December 31 has come and gone. After 12 months of Trump 2.0, many expressed their relief that the year 2025 is no more. For many, nervous exhaustion had reached its highest tolerable pitch. It seemed as if the first cold weeks of 2026 might provide a moment to take a breath and begin preparing a less frenetic future. But the relief was short-lived. The year was two days old when US President Donald Trump offered the world a spectacle meant to set the tone for twelve more months of mounting havoc.
If you enjoy geopolitical melodrama, 2026 promises to be a record-breaker. But records aren’t the only thing being broken. With his foray into a presidential bedroom in Caracas, Trump has ensured that any notion of international law or a “rules-based order” has been smashed to smithereens.
In the West, January is traditionally a time of cocooning, digesting and detoxifying after the excesses of “the 12 days of Christmas.” Here in France, January stands as the month that offers us 31 days to get back into contact with all our relations as we communicate our meilleurs vœux to everyone we know or are in contact with. The usual translation of meilleurs voeux is “best wishes.” But the word vœu also means “vow” and is, in fact, the origin of the English word. In English-speaking countries, the closest cultural equivalent to the obligatory meilleurs vœux in France is the ritual we call the New Year’s resolution, which is a kind of vow to oneself. We’re all expected to come up with one or more benign intentions that we then “resolve” to accomplish.
Last Saturday, to honor the new year, Trump launched “Operation Absolute Resolve” in Venezuela. It was nothing less than a brazen assault on a sovereign nation that ended with the successful kidnapping of a sitting president based on the pretext of his having violated a US law. Most ordinary citizens rarely carry out any of their New Year’s resolutions for more than a few days. Trump’s “absolute resolve” sets a new standard.
After Trump’s well-orchestrated act was carried out so “absolutely,” the administration went into “Mission Accomplished” mode, forecasting a future of sunlight for the American people, oil companies and even Venezuelans (as a kind of afterthought). Investigative journalist Seth Hettena attempted to bring us back to reality, accurately predicting that “questions about legality, geopolitics, and consequences will demand answers in the days ahead.” After describing a complex operation cleanly executed thanks to “good intelligence” (i.e. this was a covert action led by the CIA, including bribery and recruitment of Maduro’s inner circle), Hettena provides his own guarded, provisional answer to the question of consequences: “What comes next, however, may prove far more complicated than what happened before dawn.”
Domestically, this could herald a much-needed constitutional crisis around the question of executive authority to declare war. In particular because the administration chose not to notify even the “Gang of Eight” (top Congressional leaders) prior to the strike. This stands as a direct challenge to theWar Powers Resolution of 1973. Then there is the question of how the court in the Southern district of New York will handle the trial of a foreign head of state for crimes no honest observer believes he should be accused of.
A hard reign’s a-gonna fall
The international consequences will likely be greater. The absoluteness of Trump’s resolve reinforces and exaggerates the impression the people and leaders of other nations are beginning to have of Washington’s lack of respect for or utter indifference to any other government’s sovereignty. In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, clearly stated what Washington thinks of nearly every other country in the world that cannot be called a superpower:
“We live in a world in which 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 since the beginning of time.”
This message was clearly directed at the nations of Europe, a group that includes some former superpowers. One prominent member of that group is Denmark, which happens to control a landmass the Trump administration is seeking to annex: Greenland. Miller’s argument boils down to this: “You may be our ally, even within the world’s oldest and most powerful military alliance, NATO, which was designed specifically to prevent its members from going to war with one another, but we have decided to annex your territory by force and are thus justified by ‘laws’ that date from ‘the beginning of time.’”
Miller is Jewish and a committed Zionist. Does this reflect his political or theological thinking? Is he referring to the first day of Creation in the Book of Genesis, when God created day and night, effectively starting time? The reasoning he employs resembles that of the current Zionist regime in Israel that justifies its deeds, including genocide, by affirming its belief in fundamental laws from the past that overpower and cancel the effect of modern laws.
This formulation of the principle behind US foreign policy marks a shift in the former “rules-based order” recently championed with numbing regularity by former US President Joe Biden’s State Department. Biden’s and all earlier administrations were no stranger to the use of hard power as evidenced by the number of wars and military interventions the US has initiated or been involved in since the end of World War II. Officially, one can count five to seven major wars. According to a report by the Congressional Research Service, the “U.S. launched 251 Military Interventions since 1991 and 469 since 1798.”
In other words, Miller’s belief in the law of hard power fails to qualify as an innovation. The practice and scope of hard power has undergone an obvious acceleration over the past 35 years. Before 1991, which marked the end of the Cold War, things were paradoxically calmer. Looking backwards, some may see the period between 1945 and 1991 as a kind of golden age in which US administrations put at least as much faith into developing soft power as they did to exercising hard power.
