Might makes right.
That, delivered with a deliberate swagger, was the message President Donald Trump sent with the audacious weekend abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
It was intended not just for America’s hemispheric neighbors.
Why We Wrote This
When is a NATO ally not a NATO ally? When – like Washington has – it threatens to invade Greenland, the territory of treaty partner Denmark. Flabbergasted European leaders are scrambling to respond to a hitherto unthinkable scenario.
Friend and foe alike around the globe were also meant to take note: Mr. Trump made that explicit, after the Venezuela raid, by reviving efforts to wrest ownership of the Arctic territory of Greenland from a European NATO ally, Denmark.
Yet a critical question remains, in Venezuela, Greenland, and other priority foreign-policy arenas: Will Mr. Trump, even if he is ready to deploy U.S. military might, prove able to bend other countries to America’s will?
Coming almost 12 months since his return to the White House, the attack in Caracas served as an exclamation point to Mr. Trump’s redefinition of the United States’ place on the world stage.
Gone is a decades-old U.S. commitment, under presidents from both political parties, to a “rules-based” international order managed through organizations and alliances – above all, NATO – that Washington has built and led since the Second World War.
Now, the focus is on “America first” priorities, secured unilaterally by U.S. economic, political, and military power.
There has been a value shift as well, away from a declared preference for democratic rule, human rights, and international law. Now, value appears to be measured in dollars and cents, business opportunities, and control over resources – oil in Venezuela or, in Greenland, untapped deposits of rare earth elements critical for military and other high-tech manufacturing.
The Venezuela attack put that new vision into action.
Shrugging off previous administrations’ habit of laying diplomatic groundwork for military action, Mr. Trump ordered a raid that showcased U.S. strengths in intelligence, planning, and pinpoint execution – impervious to accusations that it violated international law.
Nor was the president visibly bothered about ensuring an end to Mr. Maduro’s brutally authoritarian rule.
Mr. Trump dismissed the prospect of helping install a new government under María Corina Machado, the opposition leader and Nobel Peace laureate, whose chosen candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, won a landslide victory in Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election.
At least until a “proper” transition could be achieved, he said America would “run” the country – working, he hoped, through the deposed Mr. Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez.
His main focus was clearly on Venezuela’s oil potential, which he expects U.S. companies to revive and expand.
But the attack also underscored the limitations to “might is right” unilateralism and raised the unanswered question of whether President Trump can succeed in persuading other countries to fall in line with his policy agenda.
In Venezuela, with a democratic transition on the back burner, he might get what he wants. Though industry experts say a U.S.-led oil renaissance is unlikely in the near term, Mr. Trump said this week that $2 billion worth of Venezuelan oil – stored and stockpiled as a result of U.S. sanctions – would soon be on its way to American refineries.
Still, if the newly elevated President Rodríguez does not do Washington’s bidding, what does Mr. Trump have left in his toolbox?
The administration has cultivated an image of renewed American military power, epitomized by Mr. Trump’s decision to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War.
But he has limited its deployment to a series of short, sharp demonstrations of muscle: last year’s bunker-busting bomb attack on Iranian nuclear facilities; a series of attacks against suspected narcotics smugglers off the Venezuelan coast and in the eastern Pacific; and the smash-and-grab raid in Caracas.
The president has shown no appetite for the kind of larger-scale action needed to make good on his claim to have “obliterated” Tehran’s nuclear program. Nor for the kind of sustained U.S. military commitment that would be required if Ms. Rodríguez or Maduro loyalists in Venezuela’s army ignore U.S. orders.
And Greenland?
Mr. Trump would presumably prefer to secure control of the island, and its roughly 60,000 inhabitants, through political and economic means, with the White House suggesting “buying” Greenland, something both the territory and Denmark have ruled out.
Yet officials also said this week that the president had not taken the military option off the table.
That is a war that, on paper, would be almost impossible to lose.
The U.S. already has a military base there. In agreement with Denmark, Washington based as many as 10,000 troops in Greenland during the Cold War, and the Danish and Greenland governments would likely be open to a renewed strengthening of the U.S. presence.
But not by force. European NATO leaders, including Trump-friendly Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, this week rejected the idea of a U.S. takeover.
Unilateral U.S. action, Denmark’s prime minister said, would signal the end of the transatlantic alliance. Its core Article 5 commitment – to mutual defense in the case of an attack on any member – was framed with Soviet Russia in mind. It would become a mockery if the aggressor was NATO’s own most powerful nation.
Is the collapse of America’s most important postwar alliance a price Mr. Trump would be willing to pay?
Perhaps. But the question suggests the need for a postscript to the “might is right” message from Caracas.
“Might,” by itself, may not always prove as valuable as it appears.
