The Borrowed Venezuelan Kettle
MAGA’s foreign policy fugue state
“A new vision of the New World order is thus emerging… [T]he goal is … no longer the Fukuyama utopia of expanding universal liberal democracy, but the transformation of the USA into ‘Fortress America,’ a lone superpower isolated from the rest of the world, protecting its vital economic interests and securing its safety through its new military power.” These lines from Slavoj Žižek might sound like they were written in 2025 in response to the Trump administration’s ostensible “America First” foreign policy. In fact, they date back to 2004, the year after the US invasion of Iraq propelled by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. They offer just one reminder that the contrasts between the vision propelling the supposed “neocon” GOP of the 2000s and the current MAGA version were always somewhat overstated, whether they came from anti-interventionist defectors to Trumpism or from Democrats who grew weirdly fond of Bush and Cheney in recent years.
The Žižek lines appear in the book Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, which I revisited this week while trying to make sense of the bewildering discursive formation around what I’m currently calling Trump’s “Venezuelan adventure,” for lack of any better descriptor. Žižek’s title comes from a joke recounted by Freud to “illustrate the strange logic of dreams: (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you; (2) I returned it to you unbroken; (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you.” “Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments,” he explains, “confirms per negationem what it endeavours to deny—that I returned a broken kettle to you”—exposing the borrower’s guilt through his inability to offer a coherent justification and the desperation of his denials. For Žižek, a similarly structured incoherence was evident in the Bush administration’s ever-shifting casus belli: Saddam has WMDs, Saddam backs Al Qaeda, we must bring democracy to Iraq.
Looking back on this moment, perhaps the most formative episode for my own political consciousness, I can only be struck by how much better Žižek’s analysis fits the rationale, such as it is, for the current Venezuelan adventure. He wasn’t quite right, it strikes me in retrospect, about the resemblance of the Bush administration’s war rationales to dream logic. Although the way the deployment of these and other justifications shifted constantly offered ample ground for the suspicions I shared with so many others at the time, there was nothing logically incoherent about them. In fact, the slightly vaguer proposition “Saddam Hussein is a dictator who sponsors terrorists and has used weapons of mass destruction” could be described as straightforwardly true: He was a dictator, had hosted terrorist outfits including the Abu Nidal Organization, and had used chemical weapons (which Washington helped him get!) against Iran. They simply weren’t true in the specific way the Bush administration was claiming circa 2002-3.
Despite the obvious motivated reasoning at work in the inexorable march to war during those years, and notwithstanding Karl Rove’s dismissal of the “reality-based community,” Bush and co. made a sustained effort to persuade doubters and present evidence to the public on behalf of their allegations—most famously, in Colin Powell’s February 2003 UN speech. This was why so many bipartisan elites (to my great disgust) ended up backing the invasion, and why the majority of the public was behind it in the initial phase. It was a masterclass in deceptive propaganda, to be sure, but it projected a certain aura of solidity and unassailability. The utter flimsiness of the rationales being offered for the Venezuelan adventure puts all this in stark relief.
The kettle logic around Venezuela, like the case for invading Iraq, proceeds in three phases: 1) First, we are told we are in a life-and-death struggle against “narcoterrorism,” a term that amalgamates the famously unsuccessful Wars on Terror and Drugs into a single cause. But oddly, the focus of this crusade is some small boats in the Caribbean, neither a major conduit of drug trafficking to the US market nor a site of much of anything that could plausibly be called “terrorism” in the way it’s been defined in recent decades. 2) When these latter points are raised, there is usually a shift toward denouncing the oppressiveness of Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship, in a straightforward revival of the “spreading democracy” rhetoric in repudiation of which Trump supposedly defined his foreign policy program. (These are combined when Maduro is described as a “narcoterrorist” cartel boss, or as someone on X explained to me, the head of a “narcocommunist empire.”) 3) Finally, when this apparent revival of a “neocon” agenda is pointed out to be at odds with what Trump has claimed to be his repudiation of the foreign policy consensus of prior decades, we are told that this is time is different because it is about “reviving the Monroe Doctrine,” a historical reference MAGA has become passionate about lately after eight years of never mentioning it.
Of course, these rationales are not logically inconsistent in the abstract any more than the Bush White House’s were; what is more noteworthy is their inconsistency with a certain vision of what Trumpism was believed by some, with the encouragement of Trump and his surrogates, to be about. But what is even more remarkable here is the administration’s persistent undermining of its own case, resulting in spectacles that are indeed best apprehended as a dreamlike phantasmagoria. Exhibit A is Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s assertion in a cabinet meeting this week that strikes on alleged “narcoterrorists” had saved “hundreds of millions of lives,” the latest and most extreme of the hyperbolic figures generated to justify the Caribbean boat bombings. Noem appeared to be positing that no less than half the US population had been narrowly saved from overdose death in 2025. A second point would be that official documents published by DHS, DEA, and other federal agencies all fail to mention Venezuela as a source of illegal drugs, much less lethal ones like fentanyl, for the US market. This, again, is in contrast to the Bush administration, which circulated a great deal of material to back up its (false) claims.
As for the supposed jihad against “narcoterrorist dictators,” I think we must view Trump’s oddly timed pardon of former Honduran president and convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández as a subliminal disavowal of this ostensible rationale for hostility to Maduro. Not only was JOH demonstrated in a US court to be exact the thing Trump now claims Maduro is when justifying his potential ouster, much of the evidence was compiled by Trump’s own first-term DOJ; the prosecution was even carried out by a top Trump loyalist, Emil Bove. Of course, there is nothing at all novel about Washington propping up some dictators while going after others: Like Manuel Noriega, Saddam himself was on both sides of this equation at different points; Jeane Kirkpatrick’s famous 1982 essay “Dictators and Double Standards” spelled out the logic of selective “democracy promotion” for the later Cold War years. What is notable in Trump’s actions is the simultaneity of the two actions and the complete disinterest in even attempting to reconcile them—a phenomenon familiar, again, from the logic of dreams.
I won’t go into the “Monroe Doctrine” claim here except to say that it’s hilarious that the MAGAverse apparently thinks meddling in Latin American affairs is some sort of throwback to the old “great” America of McKinley and TR, as opposed to one of the longstanding staples of what JD Vance denounced this week as “Permanent Washington.” (Look no further than the career of Trump’s new bff JOH, which received quite a boost from the efforts of “Crooked Hillary” Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama, or the prior attempts at Venezuelan regime change undertaken by Democratic and Republican administrations.) And that’s what I suspect is really at work in MAGA’s descent into a dissociative fugue state as it attempts to reconcile Marco Rubio’s humdrum neocon scheme to install a friendlier regime in Caracas with erstwhile “New Right” and “America First” imperatives: The one thing it still can’t acknowledge, like the man who can’t admit he broke his neighbor’s kettle, is that it simply is “Permanent Washington” now.
This week in Compact
Adam Rowe on Ken Burns’s new series
Juan David Rojas on the JOH pardon
Tiare Gatti Mora on surveillance feminism in Spain
Felice Basbøll on the fall of the Danish Social Democrats
Ralph Leonard on the homesteading revival
John B. Judis on the left’s prospects in the 21st century
George Beebe on the need for compromise in Ukraine