Transcription
What Mr. Trump did was violate the last century of collective efforts of the United States as well as virtually every other country not to do what he just did.
Donald Trump and his top aids are insisting that they are "running Venezuela," that they are taking over the country and its vast oil reserves. They also intend to conquer Greenland by one means or another in order to accomplish their plan of, as they put it, "complete American dominance over the Western Hemisphere."
Well, Richard, you um you tweeted, "Europe tried to take Russia's money to pay for its war against Russia in Ukraine. It failed. Trump plans to take Venezuela's oil to pay for the US attack on and 'running,' Trump's words, Venezuela. How 21st century imperialism tries to finance itself." I mean, that's an important and interesting question, and I I want to spend enough time today to have you explain your view on this. But before we do, I want to get started with a clip. It's about a minute long. It's on CNN. Stephen Miller on Monday being interviewed by Jake Tapper, uh, crowing about Venezuela, crowing about Greenland, crowing about US dominance over the Western Hemisphere and why, uh, international law is nothing more than a nicety. Uh, power, force, strength, that's what determines everything. Anyway, I think emblematic of where things are going with the Trump administration. Let's start first with this clip.
"Well, what the president said is true. The United States of America is running Venezuela. By definition, that's true, Jake. We live in a law or sorry, we live in a world in which you can you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world we've been saying since the beginning of time."
"But in terms of day-to-day operations in Venezuela, that is President Acting President Rodriguez is right. It's not some sort of American emissary."
"No, what I'm saying is it's, and we'll we'll keep going here, Jake. So, I want to say what I'm saying, and you'll follow up. But what I'm saying is just one level above that, which is that by definition, we are in charge because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce. So for them to do commerce, they need our permission. For them to be able to run an economy, they need our permission. So the United States is in charge. The United States is running the country during this transition period."
All right, Richard. Um, there you have it. Plain speaking on the part of the Trump administration. Uh, anyway, I want to get your take.
Okay. It's always a little difficult for me, uh, watching or listening to Mr. Miller, uh, to take any of this seriously. I only do because he's in the position that he is in, uh, or at least appears to be. Let me begin by explaining why he doesn't understand what he's talking about. The United States has been able to station military all around Venezuela for many, many years. There's nothing new. There's nothing exceptional about that. Number two, it has at least as far back as 2016 sanctioned Venezuela's oil industry in half a dozen different ways. So that's at least 10 years old. However, in all of those situations, the Venezuelan government under Maduro was able to operate, make basic decisions about domestic policy, much of its foreign policy, who, for example, it sells its oil to. Very important matters. The sanctions had effects. It they reduced their oil exports. They plunged the economy into a terrible decline, although in the last few years it has come back from how bad it was in the immediate aftermath of 2016. Okay. So the notion that the United States is some fundamental control apparatus doesn't distinguish between what the situation was 10 years ago or 5 years ago or what it became when you abducted the sitting president of the country. The United States also exercises sanctions. We are the country in the world that sanctions more other countries than anyone else, and no one else is close. So if you want to think like Mr. Miller, and I'm being generous, think like Mr. Miller, then you have to get at least some of your historical context straight. Operating sanctions, whatever you think about them, good or bad, whether they work or they don't, that is part of what countries do to one another in the modern world. They always did it in one way or another, but yeah, they do it now. But none of those actions, interfering, publicity, positioning troops, none of those actions is the same as attacking with your military force the internal life of another country.
