'Might is right' is wrong
Civilisation itself rests on the principle that the strong must not be given licence to attack the weak
Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray
I never cease to be amazed at how members of our political elite doggedly refuse to learn the lessons of history. Worse, some of them appear to have no knowledge of the past beyond the previous fortnight.
How else might we explain the support shown by certain voices for the decision by President Trump to bomb Venezuela, seize its sitting president, Nicolás Maduro, and effectively turn the country into a US colony?
Let me stress that, while I am on the left, I am not blind to the socialist Maduro’s misdeeds. There is strong evidence that he stole the 2024 presidential election, and that crime alone would be reason enough for Venezuelans to want rid of him.
But who decreed that the White House should act as the planet’s law enforcement agency? What gives Trump the right to launch a military assault on another sovereign nation – one that posed no clear and present threat to the US – without consulting the United Nations, fellow world leaders or even his own Congress?
We’ve seen this movie many times. US-led interventions in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq became wars of attrition before ending up as military and political catastrophes. Similarly, the 2011 US-backed Libyan escapade – almost entirely ignored by the political and media classes these days – sparked a seismic migration crisis which plagued Europe for years thereafter.
The pretext for such interventions is usually the liberation of an oppressed population and the promotion of democracy and human rights. The reality, however, is that the US has a grubby history of collaboration with despotic and corrupt regimes across the globe. It’s just that those regimes happen to serve its interests in a way that the Maduros of this world don’t. ‘Realpolitik’, they call it. Utter hypocrisy, I say.
We should, I suppose, at least commend Trump for not trying to fool us with guff about defending democracy and human rights in Venezuela. On the contrary, he was searingly honest in his admission that this intervention was all about oil and strategic advantage. He is plainly willing to use the mighty war machine at his disposal in the service of a new American imperialism, and he doesn’t care who knows it. Greenland, an autonomous territory of NATO-member Denmark, is next on the hit list – and that’s when the balloon will really go up.
