of our leaders have been hoping for any cracks to show in the theocratic regime in Iran for decades). But it was a bit odd for Trump, given that he instinctually supports all forms of authoritarianism—even that of traditional U.S. adversaries. 

Trump, after all, has repeatedly praised Putin, and notoriously said that the Chinese government's murderous rampage against pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square demonstrated the "power of strength."

Besides, Trump's goons are busy this week waging their own repressive campaign against protesters on American streets in Minneapolis. Which made the split-screen contrast with Trump's old-fashioned, almost neocon-tinged rhetoric about supporting Iranian democrats even more jarring. 

Then—going a step further still—Trump seemed actually to promise Iranian protesters that the U.S. military would shortly be intervening in their favor. "Help is on the way!" he said. 

It was a bit odd for a president who has been praised and blamed from all sides for breaking with the neocon wing of the Republican establishment to see him suddenly in the role of a gung-ho booster of democratic regime change. 

But soon, the old, familiar Trump reasserted himself. After expressing overt support for the protest movement and egging them on to victory—indeed, even promising that he would be right there at their backs—he swiftly lost interest in their struggle and abandoned them to their fate. 

Indeed, he even appeared to switch sides to support the government's stance. 

The Iranian government had apparently called Trump and explained that they really weren't killing quite so many protesters this week as they had last week. And they double-pinkie-promised not to execute anybody else. 

Trump, in typical fashion, immediately believed them and all but switched sides in the conflict. He even apparently took it on trust from the Iranian regime that the protesters had been firing on them too. And so, overnight, he had a complete change of heart and suddenly started downplaying the severity of the repression and more or less aligning himself with the regime's preferred narrative of the movement.

All the classic rules of Trump have thereby asserted themselves, despite his short-lived and (for him) perfectly aberrant momentary support for a pro-democracy movement. In the end, he always aligns himself with whoever currently holds power; he worships might over right; and he believes entirely the last person he happened to speak to. 

Now look—let me say for the record: I do not for an instant think that a policy of bombing Iran would have been a better option. 

It would be an unprovoked and illegal invasion of a country that has not attacked us, hence a violation of the UN Charter; it would almost certainly kill civilians, bystanders, and other innocent people—including protesters themselves; and it would most likely backfire by strengthening the regime and fueling outrage against the West. 

But if the U.S. wasn't going to intervene after all, it was equally wrong to promise aid and urge protesters to put themselves in more dangerous and exposed positions on the implied guarantee that the U.S. government would swiftly be parachuting in to backstop their revolution. 

Trump told the protesters overtly that "help is on its way"; he told them in no uncertain terms that they should "take over [their] institutions." 

Then, when they were crushed and gunned down by the thousands, with body bags littering the streets, Trump turns around and says, in so many words: eh, some of them probably had it coming; plus the government pretty-promised me that they wouldn't kill any more of them. 

The situation has all the earmarks of the perfidy of the Bay of Pigs invasion, say—when the U.S. thought it was a good idea to urge people on to try to topple an unfriendly government and then—when things inevitably went badly—abandoned them to die. 

Comparisons have also been made to the Shiite rebellion in Iraq in the early '90s, when George H.W. Bush seemingly "encouraged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein, but then opted to stay out of the country’s internal strife," as the Wall Street Journal put it yesterday. 

The Journal quotes one Brookings Institution analyst who argues that Trump, by promising aid to the Iranian protesters, "put American credibility on the line." Now that he has effectively abandoned their cause and smeared them publicly: "There will be, and already has been, a sense of betrayal and backlash from Iranians that will last well beyond the life of this presidency." 

One is reminded of the words of E.E. Cummings about the U.S. response to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. 

There as well, the U.S. government appeared at first to egg on the Hungarian revolution, and even to promise a U.S. military intervention to backstop their cause. "[A]ll poor little peoples that want to be free / just trust in the u s a," as Cummings imagines the U.S. government saying. 

Then, when Hungary put their faith in this promise, and acted on it, the U.S. government suddenly changes its tune: "be quiet little hungary and do as you are bid," they say, in Cummings's poem. In short, the U.S. abandons them to death and destruction at the hands of Soviet tanks. 