Despite the disastrous wars in Korea and Vietnam, the second half of the 20th century demonstrated that hard power can coexist alongside soft power. That was the secret of the success the US achieved throughout the Cold War, allowing Washington to credibly position itself as the “leader of the free world.” While the CIA was busy nevertheless overthrowing governments in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Indonesia, Bolivia and elsewhere, it was also collaborating with Hollywood, Madison Avenue and prestigious cultural publications such Encounter and Ramparts to promote the image of a nation seeking peace, harmony, pleasing entertainment and democracy while promoting US-inspired arts across the globe.
Trump’s team has no time for soft power. First of all, it’s expensive and its effects are at best long-term. As soon as he returned to the White House for a second term, Trump defunded USAID, the most significant official platform for spreading US soft power. Second, the focus on soft power inconveniently lowers the level of fear they believe to be the principal factor of motivation in politics. If other populations lose the habit of cowering in fear, buoyed by the idea that ultimately it was all about learning to get along and work together in peaceful pursuits, some of those foreigners may get the idea that revolt is possible.
The problem Hettena hints at is that such policies and brazen actions such as the one that played out last weekend in Caracas may produce blowback on the part of entire populations, who increasingly perceive the US as a threat to their way of life rather than a model to aspire to. And more significantly, it also provokes strategic resistance on the part of governments that increasingly seek the means of detaching themselves from US influence. When hard power becomes too visible and eclipses soft power, allies and partners begin to panic as they increasingly feel compelled to seek other sources of comfort.
Gordon Gekko in the Oval Office
When US President George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq to remove the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) they “knew” (and not just suspected) Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was hiding, most commentators not affected by the reigning sycophancy of the media said it was really about “the oil.” Only the most astute appeared to be aware of the fact that it was also the persuasive powers of the Israeli government that convinced Bush’s neocon administration to go to war with the nations that made Tel Aviv uncomfortable. As early as 2001, with the start of the war in Afghanistan, conservative Republican (but anti-neocon) Pat Buchanan in an article with the title, “Whose war is this?,” described the pressure coming from Bush’s neocon friends to “widen the war to include all of Israel’s enemies.”
In a television interview ten days after September 11, a very serious General Wesley Clark explained, with comic brio, his discovery at the Pentagon of a classified plan by the Department of Defense to invade seven countries in the Middle East over five years. The plan appeared derived from the neocon “Clean Break Memo” drafted for newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. So, not only were the critics right that access to Iraq’s oil rather than fear of non-existent WMDs was at the core of Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, the neocon clique that ran the government had literally fused aggressive Netanyahu’s Zionist extremism with US foreign policy, making it “logical” to conduct a regime change war in Iraq.
Fast forward to 2025, when a new Republican president, Trump, claimed that Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, was the head of a drug cartel and that justice required he be arrested and tried in New York. But, as soon as the deed was accomplished, Trump revealed his true motives, similar to Bush’s: Venezuelan oil. “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela, and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela, and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.”
This isn’t just access to oil. In Trump’s formulation, this is an updated version of Gordon Gekko’s celebration of greed in Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie, Wall Street. When Bush proclaimed his mission to remove Hussein’s WMD, all the media and most honest citizens believed those dreaded weapons existed. No reasonable person took Trump’s campaign against narco-terrorism seriously. As soon as Trump began bombing small boats in the Caribbean, the media mocked his claim that this constituted a threat to the US justifying extra-judicial killings. They knew it was about the combined interest of a cheap geopolitical power play and the desire to confiscate Venezuela’s resources.
In his Mission Accomplished speech, Bush celebrated ridding the world of an evil dictator, always an appealing argument for Americans who have been trained to hate dictators. Bush was, of course, lying when he claimed Hussein was an “ally of al-Qaeda” and that the successful military operation had prevented terrorists from potentially acquiring WMDs from the regime. But he never admitted, not even years later, that controlling Iraq’s oil was part of his agenda.
Trump, on the contrary, seized the occasion to use the idea of controlling oil and other Venezuelan resources, with the following proclamation: “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country, and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so.” He added, “We need total access. We need access to the oil and to other things in their country that allow us to rebuild their country.”
Greed is indeed good, as Gekko affirmed. Maria Corino Machado, whom many in the Trump administration hope to see as the future new Venezuelan president made it equally clear: “And American companies are in a super strategic position to invest. This country of Venezuela is going to be the brightest opportunity for investment of American companies, of good people that are going to make a lot of money.”
It’s unlikely that such a rosy outcome will come as easily as Trump and Machado make out. But Trump, to use one of his favorite expressions, “holds all the cards” and, like Miller, apparently believes he has done so “since the beginning of time.”
*[The Devil’s Advocatepursues the tradition Fair Observer began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more ofthe Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]
[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
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