We Are the Bad Guys
The swaggering threat to global stability is us.
What accounts for the U.S. government’s intense interest in the nation of Venezuela?
That’s all. Not drug trafficking. Many nations, including America, are full of drug trafficking. Donald Trump has pardoned multiple large drug traffickers. It’s not about drug trafficking.
Is it about how Maduro is not a uhhhhhh…. legitimately elected leader? Did the guy who in 2020 tried to foment a violent overthrow of the United States Congress in order to reinstall himself as president after he lost an election just attack a small nation because he cares about pure democracy so much? No. That did not happen.
The extent to which the national conversation about what just happened focuses on drugs, or on Maduro’s personal corruption, rather than on the world’s most powerful nation attacking a less powerful nation in order to protect its own economic interests—that is the extent to which the national conversation has been derailed by propaganda, and is meandering in a useless corner rather than shining a spotlight in the face of reality.
For those of us interested in reality, the question becomes: Might there be some downsides of kidnapping the president of a sovereign nation, because he is not sufficiently in America’s pocket? One thing we have done is to supercharge the urgency of almost all smaller nations on earth to unite with one another to protect themselves against our aggression, and to seek out competing superpowers—China, most obviously—to align themselves with in order to have some protection against what just happened to Maduro. It is easy, for the sort of shallow, power-drunk, unwise people who currently control our government, to imagine that because we have the biggest military, there can be no consequences from us attacking a much smaller nation. But anyone who has read history, and who is able to conceptualize its progress in time frames longer than an election cycle, knows that strong nations who imagine themselves to be invulnerable and therefore decide to exploit everyone else at their leisure plant the seeds of the coalition that will one day overtake them on the world stage.
What do we call it when a stronger person decides to rob a weaker person because he can? It is just gangsterism. We are the most dangerous gangsters in the world today. Not in the sense of being charming rogues or alluring antiheroes. We are the bad guys. Americans, as a people, are extremely allergic to the belief that our nation is a malign force in the world. It goes against our national mythology, it goes against our national education, it goes against the natural human impulse to imagine ourselves as good people. Additionally, under our current regime, it goes against a deliberate program of quasi-religious nationalist propaganda now being rolled out as fast as possible through every channel of the government’s power. Even the most credible news outlets in America can rarely bring themselves to portray us in the cold, accurate light that our conduct deserves. And the number of credible news outlets is shrinking as they are systematically being taken over by regime allies in order to broaden the larger propaganda campaign we are all living through.
The most generous interpretation of the U.S. as a global actor in 2026 is that we are in the hands of a bunch of amoral, dangerous gangsters, and that the stability of the world depends on the political opponents of Trumpism winning back control of the US government before too much damage can be done. The less generous interpretation is that the many systematic political and economic flaws built into our nation—investor capitalism, gerrymandering, the Electoral College, the antidemocratic nature of the U.S. Senate, the Supreme Court—are now, at long last, bringing about the final end of the age of American global dominance. That we are, in other words, on a ship whose thin hull has finally rusted through in too many places, that is going down no matter how fast the passengers desperately try to bail it out. Which of these interpretations you believe is mostly a matter of attitude. What is not debatable is that the United States government under Donald Trump is the most dangerous force on earth, and a serious potential threat to every other nation, and the leading cause of geopolitical instability. That usually causes a backlash.
It is hard for me to imagine being a member of the Trump administration, and even harder for me to imagine the Trump administration caring what I have to say about anything, but if I could leave them with one thought to ponder today, it would be this: You are establishing the precedent that it is okay to take out the leader of a nation that has not attacked you, and that you are not at war with, just because you feel that he threatens your interests somehow. How might every other nation in the world think about applying this precedent to the current leaders of the United States?
Has a violent gangster boss ever suffered a devastating backlash to his iron-fisted rule? Something to research.
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Related reading: Gangster Party; First, Kill the News; Leave the Military Now.
The more lawless, murderous, and belligerent the US government becomes, the greater the need to not be a member of its military and find yourself fighting for unjust causes. If you are a soldier, leave the military as soon as possible.
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I'm so glad you wrote about this. When I first heard about our invasion, I raced to the NY Times and CNN to get a view as to what was happening, and couldn't stomach their passive, non contextual recycling of the administration's talking points. There was no real criticism at all until I got to the BBC, where one of the opinion writers called this what it is- an illegal coup of a sovereign nation. I am so fearful of the downwind consequences of these actions, including what they embolden other nations to do, such as China, Russia, and any other powerful nation that decides to just take what they want from militarily weaker nations. The damage this administration has wrought/ continues to enact is astonishing, and we're still in the first year
"we are, in other words, on a ship whose thin hull has finally rusted through in too many places, that is going down no matter how fast the passengers desperately try to bail it out. Which of these interpretations you believe is mostly a matter of attitude. What is not debatable is that the United States government under Donald Trump is the most dangerous force on earth, and a serious potential threat to every other nation, and the leading cause of geopolitical instability. That usually causes a backlash." This country started with a mix of rot and idealism. We have never dealt with the rot. This is the result.