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Occasionally, history generates smooth changes from one era to another. More commonly, such shifts occur only gradually and untidily. And sometimes, as the former Downing Street foreign policy adviser John Bew puts it in the New Statesman, history unfolds “in a series of flashes and bangs”. In Caracas last weekend, Donald Trump’s forces did this in spectacular style. In the process, the US brushed aside more of what remains of the so-called rules-based order with which it tried to shape the west after 1945.
The capture of Venezuela’s former president Nicolás Maduro has precedents in US policy. But discerning a wider new pattern from the kidnapping is not easy, especially at this early stage. As our columnist Aditya Chakrabortty has argued this week, the abduction can be seen as a assertion of American power, but also as little more than a chaotic asset grab.
The US’s historic allies are still struggling to understand these changes. Even more important, they are struggling to respond to them. Events such as those in Caracas raise stark questions of power. They embody the exact same reality that President Trump delights in celebrating. The US is a superpower. Allies, including the UK, are not. These questions are not going to disappear. The British government should not be condemned for each hesitation. But the hesitations cannot continue indefinitely. Britain needs a grown-up debate and a clear new course of international direction.
In the Spectator this week, Peter Mandelson, the former ambassador to Washington, rubs Europe’s noses in it. “Trump has the means and the will,” he says, “and they [Europe and the UK] do not.” In Caracas, he writes, Mr Trump did more in a day than diplomacy has achieved in 10 years. The issue that faces us, says Lord Mandelson, is “Europe’s growing political impotence in the world”. The way to reclaim a seat at the table is not through “histrionics” or “fine words” but by the collective deployment of “hard power and hard cash”, he writes.
Many will disagree with this sweeping dismissal of international rules and its insistence on transatlantic realpolitik, perhaps because of its author. But Lord Mandelson is not alone. Officials, advisers, academics and commentators of every stripe are also trying to make larger sense of the US’s transformation from necessary power to rogue state.
The arguments of Prof Bew, adviser to four prime ministers from Boris Johnson to Sir Keir Starmer, are important here. In his view, Caracas marks three things. First, an increased US willingness to use executive power for swift military action. Second, a further assertion of an American mercantilism that insists on US control of oil, gas and minerals. Third, at least as promoted by the state department, a turn to a hemispheric approach, implying perhaps that China and Russia would be given freer rein in other regions.
We can, should and do regret these emerging shifts. But, as Prof Bew says, while we mourn the disintegration of the rules-based order, and decry the mercantilism now dominating the west’s most dynamic economy, the old world and its assumptions are not coming back any time soon. Countries such as Britain have to decide what economic and technological adaptations we should make in this new world to protect our interests and our people. No one can pretend that is easy. But it is a debate that involves us all, with implications that will affect us all, and therefore one in which all must have a voice.
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