What Mr. Miller forgets is that the whole world, including the United States, reacted to the horrors of World War I by making agreements and establishing institutions. In that case, it was called the League of Nations after World War I, whose job it was to prevent countries from doing to one another what Mr. Trump just did. After World War II, and why did we have World War II? Because one country, upset with the status quo after World War I, Germany, and perhaps if you want Japan also, were so upset by the consequences, so determined to change the outcome of what was happening, namely their decline relative to the rest of the world, that they broke the agreements, and nobody paid any attention. And within a very short number of years, we had another devastating world war, which reinforced in the world the view that we have to develop institutions and agreements amongst ourselves as nations not to do certain things. So we established the United Nations, and the United States took a leading position in doing that, and it got everyone, including Germany, Japan, China, Russia, to be part of that arrangement, and all of that was devoted to accepting that there are power relations and military relations and tensions in the world, and those have to be resolved. But we resolve them by working in and with the United Nations so that we don't do what Germany and Japan did after World War I to blow up the League of Nations. We're not going to blow up the United Nations in order to then repeat all of this history, which is in a thousand textbooks. Perhaps Mr. Miller has never read them. Perhaps he never took a course in what all of this is about. Or perhaps he has found it convenient not to think about those questions. But what Mr. Trump did was violate the last century of collective efforts of the United States as well as virtually every other country not to do what he just did. And Mr. Miller doesn't seem to be able. It It's not that he doesn't refute what I just said. He pretends that none of that's in the air, that that that he's telling us what the real world. You see, Mr. Miller has access to the real world, while the questioner, Mr. Tapper, and you and I, Brian, we live in in some other world that isn't the real one that Mr. Miller is going to explain to us.
Richard, the, uh, I think that's so important, the points that you're making. Uh, I wonder from your point of view, how much of this is the rhetoric of the Steven Miller type of forces within the Trump administration and Trump himself, and how much it represents something new in terms of US and thus global politics? Uh, Trump obviously, as we have talked about, and I think as everyone knows, has this one part of his personality, let's call it delusional narcissism, uh, where he decides that he has this immense power and he's the guy and he can shape and reshape the world. And, you know, he talks like that constantly. Then he bombs Venezuela, uses American special operation forces. By the way, many people were killed in Venezuela, uh, including a very, very large detail of, uh, Maduro's security team who were fighting, uh, but who were overwhelmed by this amazing demonstration of American military primacy, surveillance, uh, the capacity to carry out sort of a raid. They, they shut down the entire electricity for a for a civilian neighborhood. Uh, they were able to block signals. So basically, the the Maduro team became essentially blind at that moment. They crushed, crashed in. They killed a lot of people. They kidnapped the president. They bring him back on a US, uh, aircraft. He's in a prison in the Manhattan detention center here in New York City, where we are. I mean, it's like the, I made the analogy to the Roman colonies, the Roman colonies, the Rome of of antiquity, where the Roman Empire brought the rebellious slaves back to Rome and and treated them as trophies or had them in the Coliseum or executed them and put their heads on a spike. You know, it had that kind of performative element to it. I'm just wondering from your point of view whether the Trump administration is now, and Stephen Miller, that whole group, is now so, um, sort of bloodthirsty and emboldened that even though the reality is the real world that you and I and other people do recognize, that they've somehow placed themselves from the point of view of policy and strategy and decision-making in some other realm where they think they can do which things that will obviously backfire on them. I just wonder what you think about the taking the temperature of the administration right now.
