During the presidency of George W. Bush , news such as that coming out of Venezuela today would have suggested the premise of a kind of South American Marshall Plan, which, like the liberation of Europe from Nazi-fascism in 1945, could have propitiated, with the extension of the US area of influence, liberation and a new dawn of democracy for the victims of a regime of criminal oppression.

Trump’s ‘Monroe Doctrine’ 2.0

But the neo-con doctrine that theorised the universalisation of political freedom as the new American power doctrine and the export of democracy as the new principle of global order isthe exact opposite of the Monroe Doctrine, which Donald Trump has repurposed to return the system of international relations to the nineteenth-century canon of power balances (and imbalances), with a partition of the world into areas of geographical entitlement of the great military empires.

That the neocon doctrine crashed against a reality that belied many of its confident pledges does not mean that its imperial design did not have this ambitiously Westernized sign in the ideological-cultural sense, namely that of the creation of a global ‘open society’.

Trump’s words prelude a US proxy in Caracas

That instead what is taking place in Caracas is not the liberation of millions of Venezuelans, but theinstallation of a regime allied to Washington and the establishment of an American military protectorate over one of the states with the largest oil reserves in the world is much more than suspicion and inference, given that Trump has never hidden the fact that he considers the entire American continent as a sort of Washingtonian Russkiy Mir and that he believes that the occupation of Venezuela, no less than theannexation of Greenland and Panama, serves American interests and therefore makes US military intervention ipso facto legitimate.

On the other hand, it is no mystery that Trump has never considered the military aggression of Ukraine to be an infringement of the principle of political sovereignty of a democratic state, but on the contrary, the result of an unnecessary provocation against Russia, i.e. support for European and Atlantic ambitions of a poor country that is useless for American interests, located in the heart of the post-Soviet world and therefore expendable to Moscow’s pretensions.

When he says that, had he been president, the war in Ukraine would never have broken out, he means exactly this: that the American commitment would have been to ensure that Putin would have achieved in a few hours in Kyiv what the US achieved tonight in Caracas. And nothing excludes – indeed everything suggests – that the exchange between Venezuela and Ukraine today is also part of the Russian-American plans.

American intervention is (no longer) synonymous with liberation

Trump didn’t liberate Venezuela, he took it under a laughable pretext, cracking down on the drug trade, which will continue as before: which shows how the hybrid Maga war is no less brazen than the Russian one. How he manages it is still in doubt and probably in the making. There is no doubt about what Trump would like to do with it: what Putin would like to do with Ukraine. That Maduro’s Venezuela was a bloody dictatorship and Zelensky’s Ukraine a heroic democracy does not mean that Putin’s and Trump’s plans are different.

Of course, unlike what his crony in geopolitical affairs stationed in the Kremlin can afford, the American president remains harnessed by a system of constitutional constraints (administered, moreover, by a Supreme Court more than negligent towards him) that prevent him from doing anything he would like, at home and abroad, and thus still make for a blessedly imperfect system that, if he could, he would establish by agreement with all the ‘greats’ of the Earth and their willing feudal lords.

But Trump, like all political public dangers, should be judged by what he wants, not what he can. To consider him a possible ‘liberator’, in Venezuela or elsewhere, is too optimistic not to be stupid.