Over the past weeks, the United States of America (hereinafter: USA) has conducted a large-scale military build-up in front of the Venezuelan coast. Just a few days ago, the North Americans attacked and captured a Venezuelan ship, signalling their willingness to further intensify attacks on Venezuela. We predict that the USA will start a war against Venezuela, installing a proxy government to gain control over the South American nation. We will surely explain the reasons behind the projected goals of the USA. However, this article is less concerned with understanding the reasons behind this aggression, but with the structural learnings we can draw from it. When we adopt a broader perspective of this aggression and place it within the wider context of the North Americans’ foreign policy, it is easy to identify legitimacy and logic problems of political behaviour within the contemporary state system.
Here, the argument is not centred around the fact that the USA often invade other nations under a made-up pretext to extract economically important resources, but rather that this attack on Venezuela should ideally be the final war of this kind. Economic warfare and illegitimising other nations infringe the normative framework of most societies. From here, it follows that either all nations adhere to agreed principles, those principles are abandoned altogether, or the structure to uphold such principles needs to be altered to ensure compliance. This pattern has been repeated for more than 100 years without the international state community being able to formulate a feasible solution to the USA’s state behaviour.
Such a long period without meaningful policy responses does not align with the standards of good governance. In one of our latest works, we already examined some cases in which nations were attacked for pursuing their national interests. Politics should aim for universal progress through genuine knowledge production, something that is being constantly undermined by the behaviour of some states. This war could (and ideally should) be the last signal to stress the necessary move towards devletist state systems.
Backgrounds
Parallels to the Second Gulf War
The current developments in Venezuela strongly resemble the USA’s approach to craft a pretext against Iraq, which was ultimately attacked in 2003 for economic gain. Allegedly, the Sub-Anatolian nation developed weapons of mass destruction – a claim that was already falsified in 2002. Nonetheless, the USA invaded Iraq in 2003, killed many thousands of civilians and caused the displacement and death of many hundreds of thousands more in a period of over 20 years. Due to spillover effects, the region around Iraq, too, has been destabilised and impaired societal development in all areas, such as education, infrastructure and arts. Naturally, we ask why the USA wanted to attack Iraq so much that it made up such a heavy allegation?
At its core, the attack was driven by economic motives. At the time, Iraq’s government started to move away from using the national currency of the USA as a legal tender for oil trades. This gave Iraq considerable pricing power over their natural resources and increased the value of its own currency. Since this relative increase of Iraqi power and potential regional empowerment caused more nations to protect their national economies, which would have decreased the USA’s perceived power, the USA decided to attack. However, every action needs a legitimisation, especially in the political context, due to the importance of political decisions. The pretext of the Second Gulf War could not rely on the military action from Iraq, as was the case in the First Gulf War, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Accordingly, the North Americans made things up.
Pretext of the USA-Venezuela War
Similarly, the USA now alleges that Venezuela hosts and supports drug trafficking organisations that export drugs to the USA. This argumentation has raised many questions due to its faulty logic. Venezuela’s neighbouring states, Colombia (67% of coca cultivation), Peru (25%) and Bolivia (8%), are exceeding all other nations in the world in illegal drug production and proliferation by far. The United Nations (hereinafter: UN) only considers these three states as the main production hubs for cocaine, viewing cultivation of coca leaves for the production of cocaine in other nations as statistically irrelevant. Venezuela, on the other hand, is merely a transit nation for illegally trafficking drugs to other nations by land, water and air.
Further, there are ideological arguments brought forward. Since 1999, the South American nation has been governed by a socialist government under two presidents and the United Socialist Party, which emerged from the coalition of several left-leaning political parties. Under the Roosevelt Corollary, the USA have committed themselves to intervene in the affairs of South American nations if the USA perceives developments as contrary to its ideological framework. This doctrine was ironically formulated, and since then upheld, as a response to the Venezuelan Crisis of 1902-1903. Over the past century, the range of application has expanded from political and economic fields to ideological aspects of governance, predominantly as a pretext to contain the proliferation of communist/socialist ideals. “According to a study by Harvard University, between 1898 and 1994, Washington plotted and staged at least 41 coups d’etat in [South] America, equivalent to one every 28 months.” To achieve a government change in Venezuela today, the USA have already built an oppositional figure by vesting her with the Nobel Peace Prize and framing her as the liberating force against the allegedly repressive government of current President Nicolas Maduro.
