Expert: US foreign policy a return to past practices
U.S. foreign policy expert Andreas Kaju said that America's occasionally aggressive foreign policy has historically been the norm, with the past 30 years being the exception.
Is what Donald Trump is doing right now what his voter wants?
It's unclear what exactly his voter wants. His voter definitely wanted immigration to be stopped. If we recall Joe Biden's term in office, Biden tasked his vice president, Kamala Harris, with going to Central America to address the root causes of immigration. She was supposed to go specifically to the Central American Triangle, where Venezuela is located, because millions of people have also left Venezuela during the era of chavismo — that is, under the rule of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro — and this has affected politics both in the United States and in South America. In Bolivia, Chile and Ecuador, right-wing governments have come to power largely thanks to the support of Venezuelan immigrants. I believe Trump's voter definitely expects forceful action.
Trump has said that he is now taking over power in Venezuela. How is he doing that? We don't see crowds celebrating in the streets and Maduro's government is still in power there.
I think we're still quite far from that point. It would require certain developments we're not aware of. We don't know whether a change of power in Venezuela has happened through cooperation between the United States and some local forces, because right now, Venezuela is indeed still governed by the Maduro regime, just without him and his wife.
Does this recent attack suggest that U.S. foreign policy is becoming even more aggressive?
This is actually a long-forgotten practice. The international media has been writing extensively today about historical parallels and we've talked about this before — that Trump's policy, the Monroe Doctrine and so on have been central parts of American security policy for the past 250 years. It's just that the last 30 years were somewhat different, but now we're returning to the 1970s and 1980s when the U.S. consistently acted assertively throughout Latin and South America. The same thing happened in Panama. First, the U.S. filed charges against Panama's dictator-president Manuel Noriega and also held negotiations with him — just like Trump did with Maduro about surrender and amnesty. Noriega didn't cooperate, just like Maduro hasn't. The U.S. military went in, captured Noriega, brought him to the U.S. and imprisoned him after a trial. This has all happened before and America has always forcefully defended its interests in its own hemisphere.
How should we feel about the idea that one day Greenland might be taken simply because it's needed?
I wouldn't draw that comparison. I understand why a listener or viewer might be tempted to make that leap right now, but that's not quite how this works. There's no moral equivalence here. In the U.S., there is a solid legal case against Maduro who for the past 20 years has been running a drug cartel together with remnants of Colombia's far-left FARC group. He laundered money in South Florida, armed the cartel and held negotiations with cartel leaders as well as with officials from Honduras and other countries. All of this is documented and the facts are known. What's drawing criticism under international law is simply the episode of going into another country's territory to bring someone to trial.
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Editor: Marcus Turovski, Johanna Alvin
