To defend international order, we must paradoxically pursue the national interest

Trump’s extraction of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, and the justifications used to support it, show an abandonment of the international rules-based order in favour of an America-First focus on national interests. However, Associate Professor at UCL Philip Cunliffe argues the Trump Administration has misjudged what “national interest” really means. A country’s national interest should be thought of in terms of whether or not it effectively channels the will of that nation’s citizens. In an era dominated by geopolitical rivalry, the nation is now the unit that counts on the global stage. And, paradoxically, a focus on national interest is the only way to re-ignite international cooperation. 

With the US raid on Venezuela and kidnapping of its president Nicolas Maduro, it is clear that US President Donald Trump has abandoned a strategy of maintaining US global leadership in favor of asserting regional hegemony over the Western hemisphere and the American continents. In so doing, he has claimed that the national interest is central to his foreign policy, even brazenly claiming title to Venezuela’s oil riches. Those US citizens who are opposed to Trump now face a choice as to what comes next. Either they can criticize Trump for his abandonment of America’s global leadership, and they can aim to turn the clock back to restore US primacy as it was before Trump took office in 2016. Alternatively, they can criticize Trump for failing to abide by the national interest he claims to stand for, thereby following him onto the ideological terrain that he has opened up.

The first strategy has the merits of all conservative approaches. Criticizing Trump for having abandoned American global leadership can evoke the warm, nostalgic glow of lost primacy and seek to restore that vanished golden age. Yet the drawbacks of such a strategy are many. For starters, counterposing global leadership to the national interest would play into Trump’s hands, allowing him to pose as champion and steward of the US national interest. This will do nothing to bridge the ideological fissures that have bedevilled the American electorate and that Trump exploited to such great effect in the last presidential election.

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Defending the national interest from Trump should also offer plenty of opportunities for criticism, given that so many of his administration’s policies seem to have served his personal vanity or helped enrich his family more than they have served the country.

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In any case, golden ages always turn out be more tawdry upon closer inspection than they initially appear. Venezuela is far from the first regime-change operation the US has conducted in recent times; the difference is that, in previous times, such interventions were camouflaged with soaring rhetoric about America’s altruistic defense of democracy and human rights more than its self-interest. Trump is at least sparing us the hypocritical sermons and empty pieties. More to the point, it is impossible to restore the past—and pretending to do so will only evade the real challenges that confront the US today. Given the growth in China’s industrial might over the last several decades, it is doubtful that the US will ever again enjoy the untrammelled advantage that it had hitherto enjoyed up to Trump’s first win in 2016. Nor will seizing Venezuela’s oil reserves restore American industry.