The exact same thing appears to have happened in Iran today. "Help is on its way," Trump said. "Just trust in the u s a!" And when the Iranian protesters did indeed rise up, Trump suddenly switches sides: eh, the current government's fine. They told me they wouldn't kill any more than the thousands of people they have already, and why wouldn't I trust them? 

And in case people still don't grasp from this the essence of Trump's character—behold his quite similar policy in Venezuela. He wasted even less time there, it would seem, in stabbing the pro-democracy movement in the back. 

Now, it should have been obvious to people all along that Trump did not actually care about Maduro's human rights record. If he did, he would not have tried to deport hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan asylum-seekers who fled his regime to his clutches. 

Nonetheless, the rightfully-elected opposition party in Venezuela naively put their faith in Trump, and assumed—on some sort of "enemy of my enemy is my friend" principle—that he would back them. 

Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado proceeded to disgrace herself—morally and strategically—in a bid to court Trump by pandering and fawning over him. She accepting his extrajudicial killings of her own citizens. She went silent on his deportations of Venezuelans—even when he sent over a hundred innocent people to a torture prison in El Salvador. 

She made clear, in short, that she would eat basically any shit Trump put in front of her, if it would win her U.S. backing. 

Then, as if this debasement weren't enough, she went all the way to Washington to offer Trump the physical Nobel prize award—even as the Norwegian Nobel Committee confirmed publicly that the actual title of laureate cannot be given or transferred from one person to another. 

Machado—still, apparently, not understanding the nature of the man she was dealing with—set herself up perfectly for the obvious humiliation to follow. Trump was obviously going to accept the physical trophy, grin from ear to ear, thank her profusely—and then abandon her to obscurity again. 

And that's exactly what happened. 

Meanwhile, as Machado grovels and compromises herself—with nothing to show for it in return—Trump is eagerly doing business with the remnants of Maduro's regime. The fact that they are just as repressive as always and still reportedly have hundreds of political dissidents locked up in a torture-chamber in Caracas apparently means nothing to him—so long, he explains, as he can extract oil. 

For a long time it was a mainstay of criticisms of Western imperialism that the worst thing about it was its sanctimony—its pretense to be bringing "democracy" to the benighted natives, or to be motivated by some other noble "civilizing mission." 

As the character Flory puts it in Orwell's Burmese Days: "All I object to is the slimy white man's burden humbug [...] We Anglo-Indians could be almost bearable if we'd only admit that we're thieves and go on thieving without any humbug." 

Trump, it must be said, is indeed "thieving without any humbug." He has made clear overtly that he does not care one bit about a democratic transition in Venezuela, or holding free and fair elections, or any of the other pretexts that a neoconservative administration might have used, if they had conducted their own intervention in Venezuela.

Instead, Trump is forthrightly there, he admits, to plunder and pillage the country. 

This has prompted more than one person to describe (semi-ironically) the crassness and brazenness of Trump's motives as "refreshing," if nothing else. At least there's no humbug about it. 

But Trump today is testing the limits of the Flory principle above. We are going to have to ask ourselves in practice—now that we see unvarnished imperial plunder stripped of all its "humanitarian" pretexts—whether it is really so much better than the alternative. 

Even if the neocon rhetoric of democracy-building was always partly "humbug" and hypocrisy, after all—it did at least make some sudden betrayals and changes of principle a little harder to pull off. 

A neocon regime might have gotten us embroiled in a longer war in Iran or Venezuela by now, and I think that would be a terrible and indefensible thing. 

But they at least wouldn't have encouraged the hopes of pro-democracy forces in both countries only to dash them to pieces and end up endorsing the very authoritarian regimes that they were struggling against—as Trump now appears to be doing in both countries. 

They wouldn't have declared "all poor little peoples that want to be free / just trust in the u s a"—only to sit by complacently when the dictatorships they are resisting proceed to slaughter and imprison them. 

so rah-rah-rah democracy—as Cummings concluded his poem; 

let's all be as thankful as hell

and bury the statue of liberty

(because it begins to smell)