Cosplaying Imperialism

 Trump's decision to invite a bunch of oil executives to the White House earlier this week to discuss carving up Venezuela between them is just too on-the-nose to make any further criticism seem necessary. What's the point of denouncing Trump's Venezuela policy as petro-imperialism if he doesn't even bother to disguise it? 

I think of Pablo Neruda's poem "Standard Oil Co." (Schmitt trans.): 

Their obese emperors from New York

are suave smiling assassins

who buy silk, nylon, cigars

petty tyrants and dictators.

If Trump had set out consciously to cosplay the kind of old-fashioned Yankee fossil fuel imperialism that the poem describes, he could not have done better than his actual behavior over the last few days. 

Except that many of the oil executives didn't even want to bite. They are not in fact yearning for new sources of crude at a time when oil prices are already slightly depressed worldwide. Nor do they trust the political situation in Venezuela to be stable enough to make this a sound investment. 

This is what bestows the element of historical cosplay on the whole scene. Trump is putting on a show of Gilded Age politics in period dress—it has nothing to do with actual business or economic realities. 

So the question then becomes: why? Why dress up and reenact some of the most disgraceful episodes of American history—gunboat diplomacy, filibustering, imperialism—particularly when no one else even wants it? 

Meanwhile, the unimaginative corners of the Left are defaulting to the same script they would have used if this had been a neoconservative intervention. They are denouncing cynical U.S. invocations of "democracy-building" (even though Trump has made no such invocations) and decrying the country's opposition figures (even though the U.S. is no longer supporting them.)

Some on the Left are even supporting the odious Maduro regime, despite its record of imprisoning and torturing hundreds of dissidents. I suspect they are doing so on some kind of "enemy of my enemy is my friend" principle, which tells them that U.S. adversaries must ipso facto be virtuous. 

But they seem to have missed the memo in this case that Trump is not even opposed to the existing regime. In fact, its supposedly "Bolivarian" leadership appears perfectly willing to work with Trump to extract oil. Delcy Rodriguez, whom parts of the Left are busy propagandizing for as a victim of U.S. imperialism, actually seems to be a willing collaborationist at this point with U.S. power.

I guess people on all sides of this debate can't help but assume that U.S. policy is being managed with some baseline of rationality. We think: it has to be about extracting oil—even if no American oil company actually seems all that interested; or else we assume, if not that: it must be about bringing down an authoritarian regime that opposes U.S. interests—even if Trump now appears to be openly collaborating with that regime. 

What we aren't willing to face is that Trump's foreign policy may just be a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.