The Trump Corollary: We’re Nation-Building OUR Nation

Things went much better when we called the shots in Latin America

We’re not “nation-building” in Venezuela. We’re “puppet-government-installing.”

And not a moment too soon. Our complete withdrawal from the Western Hemisphere over the past fifty years, while we concentrated on turning distant hellholes like Somalia into “a proud, functioning and viable member of the community of nations,” as Madeleine Albright said in 1993, seems to have left the U.S. sitting in the middle of a crime-ridden ghetto.

Back when the U.S. was constantly meddling in Latin America, removing and inserting leaders at will, I note that 100,000 Americans weren’t dying of drug overdoses every year. Cuba and Venezuela weren’t emptying their prisons and mental institutions into our country for fun. Third Worlders weren’t streaming across our border, killing, raping and robbing Americans. Instead of cocaine and Fentanyl, the region’s main exports were things like oil and sugar. Today, they can’t manage to extract natural resources there for the taking.

To be sure, mistakes were made, such as the State Department backing Fidel Castro (based on the Walter Duranty-like reporting of The New York Times’ Herbert Matthews).

If only we’d kept intervening, that error might have been corrected half a century ago.

But liberals got sanctimonious about the U.S. bossing around lesser countries. Why, they’re just as capable of self-government as we are!

No, they’re not. With rare exceptions, brief periods of prosperity in Latin America are invariably followed by revolution, seizure of major industries, grandiose promises to “the people,” graft, corruption, gangsterism, violence and economic collapse. As historian Paul Johnson put it, “Everyone in [Latin America] talked revolution and practiced graft.”

Vice President Kamala Harris was tasked with getting to the “root cause” of illegal immigration from Latin America. It turns out the “root cause” is Latin Americans.

The first clue was Argentina, a bustling, on-the-move country with a booming economy and burgeoning middle class in the 1930s and early 1940s.

Alas, in 1946, “the people” voted, and, in their wisdom, chose the demagogue Juan Perón. In short order, their economy was in shambles and they were being ruled by a dictator. Even after having seen how he immiserated their country, “the people” proceeded to elect Perón again. And then a third time.

This national self-immolation became the template for Latin American governance — up to and including Venezuela.

Venezuelans had their chance at self-government and blew it, electing the communist Hugo Chávez by acclamation four separate times, and Nicolás Maduro once (contested). Now, they can’t keep the lights on and the entire Venezuelan economy runs on shipping cocaine from Colombia to Mexico.

Since our seizure of Maduro, word has gone out for everyone in the media to compare his arrest to our adventurism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Nigeria, Bosnia, Kosovo, Yugoslavia and so on. This is absurd.

Whatever happens in any of those places has very little effect on any American’s life. By contrast, Latin Americans are killing, raping, addicting and pickpocketing Americans every single day.

We’re nation-building all right, but the nation we’re building is ours. That’s what the Bushies got wrong: They were nation-building other nations.

POP QUIZ: Please explain how teaching Afghan school girls to read benefits me. (I’m not against it, I just don’t want it on my AmEx.)

Maduro was not seized because he killed a bunch of Christians in Nigeria — and for the record, I’m against that. He was captured and put on trial because he has been repeatedly indicted in U.S. courts for trafficking cocaine that has killed a quarter million Americans.

He was also sitting on the largest proven oil reserves in the world. We need oil — and we need China not to get Venezuela’s oil.

This is why the Monroe Doctrine “once ranked with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in the pantheon of American reverence,” in the words of the late Yale historian Gaddis Smith.

The gist of President James Monroe’s 1823 statement was that the Western Hemisphere is ours, and any European incursion would be seen as “dangerous to our peace and safety.” (That was before we had to worry about Chinese incursions.) In return, we’d stay out of their affairs.

Overseeing Latin America wasn’t a walk in the park.

In 1950, legendary diplomat George Kennan wrote a memo, warning that “most of the Latin American world” exhibited “tremendous helplessness and impotence,” adding that he could think of no place that had produced a more “hopeless background for the conduct of human life than in Latin America.” [Africa?]

Because of the strategic importance of the region to U.S. national security, Kennan argued that “harsh governmental measures of repression may be the only answer,” even measures that violated “American concepts of democratic procedure.”

This became known as “the Kennan corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.

In accordance with that corollary, then-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles pushed for a U.S.-backed coup d’état to depose the communist president of Guatemala in 1954. No “boots on the ground.” No “nation-building.” Secretary Dulles did not proceed to “rule” Guatemala. Our puppet did. And that was it for a communist Guatemala.

Commenting on the successful mission, Dulles said, “This intrusion of Soviet despotism was, of course, a direct challenge to our Monroe Doctrine, the first and most fundamental of our foreign policies.”

The media are in a dither, demanding to know who’s going to “run” Venezuela. The president should tell them, “Whomever the CIA chooses.”