Enemies Foreign… or Domestic?

Alex Gervais ’28

Executive Opinion Editor

It was longtime conservative opinion columnist George Will ’62 who once wrote in the Tripod: “Too bad about that cinder that was once a child: he died when we burned his hut to protect his freedom from Those Enemies of Freedom.” Will wrote that line early on in the Vietnam War. His words came when there were 11,300 American soldiers in Vietnam, before the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, before the U.S. government became wholly obsessed with snuffing out even the possibility of communism in Southeast Asia. His words hang heavy as our nation yet again stares down the oil-greased barrel of another misguided foreign military intervention.   

In the early hours of Saturday, Jan. 3, the Trump administration kidnapped Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, lighting up the skies of Caracas with cruise missiles and killing more than 80 people in the process. Maduro now stands trial in a federal court in Manhattan, charged with narco-terrorism and possession of machine guns. At present, Venezuela becomes the seventh country bombed by the “Pro-Peace Ticket” in an act that violated article II, section IV of the United Nations Charter.  

There will be people who celebrate the illegal kidnapping of Maduro; they’ll tell you he was a brutal dictator, they’ll tell you his people were suffering economically; they’ll say that U.S. intervention is necessary to foster democracy in Venezuela. Yet I must ask them: how can our nation make the promise of “democracy” in Venezuela when we cannot truly uphold that promise here at home? How can we fix a Venezuelan economy that is almost entirely reliant on a commodity cycle we don’t control?

The reality is that this intervention is not about lifting the yoke of authoritarianism from the Venezuelan people or supporting a fledgling democracy; it’s about advancing U.S. interests. As Maduro stands trial in the U.S., truly despicable world leaders walk free. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is welcomed into Mar-a-Lago even as he has an ICC warrant for his arrest and perpetuates the genocide in Gaza, the blood of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians on his hands. Russian President Vladimir Putin continues his territorial bloodlust in Ukraine, rewarded with an Alaska summit with President Trump. President Nayib Bukele strengthens his grip on El Salvador, running brutal internment camps with a US seal of approval. If we were really concerned with freedom and breaking the brutal cycle of tyranny that is gripping our globe, these men would all have been convicted for crimes against humanity at The Hague; their arrests would have been our interventions of choice. But we are not. 

We’re content to let the most malevolent men in the world walk free as long as our control of the western hemisphere and our penchant for overthrowing socialist leaders continue uninterrupted. If we were really concerned with the welfare of the Venezuelan people, we would support their economy: we’d lower the crippling sanctions we impose on them and encourage protectionist industrial policy in partnership with the IMF and the World Bank to foster the economic conditions for democracy. But we won’t do that; we could never dream of supporting a socialist leader. Instead, we’ll invoke the classic colonial resource extraction strategy,  allowing American oil billionaires unfettered access to Venezuela’s oil while the Venezuelan people suffer.

At Trinity, we’re taught to think critically, so I ask my fellow students to try to see the full story. Venezuela was the prelude: a show of strength reaffirming that the United States can violate another nation’s sovereignty with no real pushback from the global community. Next comes the rising action: the Trump administration has already hinted that the Cuban and Colombian governments will be the next to fall and has again set their gaze towards Greenland. This is about more than the overthrow of a single leader: it’s Trump’s McKinleyesque attempt at reviving explicit U.S. imperialism and leaving a territorial impact on American history. 

But what will be the climax in this redux of American imperialism made for 21st century audiences? At this juncture, it is impossible to tell. Maybe it’s the Stars and Stripes flying over Caraccas. Maybe it’s a “Cuba Libre” with a right-wing U.S. backed leader. Maybe it’s paying $1.99 a gallon for gas. All I can tell is who “Those Enemies of Freedom” really are. They lie within our shores. They roam the halls of our Congress and rubberstamp unrestricted executive warmaking power. They work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

I ask my fellow Trinity students to recognize who the enemy of freedom really is and organize accordingly. If you are against U.S, imperialism, against another foreign war, then talk about it with your friends and with your classmates. I ask you to critically engage with the people who will call you a Maduro apologist: debate these ideas out in the open so we can reignite the spark of anti-war activism that Trinity proudly celebrates. As college students and responsible citizens, we have a moral duty to carry the blossoms of peace and support justice across the globe, especially when that justice is explicitly in conflict with the actions of our own government. We must oppose U.S. intervention in Venezuela.