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Dominic Tierney is an expert on losers—in the best possible way.
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The professor’s studies of war and its political price are must-read volumes for those looking to understand how force and governance are often at odds. As Washington tries to make sense of President Donald Trump’s unprecedented push into Venezuela, his capture of Venezuelan President Nicholás Maduro, and his constant chatter about the oil resources of that South American country, I checked in with Tierney—whose books include and The Right Way to Lose a War and How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War—to get a sense of how this moment fits into the larger context of U.S. history and the global consequences for what comes after the initial drive.
The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
TIME: Listening to President Trump the last few days, it seems like he thinks this is going to be an easy operation. What does history say about this?
Tierney: The use of force, whether it reaches the threshold of war or not, is very difficult to control and very difficult to predict. People talk about the day after, but you’ve got to talk about the week after, the month after, and so on. This is especially true with regime change, missions where you are essentially removing the government of a foreign state and then unleashing political forces that you may struggle to control. The U.S., for all of its power, has time and again struggled to control those forces in recent decades. And this is one reason why the U.S., despite being incredibly powerful, has a poor military record since World War II.
Is regime change the right term to be using here? I’m struggling to figure out what word we should be using here.
The Trump Administration is trying to describe it as a law enforcement operation, which is deliberately designed to seemingly narrow the scope. It’s interesting terminology given a lot of questions about the legality. If you swoop into a foreign country and capture their leader and then whisk them away—with various sorts of behind-the-scenes efforts to negotiate with other potential actors—that is a change in the regime, at least in terms of the leadership.
It’s not at all clear how deep that regime change is going to go, whether it’s literally just Maduro and then others aligned with him staying in power and sort of reaching some modus vivendi with the United States, or whether we end up in a situation where there’s a more sweeping change.
The leader, a dictator, has been taken by force. Dozens of people were killed. Certainly if another country tried to do that to the United States, we would consider that a pretty aggressive move and an attempt to regime change.
That would be an act of war by anyone else.
Certainly if any other country made any effort to do that to the United States, it would be considered an act of war, unquestionably.
Read more: A Colony? An Occupation? No One Knows What to Call Venezuela
The wars since 1945 have not actually been so explicitly about resources, yet the President can’t seem to stop talking about oil and energy. Iraq was under the auspices of preventing another attack. Has anything changed about Americans’ appetite for this sort of adventurism?
Trump is personally quite attracted to this idea of controlling stuff. Maybe it’s his real estate background. I remember he said similar things about the mission in Syria in his first term, where you could see he had doubts about it but he was quite drawn to the idea of We’re going to control the oil—even though that wasn’t really true and there wasn’t a lot of oil.
To be honest with you, it is hard for me to imagine that controlling Venezuelan oil is in fact the key, driving force behind this operation. The United States is producing a massive amount of energy, and if it really wanted to access the oil, it probably could make a deal with Maduro. I think there are other motives that are probably more important, like hemispheric dominance and Venezuela being seen as a kind of leftist state.
Within the Western Hemisphere in particular, he’s quite willing to threaten or use force. There’s sort of some harking back to a kind of 19th Century approach to this. People are talking about the Donroe—rather than the Monroe—Doctrine. That does lend itself to meddling in Central and South America.
Trump has been willing to use force more widely, in Syria, during the war in Iran, briefly. There’s no question that Trump is absolutely not an isolationist. But he’s also being quite cautious about sort of large-scale military operations, at least thus far.
Now, in terms of wider American society, I don’t see any great appetite to get involved in foreign conflicts. Some of the polling on the Venezuela operations suggest that people are very skeptical about it. One of the polls suggested about a third of Americans supported it, about a third were opposed, a third not sure. Those are very weak numbers for the start of a military operation, right? So there’s a bit of a disjuncture, to say the least, between what Trump is talking about and where the American people are.
What do you make of the lack of talk of democratizing in this conversation?
That is quite striking. Traditionally, spreading democracy is a thread in American foreign policy. It’s always been ambiguous because the U.S. has always pursued its interest first and foremost. Sometimes that has led decisionmakers to cut deals with non-democratic actors or during the Cold War outright destabilize perceived leftist democracies.
Now Trump is fairly uninterested in democracy. He never really even talks about that or human rights or democracy.
You’ve got two different forces in American ideology. One is a preference for democracy over non-democracy. And I think most Americans do prefer democracy over non-democracy. Their willingness to sacrifice is limited, but they tend to see democracies as friends.
The other piece that I think has become much more important in the last couple years is about whether foreign governments are left wing or right wing. Are they seen as liberal or are they seen as more traditional conservative governments? You’ve seen a big effort by the Trump administration to just explicitly favor European countries or political parties that are right wing or conservative. It’s not so much an interest in democracy versus non-democracy but an interest in populist conservative right-wing governments versus liberal left-wing governments. Under Biden, the focus was on Are you a democracy or non-democracy? And under Trump it is Do you like MAGA? Do you like populism? Are you right wing?
The United States doesn’t have a really good record at this sort of operation, especially not in our own backyard. Is there anything about President Trump that might break America’s bad trajectory on this sort of operation?
The Venezuela operation makes me very nervous. I’m worried about the competence of a lot of the officials involved. I’m worried about the lack of outreach to Democrats, the complete refusal to build any kind of consensus or reach across the aisle, which by contrast, the Bush administration tried to do with Iraq in 2003.
And they got there.
Exactly. I’m also worried about the lack of any kind of allied buy-in, the reveling in American unilateralism, the lack of planning seemingly for the day after. The United States went to war in 2001 and 2003 with a very moralistic, very crusading view of war, a very black-and-white view that there were good guys and bad guys, and America would wield the swift sword of justice. The way the U.S. saw it was that the war would end like World War II ended, unconditional surrender, total victory. That model of war is extremely dangerous because it exaggerates American power and is too morally self-righteous. You need to be more pragmatic.
This mission is extremely dangerous. Either Trump basically just is satisfied with Maduro, in which case there may actually not be a huge change necessarily in Venezuela. Or Trump is serious when he talks about controlling Venezuela and even saying he wouldn’t shy away from boots on the ground. And then you have a recipe for disaster because Venezuela’s an impoverished and divided society. You could see a lot of resistance to what is seen by Venezuelans and other people in the region as American occupation, the worst kind of American imperialism.
If you’re sitting in the Danish Embassy right now, what is the conversation happening there about Greenland?
There’s been a lot of shocking developments during this term. But this is surely among the most shocking: that the United States would talk about the military option remaining on the table in its effort to acquire Greenland, which is essentially threatening the use of force against a treaty ally. It puts the European states in a complete bind because they are desperate to keep Trump somewhat onboard with Ukraine.
The Brits and so on are playing a very careful game here. They’re hoping that this is just bluster and there’s no real chance of the use of force, but what could happen is that the U.S. could present the Greenlander population with some sort of too-good-to-turn-down proposal. It’s seen as controversial, but it’s not immediately destroying NATO in the way that an invasion of Greenland would do. That would destroy NATO.
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