Look, I Don't Hate It
In Which I Put Not One, But Two Of My College Degrees To Work
Look, I don’t hate it, all right? I’ve got two degrees in political science that look really pretty in their frames in a box somewhere in my basement. I don’t think I ever really landed on a specific speciality within political science, but if you were going to force me to choose, I’d say comparative politics with a spicy bouquet of international relations thrown in for good measure.
I woke up Saturday morning in a hotel room in Omaha (we took a few days post-holiday and pre-hamster wheel routine of work/school/life, the ceaseless cycle of activities and appointments ready to drown us again to go see the brother in law and various niblings) to the somewhat astonishing news that the United States had gone into Caracas and taken the President of Venezuela and his wife into custody purportedly on an arrest warrant.
My first thought (other than, ‘Jesus Christ, my back hurts. And what the hell did I do to my shoulder?’) was: “Wait, what?”
My second thought was: finally, an excuse to use at work when the cops don’t want to go door-knocking to serve a warrant or two. “The President of the United States ordered the US Military to craft a highly detailed and complex special operation under cover of darkness in another country to serve two warrants, and you can’t go knock on a damn door to get an intox warrant served? Bruh.”
The annoying thing about studying international relations is that the realists are always so damn smug and annoying because they wind up being correct more often than not. “Nations don’t have permanent friends, just permanent interests.”1 That’s why y’all can miss me with the hand-wringing about the international order or liberal internationalism or international law or shit like that. Even if we go back to the 90s- hell, to 2008, can we really say that we didn’t just do what the fuck we wanted because it was in our interests? I mean, if we’re really being honest, all those drone strikes Obama was all about were kind of dodgy… and Clinton had us in Somalia, Haiti, bombing Serbia. Bush the Elder invaded Panama. Reagan did Grenada. We’re not special. There was never a time when we were. Everything old is new again— we’re doing blood and soil nativism at home and coups and soft-takeover on behalf of United Fruit Oil in Latin America abroad. Do I like it? Not particularly. Does it represent some kind of Trumpian assault on the international order? In the grand curve of history, no. Same shit, different decade.
My third thought, as my brain finally began to wake up, was this— I am willing to give credit where credit is due. Operation Warp Speed, even though he’s completely disowned it at this point, was one of the greatest feats of the United States government in damn near a century— you’d probably have to go back to the New Deal to find a decent comp there. And yes, although it pains me to admit it— because I long for the day when I wake up and don’t immediately have to find out what frankly insane thing the President has said/done/danced to—I don’t entirely hate his foreign policy.
This might—, and I stress might, because aside from maybe Rubio, Bessent, and Burgum, President Trump’s Cabinet isn’t exactly covering itself with a shiny sheen of ‘competent people who know what they’re doing'— be a good thing. There’s still a long way to go and it could all very easily go sideways and tits up on them, but as of this writing, this where I’m at:
Pessimism: President Trump made a bunch of promises to the oil companies to get them to cut checks for his election campaign— the rants about windmills? The cutting off of every other energy source in favor of oil, “beautiful, clean oil,” and coal? That tracks, and you’ll never believe what Venezuela has a metric fuckton of: oil! He also promised to lower the price of gas, and if the oil companies can get Venezuela up and running at full capacity again, they will undoubtedly find a way to increase production enough to lower the price at the pump while still making a ludicrous amount of money for themselves.
I think given the limited nature of the operation, at least so far, the requisite amount of pearls will be clutched in Congress and I do think it would be great if some hard questions were asked about this operation and scope of it and the plans and/or endgame for this mess, but other than that, I think he’ll probably be okay on that front. Now, if they want to put boots on the ground, they absolutely should go back to Congress. Will they? I don’t know. Will Congress care? So much of our current situation would be resolved so easily if Congress would just get its shit together and be a coequal branch of government as the Constitution mandates.2 I don’t think the Founders could have conceived of a moment where the legislative branch just lies back and ‘thinks of England’ as it were, but here we are.
