It's already obvious enough that the military kidnapping of Venezuela's president was just the beginning. Now, as part of his Donroe Doctrine in this hemisphere, President Trump is not just trying to gain control of the giant iced island of Greenland, but also clearly going after a target that many past American governments have desired to do in: communist Cuba. He's already cut off that island's major supply of oil from Venezuela. And he's now threatening to impose "additional tariffs on imports from countries that sell or provide oil to Cuba." As he put it recently, "They have no money. They have no oil. They lived off Venezuelan money and oil, and none of that's coming now."
Barring a genuine surprise, it seems that Cuba could indeed be going down. After all, Trump has already ensured that not just those crucial Venezuelan oil supplies have been cut off, but hardly less crucial Mexican oil, too, as that country's president has buckled to the American one. It seems possible as well that Trump is actually weighing "a full naval blockade of the island."
And for Donald Trump these days, Cuba is just a passing phenomenon in a world distinctly for the taking (or so he imagines, anyway). Today, TomDispatch regular John Feffer considers what it means for "our" president to become a full-scale globocop (or do I mean globocriminal?). What a world" sigh" Tom
MAGA Outgrows Isolationism
And Yet America First Means America Alone
By John Feffer
A mere 15 years ago, during an epoch that now seems as distant as the Paleozoic era, an American president attempted to use military power to prevent a dictator from slaughtering his own citizens. Barack Obama billed the action in Libya as a humanitarian intervention, citing the new U.N. doctrine of "responsibility to protect" (R2P). The president hoped to avert a massacre by Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi rather than, as usual, coming in afterwards to count the dead and try to bring the malefactors to justice.
Obama intervened like a global police officer, following the letter of the (international) law. Eager to be seen as a "good cop," the president even promised to "lead from behind." It's impossible to know if the U.S.-led action did indeed prevent massive war crimes. However, the disastrous aftermath of that Libyan campaign -- the summary execution of Qaddafi and a civil war that would kill tens of thousands -- was yet more evidence that Washington's attempts to police the world are quixotic at best.
Public support for the Libyan action was decidedly mixed, with criticism of the president coming from all sides of the political spectrum. On the left, former Congressman Dennis Kucinich thundered that "we have moved from President Bush's doctrine of preventive war to President Obama's assertion of the right to go to war without even the pretext of a threat to our nation." Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation complained that Obama was too scrupulous in his adherence to the principles of R2P, which might only raise the bar for future U.S. interventions.
Ah, the good old days, when the left and the right both took international law seriously enough to argue over how a U.S. president should engage with it!
Donald J. Trump has shown no such scruples. He considers international law nothing more than a trifling impediment by which the weak try to drag down the strong. He boasts that he didn't even bother to consult the U.N. when pursuing his trumped-up peace plans and creating his laughably ill-named "Board of Peace." He certainly didn't consider international law recently when he bombed Nigeria, seized Venezuela's President Nicola's Maduro, and threatened to annex Greenland. He may be the first American president to treat international law as if it were as fictional as intergalactic law.
By contrast, the only principle that Trump now invokes in his foreign policy is the infamous law of the jungle. He believes that power -- its threat and its exercise -- is all that matters for apex predators like the United States (and himself). The rest is just the chittering of potential prey.
"My own morality. My own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me," the amoral Trump told the New York Times in a recent (and terrifying) interview. "I don't need international law."
Global cop, then, would not seem to be a suitable aspiration for the likes of Donald Trump. Unlike Obama, he's not interested in making sure that laws are observed and miscreants punished. Instead, Trump practically fawns over the miscreants: Russia's Vladimir Putin, Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman. The duties of policing the planet -- both the adherence to law and the expenditure of resources -- simply don't appeal to him.
"We're spending tremendous amounts of money for decades policing the world, and that shouldn't be the priority," Trump said back in 2018. "We want to police ourselves and we want to rebuild our country."
That was the old Trump. The new Trump looks at things quite differently.
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