The parallel between the aggression on Venezuela and Iraq is their production of crude oil. Venezuela is one of the biggest oil-producing nations in the world (depending on the data, between 12th and 20th place in the list of oil-producing nations). Due to its geographic proximity to the USA, it would make the ideal trading partner for the USA to power their energy-intensive economy. Under the current President of Venezuela, the South American nation pursued a favourable pricing policy as regards their exports of natural resources. This policy course has led the USA to formulate far-reaching sanctions against the South Americans, as well as launch media campaigns against them. Through their media power, the North Americans have created the narrative that the domestic situation in Venezuela is characterised by violence, corruption and hostile policymaking.
Legitimacy and Knowledge Regimes
The Need for Legitimacy
As we have seen, there have been intense rhetorical efforts against Venezuela. Some of the allegations, such as corruption claims, surely have a true component to them. However, the portrayal of Venezuela from the North American perspective does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that this nation must be attacked. To bridge this gap, further efforts need to be taken, as our nature forces us to want to understand things. This is not to mean that the human being is serious about knowledge and understanding, but it simply needs to have an explanation that somewhat fits its normative, logical and cognitive framework.
In the political context, legitimacy is important to gather support and ensure that executing actors follow through fully. The USA has in both cases sought to legitimise their actions. Even though the atrocious acts of the North American nation cannot be justified, it felt the need to at least make up some argument. But this is not only limited to the USA, but every state and government also needs to give an explanation for their behaviour. Whether wars are waged or taxes are raised, everything requires an explanation.
In history, we can observe that many justifications for state behaviour were made on religious grounds. Khagans, Sultans, Kings and Emperors, for example, justified their rule, wars and policies by stating that they were vested with those rights from God. Surely, this is made up as well, but people believed it back then. Not because it was logical in objective terms, but because it was an explanation that was compatible with their normative, logical and cognitive framework. Today, the situation is not so much different. There are people who believe in the explanations of the USA, not because they are objectively logical, but because they are compatible with their normative, logical and cognitive framework. This underlines the importance of legitimacy in the political context, but also the importance of understanding how these cheap explanations influence us, due to our entrenched perspective.
Why Does the Pretext Work?
The Cognitive Dimension
There are several reasons why there are people who believe the formulated pretext by the USA in their war preparations. We can split them into three dimensions: cognitive, material and perceptive. Within the first dimension, the cognitive dimension, any argument put forward is assessed in light of its compatibility with pre-existing cognitive systems. Nobody could have imagined a modern airplane in the 11th century, but in the 19th century, people could have had at least some idea about airplanes. This is due to the nature of the presented thought and its proximity to the existing knowledge. Similarly, when we are told today that artificial intelligence will likely replace human beings in public transport, this is, even though it might never happen, a thinkable situation.
However, for example, thinking about political systems today without political parties is often too far out of the known for many people and, therefore, directly rejected as unfeasible. In the Venezuela and Iraq examples, the cognitive dimension is targeted by the nature of the content. “Drugs and weapons of mass destruction are bad things, and bad things need to be fought”, is the rationale that people need to follow. The ideological arguments against Venezuela (socialist) and Iraq (authoritarian) can also be seen as playing into the cognitive dimension, triggering people of opposing views.
The Material Dimension
Within the material dimension, the presented arguments are assessed in the light of their material effects on the subject. In other words, the receiver of the argument, the one that the acting party wants to influence, examines whether the presented argument affects their material (economic, biological) situation. If the argument involves elements that the receiver perceives as harmful to his finances or physical well-being, then the readiness to support the action increases due to an arising interest of the individual. Similarly, this can also be reversed and looked at in a positive example. However, if the receiver does not perceive a threat or benefit for himself in the financial or physical sense, involvement or support for (but also resilience against) the suggested course of action remains low.
In the case of Venezuela, the argument by the USA involves a threat that might be of interest to the people of the USA. The alleged support for illegal drug trafficking is framed as a national threat to the society of the USA. If that is believed, people are more inclined to support the aggression against Venezuela. In the Iraq example, the alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction is another directly material aspect of the legitimacy-building efforts of the USA, as it created a perceived threat to biological life.
