While it goes without saying that political phenomena are linked to domestic factors in the countries and regions where they emerge, it is also true that external shared and reciprocal factors also help explain those phenomena and their dynamics.
The fact is that the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro crowns the trajectory of a war-like, almost zero-sum approach between the United States under Donald Trump and the “Third World.” This trajectory is only growing and developing amid a climate of hostility and friction in arenas from Caracas and Havana to Tehran and Gaza.
What must be noted here, however, is that both sides are, to a large extent, products of an insurgency against the foundations of their rise in their own contexts. Trumpism and similar phenomena in Western Europe constitute a nationalist revolt against liberal principles. They have used every word in the book, and draw from a history many had believed obsolete, to combat liberal globalization: from the “Monroe Doctrine” of 1823, to control over straits, corridors, and raw materials; from protectionism and tariffs to hostility toward immigration and asylum... They have a pessimistic view of the world, a pessimism that can only be alleviated through the use of force against those deemed responsible for it.
The same orientation applies to countries allied with the United States, like Israel, which also went from the hands of labor and the liberal left to those of the nationalist and religious right, which goes so far in its skepticism as to question “life with Arabs.”
As for Trumpism’s enemies, they similarly grew out of the decay of “national liberation movements,” which was aggravated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its bloc, as well as the inflation of pure identity-based dimension at the expense of developmental and ideological politics. Their view of the world is no less pessimistic. In “colonial history,” they find both the reason for this pessimism and powerful encouragement to “undo” that history.
We have seen transitional episodes, unfolding at varying speeds, lead us to the point we are currently in. There was the Khomeinist (Islamic) Revolution in Iran in 1979 and the American hostage crisis that immediately followed; the election of Hugo Chávez as president of Venezuela in 1999, seven years after he had attempted a coup; the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States, which Washington retaliated to by invading Afghanistan and Iraq; and, finally, the October 7, 2023 operation and the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza that ensued.
Along this winding path, the end of the Cold War was a crucial turning point. This confrontation imposed restraints on both regional and international conflicts, safeguarding national borders in a substantial number of countries around the world. Moreover, the Soviets- especially from 1956 onward, when they affirmed the legitimacy of peaceful, parliamentary transitions to socialism- sought to institutionalize the struggle “against capitalism.”
It was not without significance that the collapse of the Soviet Union coincided with Saddam Hussein's self-appointment as heir to the struggle against the West, as shown by his seizure of the Emirate of Kuwait.
While Francis Fukuyama was announcing liberal democracy’s triumph to the world, heralding the end of history, many long knives were being honed and sharpened in the “global village.”
As far as Europe is concerned, it has no option, amid this debacle, but to play the role of victim. According to its American critics, Europe does not spend enough on defense in a grim Hobbesian world, and its union project invites punishment by attempting to overstep national borders. Other "shortcomings" that fragment and weaken its domestic front include an excess of liberalism ill-equipped to face the cruel challenges of reality, and laxity toward adversaries, from China to migrants and refugees. In this sense, punishing Europe becomes called for, and so, for example, wresting Greenland from Denmark becomes a “strategic necessity.”
That is how, more than three decades before the invasion of Ukraine, it began to become clear to the two radically hostile camps that the radical solutions required were more existential than political. The US, the “Great Satan” that “butchered the Native Americans,” “understands only the language of strength,” justifying the use of all arms, including militias, terrorism, and arms and drug trafficking, even as local populations are hit a lot harder by these policies than the West itself. On the other hand, coexisting with these malign forces is deemed impossible: they “threaten Western civilization” and use migration and asylum as their means for “replacing” white Christians.
Both sides are proponents of direct action, turning to force more readily than politics, diplomacy, and institutions. Donald Trump is particularly emblematic of this inclination to dismiss the fitness of these international institutions for arbitration in an existential struggle with adversaries that do not respect institutions, or even the states crumbling in their hands. Trump makes the same claim of his opponents that they make about him: they understand only the language of strength, and he, at the end of the day, is stronger than they are.
