In this article, Adam Creighton contextualises and disseminates the IPA’s research into Australia’s National Defence
Perhaps not since Theodore Roosevelt has a US president been so blunt about the real reason America intervenes abroad: naked self-interest.
Members of Donald Trump’s MAGA base shouldn’t fear their children are about to die in the jungles of Venezuela in another doomed attempt to export democracy. They should admire their President’s candour.
Trump made no serious effort to cloak the seizure of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, last week in the familiar language of freedom, humanitarianism or international law.
Instead, Trump spoke openly about monopolising Venezuela’s vast oil reserves for American benefit – a clarity that finally buried the so-called rules-based global order, which never truly existed anyway.
It’s hard to imagine even those diehard spruikers of the fictitious global order, Defence Minister Richard Marles and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, uttering the phrase for years now that the ultimate guarantor of our security didn’t even attempt to cloak its brazen intervention as anything other than America First.
The outrage was understandable among the UN set – many thousands of high-paying bureaucratic jobs hinge on at least lip service to international law – but not the surprise.
For all Trump’s talk of peace and the presumed isolationist bent of his administration, the President already has bombed at least a half-dozen countries – including Somalia, Nigeria and Iran – not even one year into his second term. That’s far more than Joe Biden did in his entire four years in office.
The Venezuela move was “shock and awe”, Trump-style: no boots on the ground, no rhetoric about democracy or the enforcement of international law.
Trump was putting his administration’s freshly minted national security strategy into action.
“We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere,” the 33-page security strategy document states, describing what it calls the “Trump corollary” to the well-known Monroe Doctrine.
It remains an unambiguous victory for Trump, who has shaken off the TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) accusation, and the US, which demonstrated its unrivalled ability to project power only months after a brilliant high-stakes bombing operation in Iran.
Whatever cover Trump’s “illegal” action supposedly gives Russia and China to behave similarly is dwarfed by their military and economic humiliation.
Energy-poor China, which must import about three-quarters of its oil, had seen Venezuela as a reliable supplier. Meanwhile Trump has deprived Moscow of billions of dollars’ worth of future arms sales to Caracas and highlighted the worthlessness of a freshly inked strategic partnership that Maduro signed with Russia last year.
But the tactical success of Trump’s intervention victory could easily become a long-term strategic loss, not to mention the ongoing awkwardness for Australia in particular.
Venezuela’s oil reserves, which oil-exporting America doesn’t even need, are no El Dorado, costing more to extract per barrel than the prevailing oil price, owing to their poor quality and the difficulties of pumping them.
Top US oil executives, predictably, told Trump at the White House last week they wouldn’t invest the $US100bn ($149bn) required to update Venezuela’s dilapidated oil infrastructure without investment certainty, which is impossible without US boots on the ground – something Trump is unlikely to countenance.
The Venezuelan military, not to mention the families of the 80-odd Venezuelans killed in the US operation, aren’t likely to warm to US orders in coming months.
Maduro’s regime, which has brazenly stolen elections and presided over one of the biggest collapses in national income of any nation in modern history, is still in control.
New interim president Delcy Rodriguez, a veteran left-wing revolutionary, has a track record of publicly hating the US. Trump’s disregard for opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who symbolically offered her Nobel Peace Prize to the US President, won’t please pro-democracy forces within Venezuela either; they’ve realised their initial dancing in the street at the prospect of a new democratic government was rather premature.
Even if the US could miraculously lift Venezuelan output from roughly one million barrels a day to the three million it once produced in the 1970s, OPEC simply would adjust supply to neutralise any meaningful price impact. The US doesn’t even need the oil.
What Trump has achieved is a tactical victory, not a strategic one – and potentially a long-term loss. His audacious act will harden opposition to the US, which is no longer as relatively powerful as it once was in the immediate aftermath of the World War II era.
The spectacle of the US, home to only 4 per cent of the world’s population, dragging a foreign leader of a mid-sized nation before a domestic US court, whatever the accuracy of the charges, won’t sit well with many actual and future heads of state.
Russia and China, not to mention other South American nations, newly fearful of US power, will have strong incentives to redouble their defence spending and in particular their counter-espionage operations.
Trump publicly slammed US defence contractor Raytheon last week, but that industry is the only clear winner long term.
Almost two years ago I wrote an unpopular column in these pages arguing “there is not, and never was, a rules-based global order, despite our politicians’ fondness for evoking it”. I hate to gloat but we now have yet more evidence.
That’s cold comfort, though, given Australia’s near total reliance on the US – a nation most of our biggest trading partners and neighbours must privately if not publicly loathe even more – for our defence.
