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In a CNN interview Monday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller laid out the criminal character of the assault on Venezuela and American imperialism as a whole. When asked what Trump meant when he said the US would “run” Venezuela, Miller declared, “We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
Miller dismissed international law as “international niceties” and declared flatly: “The United States of America is running Venezuela ... we are in charge, because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce.”
Miller made clear that this “iron law” applies not just to the former colonies but the territories of the European powers themselves. When asked about Greenland, Miller declared that “Greenland should be part of the United States” and refused to rule out the use of military force. “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” he sneered.
This is the language of the Nazis, drawn from Hitler’s
Mein Kampf and its talk of “iron laws of Nature” in relation to races and racial-state conflict.
Beyond the specific ideological influences of Miller’s statements, however, he is expressing what is in fact the essential character of imperialist policy. Lenin, in his 1916 work
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in analyzing the competition between different banks and corporate conglomerates, explained that influence and power is divided “‘in proportion to capital,’ ‘in proportion to strength,’ because there cannot be any other method of division under commodity production and capitalism.”
Polemicizing against those, including Karl Kautsky, who claimed that capitalism was capable of peaceful development, he wrote: “Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations—all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism.”
In the aftermath of World War II, under conditions of immense social upheaval and enormous popular outrage over the crimes of the Nazi regime, the capitalist powers outlined and expanded certain principles of international law that were supposed to regulate the relations among states. A limited number of the surviving leaders of the Nazi regime were tried for crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. In its ruling, the International Tribunal declared a “war of aggression” to be the “supreme international crime.”
As a matter of fact, the United States never considered itself seriously bound by these principles. Within five years of the Nuremberg verdicts, it launched the Korean War. Then came the Vietnam War, the various operations in Iran, Indonesia, the Congo, Guatemala and Chile and the backing of death squads across Latin America.
But US imperialism traditionally cloaked its aggression in the language of freedom and democracy. As Trotsky remarked ironically in the 1920s, “America is always liberating somebody, that’s her profession.” Wilson’s “Fourteen Points,” Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms,” Carter’s “human rights” reflected an effort to uphold the pretense that American policy was not governed by predatory interests.
In asserting the “iron law” that might makes right, Trump is not inventing a new doctrine but stripping away the tattered remains of the democratic pretexts that once accompanied American aggression. He is not inventing something new, and Trump is building on decades of escalating criminality that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But there is now a qualitative development.
In asserting the “iron law” that might makes right, Trump is not inventing a new doctrine but stripping away the tattered remains of the democratic pretexts that once accompanied American aggression.
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