Sympathy for the Devil

The recent American intervention in Venezuela, in which the country’s president and his wife were captured, caught most of the world’s politicians on the wrong foot.

Not that they hadn’t expected something to blow up sooner or later, but Trump’s move was so brazen that they simply didn’t know how to react without tripping over their own feet and biting their tongues.

An honorable exception, in my opinion, is Karl Erjavec, the self-proclaimed, I-swear-on-my-mother’s-life Mick Jagger of Slovenian politics.

I don’t know whether Karl has commented on the American attack on Venezuela yet, but some time ago he said that “throughout history the borders of states have never been drawn for all eternity,” and that talk of the inviolability of borders is an “EU illusion.”

We can agree with Karl’s interpretation of history and today’s geostrategic challenges or not, but his doctrine manages to explain and cover most of the current crises we are witnessing in today’s world, including the excursion to Caracas, without his being open to accusations of double standards. Or any standards at all. You Can’t Always Get What You Want, silly EU. Borders are not inviolable. Tough luck, that’s just how it is. Another question is why Karl is so enthusiastic about this state of affairs. Perhaps he believes that in the brave new world milk and honey will flow for Slovenians. With the Russians, Americans and Chinese, there are 1,902 million of us. We’ve got this.

The American president can of course be accused of double, triple or manifold standards, but I doubt it would bother him much, since he makes no secret that principle, logic, facts and reason are characteristics that mark weaklings. Every time he speaks, he offers a new explanation for the attack on Venezuela.

Maduro was a dictator.

Maduro was a drug trafficker.

By nationalizing the assets of American oil companies, Venezuela stole American oil.

Maduro imitated Trump’s dance moves. He wasn’t nice.

Who knows what was really going through his head. An amateur linguist on X hinted at the etymological origin of the attacked country’s name. It is a compound of two words, venez and uela, which in the language of the local natives mean Epstein and distraction. Who knows.

In short: a total mess. But that doesn’t bother Trump. He does things above all because he can. The mess is not a consequence but the purpose. To show who’s boss. Under My Thumb, my friends.

For Europe’s moral tightrope walkers, at least those who still care about the remnants of their own credibility and principles, the matter is more complicated. How to stand up firmly to Trump without his noticing. Because he doesn’t like that.

First they tried to wriggle out by saying that Maduro was a dictator who did not accept defeat at the elections. But tough luck, because Trump very quickly tired of the pro-democracy narrative, which is not surprising given his own attitude toward respecting election results and his fondness for most of the world’s other authoritarians. Not to mention that he cut a deal with Maduro’s vice president for a couple of million barrels of oil and brushed off the opposition leader because she had stolen his Nobel Peace Prize.

Then there are the drug trafficking charges. Even though Trump recently pardoned a former president of Honduras who had been convicted of similar misdeeds by an American court and was already serving a prison sentence in the US.

Finally, there is the oil story. This excuse is too much to swallow even for the most hardened Trumpversteher. Where will we end up if we accept that the big simply take what they believe belongs to them? Who will be next? Greenland?

European politics has reached the point at which it should realize that there are no more options in which Trump is fed and our value and security goat stays whole. That this puts us all in a very tight spot is clear—especially since it seems that for now we cannot stop the war in Ukraine without the US. But that does not change the fact that European politics should have seen through this long ago, instead of constantly using kneeling as the only solution while hoping each time for a different result.

The intervention in Venezuela has also deepened the crisis of credibility for a large part of Slovenian politics, although, judging by the fieriness of the reactions, they evidently aren’t aware of it. On the left they raised a ruckus; on the right they expressed understanding for the attack. Much as with the war in Ukraine, only mirrored.

Far be it from me to lump the American intervention in Venezuela and the Russian “special military operation in Ukraine” simplistically together. Zelensky is not Maduro, the US is not (yet) Russia, and the Russian special forces got a bloody nose when they landed near Kyiv. But there are some basic parameters and facts that one would expect principled politics to respect regardless of ideological preferences and domestic political interests. Fat chance.

On one side we heard that this is a gross violation of international law. Maduro is a head of state who can be replaced only by the citizens of Venezuela. Both are true—but the same applies to Ukraine, where instead of insisting on respect for international law and the right of Ukrainians to decide their own fate, we heard all sorts of things and accusations against everyone and anyone except those who actually violated that same national sovereignty and international law.

What is more: relativizing Russian aggression (America’s proxy war, blah blah, Zelensky’s a Nazi, blah blah, NATO is to blame for everything, blah blah …) is certainly not a message that would lead anyone—least of all Trump—to conclude that the gross trampling of international law doesn’t pay. If you are prepared to grant Tom an exclusive sphere of interest over his neighbors, it is hard to deny it to Harry.

Paradoxically, in Slovenia today many of the most fervent opponents of American imperialism, with their positions, are objectively holding the ladder for American policy, which, hand in hand with Putin, is reshaping and destabilizing the world in the crudest way.

Things are no better on the other side. The Slovenian right firmly took the side of the suffering Venezuelan people and supported the American intervention which, in agreement with the Venezuelan dictatorial regime, decapitated the Venezuelan dictatorial regime and ensured the continuity of the Venezuelan dictatorial regime.

On Ukraine, they are slowly wriggling out of the vise between their initial support for Kyiv and their ideological sympathy for Trump’s and Putin’s antiliberal reshaping of society and the world. We haven’t heard much about support for Ukraine from our railway pioneer in a long time. Sorry, Volodya, our train is now going in a different direction.

It seems that each side, from its own end, is prepared to make a pact with the devil, or at least to indulge him, in order to satisfy its own ideological needs. And then each, from its own extreme edge, helps push the world in the same direction. Down with NATO. Down with the EU. Down with liberal democracy.

Sympathy for the Devil, as Mick Jagger would say—the real one, not ours. But for what is happening to us, a more fitting soundtrack is a song he wrote a few years earlier: As Tears Go By.

And we can only hope that tears are all we will shed.