The Perceptive Dimension
In the third dimension, we are confronted with a more structural aspect of the pretext for war in Venezuela. Much of why people believe in the USA’s stance or remain silent against their atrocities is the structure of the existing knowledge regime. Because media and the world economy is dominated by the USA, this extended presence creates an implicit perception of superiority. Language reflects the effect of such structural aspects quite well, as the distinguishing terms “developed” and “under-developed/developing” nations have become so common that their hierarchical effects are no longer consciously examined. In other words, the perceptive dimension of an argument describes the factors that normalise certain views. Here, we can clearly see from the reaction of the international state community that the probable invasion of Venezuela is of no interest to most nations, which is a stark contrast to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The USA’s relative strength has created a perception of authority, and with it, legitimacy. It is not that the world is used to similar policy actions, but rather that a different framework of assessment has been established for nations of similar strength. Surely, this undermines the idea of multilaterally agreed norms and rules, but the reason why the emergence of such a measurement system was possible is that other nations and societies accepted it. Their demand for North American products, information and services created the perceived quality standard in economic terms and legitimacy in political terms.
So, How Does It Work?
Summarising, the reason why the USA can openly threaten Venezuela and capture its ships without consequences is that the global society accepts the USA as its hegemonic power – the so-called USA Curse. This creates an implicit leniency towards non-involvement by other states. They are reluctant to hold the USA accountable because of fear of retaliation, but more so because their economic success increases their relative power and success in terms measured in the sense of contemporary societal models. Think about a restaurant owner who scares away homeless people who ask for food but would happily serve a celebrity for free. Next, the elements representing the cognitive dimension of the argument allow the USA to build legitimacy because the allegations are cognitively tangible and not perceived as utopic, even though false. Finally, the material dimension of the arguments creates perceived legitimacy through the formulation of a direct threat.
How Often Until We Understand?
We have experienced the current situation in Venezuela countless times – over 40 times in South America alone. It happens over and over again. Why? Because it works for the USA. The only reason why such situations can arise is that the government of the USA has noted the success of the approach. As long as all circumstances remain the same, the approach will not change – there is no psychologically reasonable explanation for such a change in the approach. We could even approach this problem mathematically: the result of the function will not change, as long as the constants of that function remain the same. So, what is the function in the political function here? The population. Even though legitimisation efforts of the USA have always been questioned, the global society has accepted them somehow. This is not because the argument was logical, but because the sheer existence of an explanation that superficially ticked the boxes of the three argumentative dimensions of legitimacy was psychologically enough to prevent tangible action and unrest against the wars of the USA.
We like to view ourselves as rational and conscious organisms; however, we cannot easily escape the functioning of our brains. Accordingly, the explanations provided were enough to proceed with the atrocious foreign policy the USA has been intensifying for over 150 years. However, at some point, we will identify the pattern and start questioning the explanations. For example, Israel is proclaiming that “Iran is only a couple of months away from developing nuclear weapons”. This claim has been brought forward since 1996. Today, nobody believes this narrative because at some point, the global society understood the motivation and pattern behind these empty claims.
As regards the invasive USA foreign policy, we are dealing with a more complex phenomenon. The wars waged are geographically and temporally dispersed, meaning that the regular citizen has difficulty connecting those wars structurally to understand the pattern. Therefore, it is the sheer number of occasions that will lead us to dismantle the repeatedly applied legitimisation efforts of the USA. If not with this war, then with the next, but at some point, the global (state) society will need to react and change the constant of similar responses to such aggressions.
The Ideal Response
In the end, our often-formulated response to political developments can also be applied here: citizens are very powerful, and their actions shape our political reality. If we begin to focus on finding truth and understanding by means of genuine knowledge production, our focus will shift away from detrimental developments in our world. Our attention is the driving force behind every action and inaction – what we focus on will grow. Or in North American terms, our focus is the petrol of the world’s engine. Therefore, understanding the structural rationale behind the USA’s invasion policy helps us to redirect focus on development and to hold the USA accountable for their actions. Such an understanding would necessitate pressure from various societies on their governments to hold the USA accountable. It would also produce the pressure to support Venezuela (or any other nation that pursues its interests). We are the constant in the function that needs to change, so the North Americans can change.
If the perception of power is altered, we can empower true progress that exceeds economic growth. Here, the devletist state model is, again, the only viable option for structuring governance in a progressive, prosperous and normatively valuable fashion. Within such an international state structure, there would not be economic warfare because the measurements of success are not geared towards economic comfort by all means. Rather, the societal goals would be structured around educational progress through genuine knowledge production. This approach guarantees societal success. However, the devletist idea may lie outside the cognitive dimension of arguments within the contemporary setting, meaning that it might not be as compelling as other political schools as the idea of devletism. Or maybe we are closer to discovering the devletist idea as the ideal next step of political development than ever before.
