David M. Shribman: Venezuela episode mirrors disregard for norms at home

Has Donald Trump just ripped the mattress tag from international relations?

The legend on mattress tags warns that the labels should not be removed "under penalty of law." That warning has an exception: the consumer. The United Nations Charter affirms the sovereignty of countries around the globe. That stipulation has exceptions, too: humanitarian and human-rights violations.

Trump has little respect for the United Nations. He's likely to brush aside any General Assembly resolution condemning his decision to dispatch the Delta Force to remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and stuff him into an aircraft for the first leg of a route to a New York courtroom, where on Monday Maduro declared himself both innocent and a political prisoner.

At the same time, there is general agreement that Maduro is corrupt, likely a criminal, probably involved in the manufacture and sale of addictive drugs, and, if this is not enough to stoke the ire of the American president, a socialist. (Acting President Delcy Rodriguez may have spoken in conciliatory tones shortly after the Maduro abduction, but she is a socialist as well. Trump has said he'd tolerate her presence in Caracas as long as she conforms to American wishes, warning, "If she doesn't do what's right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.")

Maduro has been an irritant to Trump since the president's first term, largely because he resisted caving to the demands of American petroleum executives, still smarting from the 2007 seizure of the assets of Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips by the revolutionary Hugo Chavez ― six years before Maduro took office.

Venezuela possesses about 17% of the world's oil reserves, but the country's production declined by an annual average rate of 8.2% from 2011 to 2021, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency. Trump halted oil imports from state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela in 2019, though Joe Biden opened up imports from Chevron, the only American oil company still operating in the country. Chevron has indicated that it hopes to increase its production if Venezuela achieves a reasonable semblance of stability.

As a result, this episode is the latest in a parade of oil-stained politics dating to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1945 "oil-for-security" agreement with Saudi Arabia's Ibn Saud. It joins the Arab embargoes of 1973 and 1979 as one of many energy issues prompting domestic American contention.

Early public-opinion surveys show Americans deeply divided over the wisdom of the Venezuela episode, with 36% supporting the removal of Maduro and 39% opposing it, according to a YouGov poll. The usual partisan divide prevails, with about two-thirds of Republicans in support and two-thirds of Democrats in opposition.

One of Trump's predecessors ― it's remarkable the president doesn't quote Harry Truman more often, as he's closer in some ways to him in temperament than his beau ideal, William McKinley ― said, "I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he'd taken a poll in Egypt."

Trump seems to heed his preferences rather than polls. He certainly didn't consult the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which established the sovereignty of nations, setting the standard for prohibiting nations from interfering in the internal matters of other countries. And he didn't worry about MAGA blowback, especially from former GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Trump apostate who, citing the movement's opposition to overseas adventures, said, "This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end. Boy, were we wrong."

Democrats slap themselves across their foreheads every time they think Greene, the onetime publicizer of QAnon fantasies, speaks truth to power, or at least says something they wish they'd said themselves. But they're also aggrieved the president didn't consult Congress before ordering this operation, a defiance of tradition, but not quite the defiance of the 1973 War Powers Act that was passed over the veto of Richard Nixon.

But concerns about the principle of non-interference linger, even as the administration casts this as part of a war on crime rather than an act of war.

"There are bad leaders around the world," Sarah Burns, the Rochester Institute of Technology scholar and author of "The Politics of War Powers," said in an interview. "But it shouldn't be up to the United States, especially one man, to decide whether a country is led by any individual, good or bad. When you have a situation like this, you don't know what the results are going to be."

That remains one of the mysteries of this affair. Despite the assurances of Senate majority leader John Thune of South Dakota that the Trump team has a plan, there's little evidence any plan of action has been subject to the kind of scrutiny that even the George W. Bush team applied to Iraq and Afghanistan. Both turned out to be debacles.

Both Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, each more accomplished in military and political affairs than anyone in the current administration, spoke of the importance of having a plan, even if it's not followed. Several elements of the D-Day plan, for example, were adjusted as circumstances changed.

"What now is the plan?" asked Philippe Sands, director of University College London's Centre on International Courts and Tribunals. "One need only to think of Nicaragua, Afghanistan and Libya, amongst others, to imagine what the consequences might be, and the encouragement it will surely give to others to act with such brazen disregard for the international legal norms that bind us all."

Trump has as much regard for the rules-based world order as he does for the customs and constraints of American politics.

His supporters laud him for that ― they contend the conventions Trump has trampled are vestiges of a faded era and, in any case, were created by, and for the benefit of, a discredited elite. His opponents cite the general domestic tranquility that's reigned for 250 years and the steady, though slow, accumulation of rights that's been a hallmark of American history ― and argue that the global institutions he reviles were created by Americans for the interest of Americans and for the benefit of citizens around the world.

That is why the American experience in Venezuela stands for the evolving American experience at home and abroad. With apologies to Maine as the label is ripped from the mattress: As Venezuela goes, so goes the nation.

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David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.