Trump’s approach to Venezuela repeats the mistakes of the past | Austin Sarat

Donald Trump seems determined to have a military confrontation with Venezuela. He has deployed a massive military arsenal in and around the Caribbean Sea and taken a series of provocative actions off the Venezuelan coast, justifying it as necessary to stem the flow of drugs into the United States.

The Council on Foreign Relations says that deployment includes an “aircraft carrier, destroyers, cruisers, amphibious assault ships, and a special forces support ship. A variety of aircraft have also been active in the region, including bombers, fighters, drones, patrol planes, and support aircraft.” This is the largest display of American military might in the western hemisphere since we invaded Panama in 1989.

The president has refused to rule out a ground invasion of Venezuela. But so far, the administration has used its military assets to target boats allegedly carrying drugs, sought to close Venezuelan airspace, and, on 10 December, seized an oil tanker. How the seizure of an oil tanker helps stem the flow of drugs into the US is not obvious.

In fact, Pam Bondi, the attorney general, claimed the ship was involved “in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations”.

Beyond these explanations, it is unclear why Trump has targeted Venezuela in the ways he has. The president may want to punish the country’s dictatorial president, Nicolás Maduro, for allowing hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans to migrate to this country.

Or he may be seeking to control the country’s vast oil resources.

Whatever his motivation, the peace president is saber-rattling in the Caribbean, much like a bully picks on weaker opponents. And Venezuela is not his only target.

In an interview with Politico, he suggested he would be willing to take military action in Mexico and Colombia to stop the flow of drugs coming from those countries. What he once said about the way he likes to deal with protesters at home seems now to describe the way he thinks about the United States’ relations with nations in the western hemisphere: “You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time.”

We’ve seen this act before, and it generally did not end well for this country or for its neighbors to the south. It is time for Congress to assert itself and try to stop the president from leading us further into a South American quagmire, what one senator called “sleepwalking us into a war with Venezuela”.

It is also time for the Organization of American States (OAS) to break its silence and condemn what the Trump administration is doing. The International Federation on Human Rights is right: “The erosion of the democratic system and human rights violations … in Venezuela … do not authorise any State to intervene as the United States is doing … In doing so, it violates the central right on which the architecture of the world order is based, which is the self-determination of peoples.”

It is clear that respect for that principle has not animated the administration’s foreign policy. Examples are legion, including the way it has treated Palestinians and has seemed to accept Russia’s territorial claims in Ukraine.

In language reminiscent of the 19th century, the recently released US national security strategy indicates that “the outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations”. The document comes close to envisioning a world less dominated by the United States, one where stronger powers recognize and respect each other’s spheres of influence. That would involve other powers respecting each other’s efforts to interfere in the affairs of weaker states within their sphere.

This idea dates back to the sixth century BCE. Then, Professor Andrew Latham argues, “Rome and Carthage concluded a treaty prohibiting Roman ships from sailing near Carthaginian waters and Carthaginian forces from attacking towns friendly to Rome.”

Fast forward to the 19th century, and we see examples where nations would assure their competitors that they would respect their right to play a dominant role in a particular region. Trump clearly wants to establish dominance in the western hemisphere.

As the national security strategy puts it, “The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity—a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.”

This is clearly a step back from what Latham refers to as “the universalization of the US-led liberal international order” that has been the pillar of international relations since the fall of the Soviet Union.

But Trump’s 19th and early 20th-century predecessors, William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, would be proud. McKinley launched an era of American imperialism and a war against Spain to ward off its interference in Cuba. Following him, Roosevelt made so-called “gunboat diplomacy” a central tool of American foreign policy.

That involved the conspicuous display of military, especially naval, power to intimidate other nations and secure their cooperation in the pursuit of American national interests. Sound familiar?

Earlier examples include the 1903 deployment of an American warship to deter Colombian intervention in Panama, the use of the American military to seize the Mexican port of Veracruz in 1914, and the deployment of the marines more than 20 times in Central and South American nations during the first part of the 20th century.

Throughout the cold war, the US regularly intervened in those nations. We used covert operations and military force to undermine governments that were in any way sympathetic to the Soviet Union, including in Guatemala in 1954, Ecuador nine years later, and several times in Chile.

The results were not good.

Gunboat diplomacy and efforts at regime change fed anti-American sentiments throughout the region, exposing the US to charges of hypocrisy for talking about the importance of respect for national sovereignty in the international order, but not respecting it when we didn’t like the governments of other countries.

A study of the aftermath of CIA efforts to overthrow governments in the western hemisphere found that they caused a whole host of damage to their economies and political and social systems, leaving them less free, democratic and prosperous. For example, we intervened in Guatemala to depose a democratically elected president and left the country in the hands of a dictator. That led to a bloody and prolonged civil war. And our efforts in the early 1970s to undermine Chile’s Salvador Allende, a Marxist president, destabilized that country’s economy.

I’m afraid we are on that course again. Unless dissuaded, the president’s actions in South America will leave the United States less secure and the region more unsettled.

• Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty