During his characteristically rambling press conference on Saturday about the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Donald Trump asserted that ‘It’s all a deal. Life is a big deal’.
It’s what he believes. According to him, everything can be negotiated with everyone, and he believes that he’s the best at doing this. Early last year he said something similar. ‘That’s what I do. I do deals. My whole life is deals.’
Of course deals are important. The great 18th century writer Samuel Johnson famously said that ‘there are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money’.
Deals are an essential part of life. But they aren’t life. Trump is wrong to say that ‘life is a big deal’. When that maxim is misguidedly applied to the relations between states, disaster is likely to follow.
The abduction of Maduro and his wife in Caracas, brilliantly executed though it was, undermines the rules-based international order. It will give comfort to ruthless regimes such as China and Russia. They will feel even less constrained to observe civilised standards than they have been.
Some have claimed that Trump is looking for regime change in Venezuela. Judging by his press conference on Saturday, this is far from his mind. He wants to do a deal involving oil with Maduro’s hardline deputy, Delcy Rodriguez, and what remains of the regime, that will financially benefit the United States.
Maybe they’ll play ball. Maybe they won’t. In either event, it’s clear that Trump is not remotely interested in restoring democratic rights to the Venezuelan people.
On Saturday, he dismissed the opposition, preposterously claiming that its main leader, Maria Corina Machado, ‘doesn’t have the support or the respect inside the country’.
Smoke rises from Caracas during the US’s military action on January 3, which resulted in the capture of Venezuela’s president
President Nicolas Maduro after his capture, in an image posted on Donald Trump’s social media website Truth Social
I sense that the Right in Britain, and even what one might call the decent Left, are divided about Trump. Everyone except Labour’s deluded hard-Left (which has long worshipped Maduro) can agree that the now ex-president of Venezuela is a bad and corrupt man whose catastrophic rule has impoverished his country.
But I believe those on the Right who champion Trump without reservation, and fail to see the dangers that this myopic deals-based leader of the Free World poses to the international order, are profoundly mistaken.
Let me appeal to the example of Margaret Thatcher. In October 1983, the United States invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada, whose Head of State happened to be Her Majesty the Queen.
The US government was fearful that communists might take over there. However, President Ronald Reagan didn’t bother to consult Mrs Thatcher in advance, not least because he was rather frightened of her.
She was incandescent when she learnt what had happened. For the most part she managed to conceal her true feelings in public, while in private letting them be known to Reagan. However, in a BBC World Service interview at the time she was unable to equivocate any longer.
First she referred to the Falklands War, which had taken place the previous year, with America for a time a less than rock solid ally. ‘Britain went to get its territory back . . . That has no parallel whatsoever with Grenada.’
She continued: ‘I am totally and utterly against Communism and terrorism. But . . . if you are pronouncing a new law that wherever Communism reigns against the will of the people . . . there the United States shall enter, then you are going to have really terrible wars in the world.’
Margaret Thatcher was upholding the rules-based order, which had prevailed since the Second World War, with one or two hiccoughs such as the 1956 Suez Crisis (when, ironically, the US claimed to defend that order after the British government of the time had seemingly undermined it).
President Trump addresses the press from Mar-a-Lago, alongside defence secretary Pete Hegseth
President Trump watches the raid that captured Maduro with CIA director John Ratcliffe standing behind
‘Those on the Right who champion Trump without reservation are profoundly mistaken’
There have been a few hiccoughs since, most notably in Iraq in 2003, when America and Britain invaded that country without justification. By this I mean that, contrary to false propaganda pumped out by the likes of Tony Blair, the Iraqi regime, however disagreeable, didn’t actually menace any Western power.
So it is with Venezuela, which is more than 1,000 miles away from the nearest US coastline. Maduro was not threatening America or preparing an act of war against it. His alleged encouragement of the narcotics trade, though abhorrent, doesn’t legitimise invasion and abduction.
Thatcher was right to uphold sovereignty after the US invasion of Grenada. You can’t go around attacking countries whose governments you happen not to like. This is a fundamental principle which, with his avaricious eye always on the next advantageous deal, the amoral American President cannot grasp.
China and Russia have both had a mild fit of the vapours over Trump’s adventure in Venezuela, but deep down their leaders are, of course, only too happy to witness this naked display of power.
President Xi Jinping will argue that, if American aircraft and helicopters can mount a raid on Caracas and capture the President and his wife, the United States and the West will be in a less strong position to object should China attack Taiwan, or anywhere else that might take its fancy.
Similarly, President Putin will attempt to portray Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a more favourable light. Of course the comparison is a poor one, since Trump has no intention of permanently occupying Venezuela or of killing thousands of its citizens.
Nonetheless, by using force in shameless defiance of accepted norms, Trump has given the bullies and brutes of this world, of whom there are many, a convenient precedent with which they will seek to justify their future excesses.
To put it another way, the blinkered President has recklessly sacrificed America’s moral leadership. It’s true that this was sometimes more honoured in the breach than in the observance – witness the Iraq War. All the same, the US still stood for something precious. Until now.
Has Trump¿s raid set a dangerous example for other world leaders to ignore international rules?
All this of course puts Sir Keir Starmer, as Trump’s unofficial butler and cringingly sycophantic acolyte, in a delicate position. He knows that the American President has acted precipitately and rashly but is too frightened to say so.
If he had any guts, he would stand up and declare that in this matter Trump is wrong – just as Margaret Thatcher was prepared over 40 years ago to chide her friend Ronald Reagan, who happened to be a far nicer and infinitely wiser man.
But I don’t suppose that Starmer will dare take Donald Trump to task and say what he should: that America is our closest ally but it must support the international order, which is the only defence against a lawless world in which might is right and the strongest take whatever they want.
Trump isn’t a wicked man, in the way that Vladimir Putin is. But with his emphasis on dealmaking, and his conviction that money should be made out of every crisis, he is a terrifyingly limited one.