Well, I think you're partly right that it is a a way of a relatively small group isolated in the White House and in in the higher reaches of that wing of the Republican party talking to each other a great deal. If you listen to Miller, if you miss listen to Navarro, the economist who advises, you get this feeling like you do when you listen to Mr. Trump. But let me try to tell you what I think is going on. You began by asking me what's new here, or some words to that effect, and I, that's a very good question, and the answer is nothing. The United States has done this in one Latin American country after another. There was the best testimony that you can get was the testimony about that given yesterday by Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs to the Security Council at the UN. They invited him. He gave a short talk, and as is often the case with him, he hit the nail pretty well on the head. You know, he's come a long way from the hatchet job on Russia that he did after 1989, for which he is doing penance. My suspicion watching him is really in his own mind and heart, and he's trying to to to be a better human being, and he's, and he's succeeding at it, to to give him his due. He explains there, citing sources because he's a professor, of the literally dozens and dozens of efforts to overthrow governments that have been conducted by the United States, both between the end of World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union as part of the Cold War, and then since, with the Cold War gone, continuing to do it, using military force sometimes, s not always the CIA, sometimes not always surveillance mechanisms, everything you just listed. So this is [clears throat] nothing new. It has been done by Republicans, it has been done by Democrats. One thing is, however, a little different. Up until Mr. Trump, the effort was made by quite a considerable effort to portray all of this under a veneer of babble about democracy and freedom and all kinds of stuff like that. Blatantly untrue if you took 10 minutes to look at the situation using other sources, but it's what the American public wanted to hear, and it's what the government felt it ought to say. So, Mr. Trump represents a political force that rejects all of that. He wants to be the tough guy who tells it like it is. That's Mr. Miller. Now, I'm going to tell you, we're really the toughest guy in the block. And now, why would that happen? In other words, why would we now have a leader and and his advisor flunkies like Miller talking like this? First of all, it's politically unspeakably stupid. All over the world, the overwhelming mentality of the world we live in is now captured by the term anti-colonialism. Asia, Africa, Latin America, everybody is proud that the last 50 years, all the mass of the people of the world have thrown off the yoke of being run by some European or quasi-European country. That's where people are. So if what you do is say, "I'm going in there, I'm taking over," you are telling the world, "I am the embodiment of what you hate, of what you feel is the burden you unlock." The level of damage this does to every other project the United States and its citizens undertake is enormous, will last for years, and is incalculably large. That's why for the last 75 years, you've covered it over in verbiage about freedom and democracy and all the rest. So this, this is you're shooting yourself in the foot. But why would you do it? Here's my last point. I think the reality is that the American people, including Mr. Trump and Miller, are feeling something, having a hard time putting it into their heads. Because like other feelings that are important in life, it's one thing to feel it. It's another thing to allow your brain to accept it. Think about how we think about death or sex or a whole lot of other issues. So, we feel a reality which is the American Empire is over. We've had a good hundred years where we were the number one country. We aren't anymore. Not economically, not politically, and we don't know, but maybe even militarily. This is impossible to cognize, to make to to put into your brain, because it is we are a people who have lived, all of us who are alive today, in the empire period. Mr. Trump, therefore, is doing something that primitive people do when confronted with a decline of what they assumed would be eternal. They're retreating into a combination of manageable empire-like behavior and fantasy. And that's what Mr. Miller articulates. "We are going to dominate the Western Hemisphere." You know why they're saying that? And B, by the way, the strategic paper issued by the State Department on the 4th of December says this explicitly: "We're retreating to Latin America because we can't do it anywhere else. We can't do it in Asia anymore. The Chinese make it impossible. We can't do it in Europe because it's too costly, too expensive, and we're having too many problems with the Europeans. So, we're going to do it. We're going to rediscover the Monroe Doctrine. We're going to try to be the big puffy in our little area because we can't do it anymore. And that'll make us feel better. We have to feel better that we are still somehow touching that imperial power." So look at Mr. Trump. That's why he has to babble about Greenland or Canada or Mexico or drop a bomb in a village in Nigeria. What in the What are you doing? This is a kind of make-believe neo-colonialism, costing us enormously because we are taking on the mantle of the devil for most people in the world and being nothing other than a desperate effort to hold on to some shreds of the imperial position we dream of not having lost, even though in our gut we know we have.
I think you're right, Richard, that the people of the world are looking at what Trump is doing or their statements or what Steven Miller says, and they realize that the assault on Venezuela, this idea that the US can run Venezuela, or the US can grab this territory or that territory, or that the Monroe Doctrine or the or the Roosevelt Corollary, which was established at the time the US was seizing Puerto Rico and seizing Cuba and seizing the Philippines, that early 20th century period, and Trump says now, "This is the Trump Corollary that he's going to reassert and establish forever American dominance over the Western Hemisphere." This language and these actions, um, are basically sort of a something that is repudiated by the people of the world. I 100% agree with you, and I think the public opinion in the world, maybe unlike the 17th century or 18th century, public opinion today actually matters.
