Officials in President Donald Trump’s administration step before television cameras and speak as though reading from a shopping list: Cuba is bad. Mexico’s president is good, but drug cartels run the country. Colombia’s president should watch himself (the actual phrasing was less polite). Greenland must come under American sovereignty, and Denmark has no legitimate claim to it. The European Union is an “adversary”, “created to harm the United States”. We will crush Iran. We will destroy Hamas. Lebanon is a failed state—followed by much more in the same register.
Alongside this catalogue sits another: leaders who have earned Trump’s admiration, among them Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un—who appears on the roster of favoured figures, disappears from it, then reappears, with no coherent explanation—along with others who receive no appreciation at all.
If one can interpret the praise Trump and his officials extend to certain presidents through the prism of the personal value he assigns to rulers of large and small states alike, the “shopping list” itself is harder to parse. None of the countries named is suffering a power vacuum, whatever the nature of its political or economic system, or its record in protecting—or violating—citizens’ rights. Such questions appear to weigh little in Washington. What matters is the pursuit of geopolitical objectives and immediate American interests.
That is, at least, what one might infer from leaving Nicolás Maduro’s regime intact—apart from arresting him and his wife and transporting them to New York. No information has emerged about dismantling the drug-export networks invoked as the pretext for the 3 January attack on Caracas, nor about reviving the political process that stalled in 2017 after Maduro sabotaged elections and voided their outcome. “The United States will run Venezuela,” Trump said—an assertion so opaque that even American commentators sympathetic to the president struggle to explain what it means.
