For years they have been caterwauling about undocumented immigration and the need for border security. They’ve talked about building walls along the United States’ southern border to keep people out because preserving and honoring the sanctity of a nation’s borders is of the utmost importance.
It turns out, though, that they didn’t mean a word of it. That’s the lesson to be drawn from the United States’ assault on Venezuela and the posturing by Trump and Miller regarding a U.S. annexation of Greenland.
International reactions to both the attack and the musing about annexation have been fierce. Some of our staunchest allies over the decades have criticized us for flouting international law, ignoring clearly established treaties and, of course, violating the sovereignty of other nations.
And how have Trump, Miller and MAGA responded to this barrage of criticism?
With variations of this single argument: Borders don’t really matter.
If you’re big enough, strong enough or smart enough, you can treat another nation’s border as if it were a grocery store sliding door entryway during a supermarket sweepstakes giveaway game. You can take away as much as you can carry and no one else—not the store owner, not witnesses to the event and certainly not the police—can or should be able to say boo about it.
Now, because neither Trump nor Miller is cursed with self-awareness and because most of the folks in the MAGA universe don’t really pay attention, they don’t realize that they just turned the U.S.-Mexico border into a giant automatic sliding door.
Let the supermarket sweepstakes along the Rio Grande begin.
After all, if international law doesn’t matter, if established treaties don’t matter and if a nation’s sovereignty doesn’t matter, then what right does the United States have to complain if someone—anyone—is strong enough, brave enough or smart enough to find a way into this country?
No one—including the president of the United States and his White House storm trooper in training Miller—should be allowed to say boo.
That’s the message the rest of the world is going to take from the Trump administration’s actions in Venezuela and its threats regarding Greenland. If the United States—once the enforcer for international law and the inviolability of treaties—takes the position that it can unilaterally disregard both the law and sworn agreements between nations, then other nations and their citizens can do the same.
Anything goes.
Critics of the Trump administration’s invasion and takeover of Venezuela and threatened takeover of Greenland have pointed to the more immediate consequences of the president’s bullying approach to foreign policy.
They say that Trump’s actions in Venezuela not only will disrupt that country but likely will further destabilize Latin America and turn it into yet another hotbed of hostility to the United States.
And if the United States does move to take over Greenland, it will mean the end of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, an instrument that, however imperfectly, has helped to keep World War III from erupting for more than three-quarters of a century.
Both of those criticisms are valid—and the projections embedded within those criticisms probably will come true.
But neither of those outcomes is likely to be the final or the most important result of this feckless administration’s act-first, think-later approach to foreign affairs.
No, the most lasting consequence of this recklessness will be the erosion and erasure of any sense of international law or restraint. The formal and informal understandings between peace-loving and democratic nations—again, however imperfect—that they will band together to prevent local conflicts from escalating and expanding has helped to prevent the world from exploding at times.
Dispensing with those understandings to gain oil or land is on our part a foolish act, one we and the world will pay for. Enshrining that might alone as a justification for hostile acts will only embolden the worst actors on the planet.
Bob Dylan once wrote, “To live outside the law, you must be honest.”
Part of the reason we need the law is that so few of us are honest.
And no one in this administration seems to be.
