In the initial rush of news Saturday morning, many commentators speculated that the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela was also a blow to President Vladimir Putin of Russia, since Venezuela and Russia are allies. To the contrary, it is a victory for Putin, because it is a blow — quite likely fatal — to the new world order of law, justice and human rights that was heralded in the wake of World War II.
That order was never as robust as its champions made it out to be. Many of the multilateral institutions created to foster cooperation and enforce international law have been dysfunctional, often because they were sabotaged by their most powerful members. And yet, some mechanisms worked; some laws were enforced; some crimes were punished and many more were probably prevented; millions of people had their freedom and dignity affirmed; and a reasonable hope persisted that a law-based, humanistic world order would be built. No longer.
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Kind of mockery
Illegality does not uphold the law. Starting wars of aggression does not make anyone safer. Colonization does not bring freedom. And colonization is what Trump promised when he dismissed María Corina Machado, a Nobel laureate with a credible claim of a popular mandate and international recognition, as lacking leadership qualities and said, in various ways, no fewer than four times, “We are going to run the country.”
This was a very particular kind of mockery, familiar to anyone who has paid attention to Putin. Russia’s president has claimed that his invasion of Ukraine was a mission to liberate the people of that country. He has claimed to be defending Russia’s sovereignty, which Ukraine’s existence never threatened. Putin has even claimed that Ukraine has illegitimately appropriated infrastructure created by his nation (well, by the Soviet Union, which Putin conflates with Russia) — just as Trump falsely claimed that Maduro perpetrated the largest theft of American property in history by nationalizing the oil industry that U.S. companies had helped build.
There is a world of difference between Maduro, an autocrat who has stayed in power by falsifying elections, and Ukraine’s legitimate, democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But what matters here is the similarity between the aggressors: Trump and Putin.
For years, Putin has been asserting a vision of a world divided by a few powerful men into spheres of influence. This, too, is the post-World War II order — the Cold War order, in which countries colonized by the Soviet Union were excluded from the liberal aspirations asserted by the West. It has long been clear that Trump instinctively shares this point of view: Carving up the world appears to be what he thinks political power is for. Whoever wrote the National Security Strategy that was made public in December codified this worldview as the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the United States’ 2-centuries-old assertion of power over the Western Hemisphere. During Saturday’s news conference, Trump appeared to have renamed the corollary the “Donroe Doctrine.”
Half a century ago, as a Soviet third-grader, I sat through months of lessons devoted to natural resources. The Russian term — polezniye iskopayemiye — is telling: It literally translates as “beneficial extractables.” Those Soviet school units were so boring that I can still remember the sense that the minute hand of the classroom clock was standing still. I remember, too, that granite is solid, metal is found in ore, oil is necessary for modern life and the purpose of land acquisition is extraction. I remember, too, a giant map of the Soviet Union in which the many mineral-rich regions were colored bright red. This, I remember being told, was our wealth.
‘Take the oil’
Trump seems to have arrived, on his own, at the same understanding of geography and politics that was pounded into the heads of Soviet schoolchildren, including Putin and me. During Trump’s news conference, he responded to most questions — whether they were about the mechanics of “running” Venezuela, the cost of such governance, or other countries’ geopolitical interests in the region — with answers about all the oil the United States will pump out of the Venezuelan wells. His politics is the politics of self-enrichment, one big quest for beneficial extractables. During his first presidential campaign, he used to criticize George W. Bush for failing to “take the oil” during his war in Iraq. Some of us wondered at the time: How do you “take the oil”? This is how: You take the country.
Another thing Trump and Putin share is their disdain for European values, the very values of cooperation, justice and human rights that the post-World War II international order was designed to uphold. Putin’s speeches drip with this disdain, much like Trump’s national security strategy does. The Donroe Doctrine, it seems, may allow Trump to take Venezuela, Cuba — which he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have openly threatened — and any other part of the Americas Trump desires. (I am sure he will return before long to talk of making Canada the 51st state.)
If so, it will also allow Putin to take as much of Europe as he wants to bite off. Russia’s hybrid warfare in Europe — acts of both political and infrastructural sabotage, including suspected jamming of air-traffic-control frequencies at numerous European airports — has escalated since Trump returned to office. The Trump administration’s continued pressure on Ukraine has emboldened Putin. The invasion of Caracas, carried out in ways eerily similar to what Moscow had once planned for Kyiv, will embolden him further. A similar message has no doubt been received in Beijing: If Trump can take Venezuela and Putin can take Ukraine, surely President Xi Jinping of China can take Taiwan.
Putin was Maduro’s ally, but allies come and go; worldviews, and the desire to force the world to conform to them, stay. Putin’s world has just become more harmonious. Not because, as conspiracy theorists would have you believe, Putin tells Trump what to do, but because these two autocrats really do view the world in the same way. We have a saying for this in Russian: Two boots make a pair.
M. Gessen is a columnist for The New York Times.
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