This could easily collapse into chaos and land us in another protracted overseas conflict. I’m sure voters will love that.
Optimism: Broken clocks are right twice a day, so I’m more inclined to think that Marco Rubio is pushing a lot of this for his own ideological preferences (Cuba) more than anything else. While I think there is potential for this not to be a bad foreign policy move, I also am not convinced that this is a super genius 3D chess move by the administration. So far, their track record hasn’t impressed me that much. But it could wind up being a super-genius 3D chess move almost entirely by accident.
Russia, as the kids say, might be cooked. The Iranians are in the streets, and if that regime collapses and a pro-US regime is installed in Venezuela successfully, two huge untapped oil markets have opened up, and that could be the end of that. Ukraine is reading these tea leaves as well, as they’re operating deep behind the lines almost with impunity at this point, hitting oil infrastructure with glee. I think this raises the likelihood of Russia being forced to the table and a deal far more favorable to Ukraine being worked out over the next year or so.
China is more complicated to consider. There’s this idea being pushed on the internet that the ‘deal’ is that the US ‘gets’ Venezuela, and Russia ‘gets’ Ukraine, and China ‘gets’ Taiwan— there’s sort of a gentlemen’s agreement to divide the world up into ‘spheres of influence’ and stay out of each other’s backyards. The problem I have with this theory is that if I push on it a bit, it sort of collapses pretty quickly. Why would we agree to let China acquire the ability to project naval power deep into the Pacific Ocean? Other than a propaganda win (which is not nothing), what does China get from Taiwan? If I were Taiwan, I’d blow the chip fabs up as soon as the first PLA boots hit the beaches, and that’s assuming they can get there at all. And why grab Taiwan when large swathes of eastern Russia are just sitting there, full of resources that the Russians can’t exploit properly?
I don’t buy that. Does this open up the possibility of China doing a snatch-and-grab job on the President of Taiwan? Perhaps.
I do buy the arguments that if China is going to go for it, they’re going to need a supply of oil they can rely on that’s not under the control of the United States, and they might just have lost one. (There was a Chinese delegation in the country at the time to meet with Maduro. He did not make that appointment, and Beijing was caught flat-footed there.)
Right now, the world should be interested in making the costs of China taking Taiwan so prohibitive that it gives them pause. I think this potentially raises the costs for China. The problem is that no one knows the real internal calculus the Chinese have about Taiwan. I tend to think that the Chinese aren’t going to move unless they are convinced that they can win and win quickly. Deng Xiaoping famously said, ‘it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice’— only when the cats caught enough mice and started looking around and saying things like ‘do we get a vote on who the head cat is?’ they got tanks in Tiananmen Square for their troubles. I don’t think they’re going to move unless they can win because the costs of losing could compromise the CCP’s ability to maintain power. I think the maintenance of that power is paramount, but I’m also basing that on China’s behavior in 1989, so who the hell knows.
Maduro was a bus driver who somehow managed to get himself put in charge of a country, and by all accounts wasn’t doing that great of a job at it, and wasn’t exactly a good guy to boot, quite the opposite in fact. This is not a good guy, and a lot of Venezuelans (and Cubans) seem pretty happy that he’s gone. So, is this good? I’m going to say… sort of?
There’s a lot to consider, some of it good, some of it bad, and I totally understand people who feel queasy about the whole situation. But… I don’t… hate it?
~
Of the IR schools, I found constructivism the most fascinating because it offered a way to avoid the internationalist vs. realist trap that seemed impossible to escape.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Congress is the reason why our democracy is being stretched to its limits right now. Fix Congress— whether by uncapping the House or changing the majority party, I don’t care which, and a lot of problems that people spend their time freaking out about will go away. But until there is sustained pressure- until voters make it clear that Congresscritters will lose their jobs unless they start fulfilling their Constitutional role properly, I would expect our current state of affairs to continue