The Changing Symbolic Power of American Language and International Law

Widely accepted international legal norms inject moral norms and ethical considerations into global politics, often rightly so, criminalising violent foreign intervention, crimes against humanity, and more. Presidents and world leaders, most recently Rodrigo Duterte, have been held to account by the International Criminal Court, for example, for these transgressions. Yet, accountability for President Trump’s recent military operation in Venezuela, which violated the sovereignty of a state and the immunity that its functional executive, Nicolás Maduro, is due, seems unlikely. 

This intervention is widely regarded by scholars, Republican politicians, and the international community as illegal, and thus the United States government has barely taken the trouble to justify it, in legal terms. In previous interventions in Venezuela, desire for political control over oil resources was done through the language of democracy and human rights, as recently as the 2019 elections, where Juan Guiadó was the preferred candidate of the United States and much of Western Europe. Democracy promotion, though highly and rightly problematised by scholars and practitioners alike, has been the United States’ manner of framing their violent interventions through a human rights and even self-defence narrative, best exemplified by the Iraq War. In fact, given the lukewarm positive responses of the Venezuelan diaspora abroad, this would have been one of the rare cases where true promotion of democracy and free elections by the United States would have been welcome. So, why did the American executive branch not push this seemingly obvious explanation for their intervention in order to bolster their reputation?

This exceedingly rare case, framed in terms of oil interests, and profit maximisation (on the part of American private companies), could still be seen as somewhat logical due to its intention to make better use of Venezuelan oil resources and distribute proceeds in a trickle-down manner to the Venezuelan people. Even the most Machiavellian uses of law and logic have been cast aside, given that business news outlets are more likely than general interest press (NY Times, CNN, Fox) to report the truth: most American oil companies perceive Venezuelan oil as too low quality and risky to seriously invest in. It begs the question: did Trump ask any oil company what they wanted beforehand? Was he simply seeking to cement his own reputation as an aggressor on the world stage, turning what may previously have been seen as irrationality into “enigmatic” shows of power?

Trump wishes to undermine America’s role in the international system as a patron state, a false narrative that has allowed neocolonial interventions for decades. Yet, by portraying America as an oil-hungry, aggressive state completely uninterested in even a performance of democratic pursuits, Trump has finally won in his populist-inspired approach to end foreign interventions under a thin guise of dismantling neocolonialism, which ultimately costs the taxpayer. Instead, his approach costs the American populace their reputation. International law which intends to protect national sovereignty is now best viewed through the lens of how it serves symbolic diplomacy, and we are forced to view the current global landscape as almost satirical, the ideas of theory previously relegated to study of media and aesthetics bleeding into reality. As Jean Baudrillard illustrated in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, when symbolic diplomacy transitions into aggression, it demonstrates that politicians view world order and the language used to uphold it as a game, as a way of navigating a simulation that they wish to create. Morality is twisted at the expense of valuing human life: Trump claims Maduro is not privy to diplomatic immunity due to the unfairness of his election. This makes it acceptable to kidnap him and install his second in command, thus implicitly recognising his government.  

The role that language, narrative, and logic play in unmatchably powerful American military interventions has long been dangerous, but the decision to forego it altogether demonstrates a sinister turn in the international landscape. Even the action of molding and rewording policy decisions to fit international norms, or at least a coherent narrative, imposes a system of checks and balances, or accountability, on a government. This is best exemplified in post Cold War interventions such as in the Angolan Civil War in the late 1990s — accountability for military spending in other countries can incite investigation into misuse of funds and help to avoid the prolonging of conflict. Truth is smoothed over, Venezuela falls lower and lower on a list of headlines, international law becomes a joke to its own scholars, and we embrace a simulation of global politics that we are unable to meaningfully critique given its purposeful occlusion of nuance in favor of grandstanding, largely on President Trump’s part. Politics, when it is used as a symbolic tool of ego, forgoes even traditional ideas of democracy promotion or economic interest. Irrationality is reframed as mystery, symbolic intervention is what offers reputational currency. And nothing changes in Venezuela.

Image: Flickr/Matt Wootton

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