Uh, people are not going back. They're not going into a colonial situation. You look at Iraq. The US could overwhelm the Saddam Hussein government in three weeks, between March 19th and April 9th, 2003. But then the the resistance grew and grew and grew, and and eventually the Americans couldn't stay there, and, uh, even though a million Iraqis died or hundreds of thousands, people are going to just keep fighting because they're not going to go back into a colonial, uh, situation. So I 100% agree with you.
I want to ask you though, a final question, and it, it's kind of where I started. It's about your tweet, the Richard Wolf tweet that we want, you know, we want people to to look at your material, your books. Now, I'm encouraging people to read your tweets. But here it is. I thought it was very interesting. "Europe tried to take Russia's money to pay for its war against Russia and Ukraine. It failed. Trump plans to take Venezuela's oil to pay for the US attack and 'running' Venezuela. How 21st century imperialism tries to finance itself." This is an important question. Lenin wrote the book in 1916 during World War I, the war, war you mentioned, um, called Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. It certainly wasn't the last stage. We're in different stages. Uh, but what stage are we in now? And what about this issue of financing?
Well, you know, this is my own area that I've spent my life on. The first book I ever published was a study of British colonialism in East Africa, in the country now known as, uh, Kenya, known as an independent African country. [clears throat] And the book, in case anyone's interested, published by Yale University Press, uh, it's called The Economics of Colonialism. And one of the things I discovered working in the British Museum and the British Colonial Office and in East Africa, reading endlessly the documents of the administration, was from the time the British took that colony, 1895 to be precise, until the end of my period of study, 1930, those 35 years of establishing the Kenya colony. It was first called the East Africa Protectorate. Their number one issue was how to pay for it. And and they explained why we use taxpayer money. In this case, British taxpayers paid a lot of money for the military activity, for administering the colony, for crushing the resistance, uh, of the Kikuyu and Luo and other people of Kenya. And that's very costly and is a long-term commitment. We can't expect something like that, which is beneficial to a very small number of British settlers who went to Kenya and grew the coffee that that this society came to depend on, Arabica coffee, that we drink to this day. You, me, everybody else. So we have to come up with a way of paying for it. We have to figure out a way to make the colony pay for the cost of its own exploitation by the British. And so what they did, very simple, they rammed the the mass of the people into tiny reservations like Indian reservations in the United States, where they couldn't survive. And the only way they could survive would be to work for a pittance on the coffee plantations of the white British settlers who were given the best land after that was taken from the Africa. The story is so outrageous, you can't quite believe it. But this idea that the clever colonial power makes the oppressed colonized people pay the cost of their own exploitation. That is the foundational financial logic and objective of every empire. That's why it occur, you know, Mr. Trump doesn't know anything about this, and Mr. Miller even less. But it occurs to them because they know that it's gonna, as already, that that operation cost a fortune, and you have two people sitting in a New York jail. Well, you know, that that's not a good return for what you paid out. And I'm not even talking about the loss of life. So that's why you hear this noise about oil. By the way, highly problematic. The quality of the oil that Venezuela has is a big problem in the world oil market. Not at all clear that that's a viable economic proposition. The Chinese bought that oil partly to support Venezuela. There's much other oil that Chinese can and will switch to if the United States fools around there. The reality is very different. But I can see why he's doing it. He wants to be able to tell the American people, "That's what he's already doing. Don't worry. Don't worry. This absurd political action, dangerous for America, very costly to us, won't in the end be a big cause because we're going to get a lot of oil money." It's mostly BS. Very, very unclear. And by the way, if you look at what happened to the stocks of the oil companies, if you look at the statements of oil company leaders, if you look at commentators, which I do for a living, they're all telling you there is no oil boom that's involved in any of this because it's too expensive to repair the oil system there. You know, 10 years of sanctions have done a job on their oil industry. And given the price and given that heavy oil, sour oil quality that they have there, this is not anything other than a talking babble for a a president who backed himself into this corner.