Notes on Venezuela and Sociopathic Imperialism
Donald Trump, fresh off his great victory-that-will-end-in-quagmire in Venezuela, has instantly returned to his repeated threats to attack Greenland if Denmark does not cede that territory voluntarily. To state the obvious, it is long past the time when anyone can rationally try to explain away such threats as “trolling” or “joking.” He is saying explicitly that the United States “needs Greenland,” and that the United States will soon have Greenland, one way or another. This is coercion plain and simple, backed by unveiled hints of possible military conquest. In essence, this is mafia strong-arming of the sort one would expect from a vainglorious thug like Vladimir Putin — and should therefore also expect from Putin’s most ardent admirer and toady. In this connection, it is worth recalling another obvious fact, namely that Denmark is a member of NATO, and therefore Trump’s warnings and ultimatums against that country’s territory and sovereignty demonstrate direct hostility towards NATO, a military alliance of which both America and Denmark are founding members, thus reinforcing Trump’s de facto allegiance to Putin, who would love nothing more than a NATO break-up instigated by the alliance’s most powerful member.
Denmark’s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, in addition to emphasizing the implications, noted above, of the fact that Denmark and Greenland belong to NATO, stated a second obvious fact that, taken together with the first, reveals everything one needs to know about U.S. foreign policy under Trump and his band of bootlickers.
Specifically, Frederiksen said, “We already have a defense agreement between the Kingdom and the United States today, which gives the United States wide access to Greenland.”
In other words, the U.S. government already has a long-established military presence on Greenland, as approved and continually supported by the Danish government. American annexation would add nothing of significance to U.S. interests from a national security point of view, not to mention the irreparable harm it would do to U.S. national security through weakening if not destroying the NATO alliance. So why even contemplate such an act of aggression, let alone openly threaten it?
To answer that question, we need only take a quick look at the well-displayed psychology of Donald Trump. To state what everyone knows, Trump is what modern psychological jargon designates as a sociopath, and what ancient Platonists would call a tyrannical soul. By any name, this is a man whose fears and desires have rendered him incapable of genuine empathy or friendship. He sees every human relation as a simple power conflict because that is his own psychological and social condition.
Remember the infamous celebrity TV program clip released in the weeks before the 2016 election, in which Trump boasted to the show’s host that he would casually seduce other men’s wives, and most significantly, grab the women by the private parts. Remember, more precisely, his explanation of this behavior: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it.” Notice that he did not say, “They like it” or “They ask for it.” He said, in a perfect revelation of his mind, “They let you do it.” In other words, the only factor at play in determining whether such behavior towards other human beings is acceptable or justifiable is the issue of whether they will submit. It’s a power game, and the man with sufficient fame and money can get away with things that other men cannot. People with less fame and money — less power, as Trump defines power — will acquiesce to your demands. Whether they approve of or appreciate your behavior never enters the equation, because it is ultimately of no consequence to the tyrannical soul — after all, judging others on the standard of his own mind, this soul is naturally unaware of any motives other than conquest, performative success, self-aggrandizement. The only vital question is whether others will surrender to your superior power.
What would stop such a man, devoid of empathy, fellow feeling, or friendship, driven by a fear-induced need for constant demonstrations of power defined as the capacity to subdue others to his will, and granted (as he sees it) personal control of the most powerful military on Earth, from subjecting smaller countries, including long-time allies and trading partners, to threats of force issued with open disdain for their wishes, their sovereignty, or their rightful territorial claims, not to mention a total disregard for human decency, accepted norms, or established precedent?
What would stop him? Only one thing: the fear of being resisted by someone stronger than himself, who might do to his will and self-respect precisely what he forever seeks to do to the will and self-respect of others. The only governments on this planet whom Trump respects enough not to cross — whose countries he would not, so to speak, grab by the private parts to prove his twisted notion of manhood — are those whom he fears, namely those of the thuggish souls he perceives to be stronger (less constrained by human feeling) and more assertive (less risk averse) than himself, which at this moment means primarily Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and possibly Kim Jong Un.
The upshot of this, geopolitically, is two-fold.
First, Donald Trump fundamentally disbelieves in alliances, for the same reason that a sociopath in his private life is incapable of the loyalty and love definitive of true friendship. He does not see humanity as divided into natural friends and then the rest, for he sees in everyone only a pale reflection of himself: lacking empathy, lacking integrity, incapable of honoring a commitment, and hence impossible to trust, such that the ancient maxim, “All things in common among friends,” can only be regarded as a sucker’s game. On this assumption, the only way to be assured of access to another person’s (or country’s) material goods or advantageous conditions is to coercively take these from him.
Second, the president of the United States is psychologically calibrated to palliate his deep-seated feelings of weakness and vulnerability by abusing, coercing, and generally manhandling any and every country with which America is formally or informally allied, in order to impress, appease, or otherwise shield himself from the ire of America’s most dangerous enemies. The normalization of executive-ordered domestic terror and international tariffs that has been the leitmotif of Trump’s second presidential term is the indignant lunge of a frightened little megalomaniac who cannot abide a world in which anyone disagrees with him, holds interests not subordinate to his, or refuses to fear and submit to his will about anything whatsoever.
A few weeks earlier, Donald Trump issued a pardon to the former president of Honduras, who had been serving a forty-five-year prison sentence after having been convicted in an American court of crimes related to trafficking massive amounts of illegal drugs into the United States. Last week, however, Donald Trump ordered the president of Venezuela toppled and removed to the U.S. to face drug trafficking charges in an American court. There is nothing to explain here, nothing that is not obvious from the actions themselves and the identity of the individual who performed them. His illogical whims rule, because the rule of his illogical whims — or rather the world’s apparent inability to resist the rule of his illogical whims — is, to his mind, the surest demonstration of his power. Irrationality is, in truth, the very negation of genuine human power, but negation has a visceral appeal all its own, to the weak.
Trump believes that he, his family, and his corporate cronies/manipulators are going to make a lot of money on Venezuelan oil. He does not care who governs Venezuela, or whether that government is legitimate in any way, let alone representative of the Venezuelan people, as long as there is money to be made there. Will he cut a deal to share the profits with Vladimir Putin? Who’s to say, for that matter, that he hasn’t already done so? In any case, when push comes to shove, I have little doubt he will do what Putin demands, unless and until he suddenly realizes that Putin has become as much of a lost cause as he himself is — as all two-bit thugs are, in the end.
