President Donald Trump invaded Venezuela to capture leader Nicolás Maduro and has spent the better part of the week threatening the remaining leaders in the Maduro administration. The aftermath has brought comments about a $100 billion U.S. investment into Venezuela infrastructure and a possible purchasing of Greenland. One Mother Jones editor is speculating it could be part of a "neo-royalism" campaign.
Writing Wednesday, Inae Oh said she saw some individuals debating the reasons the administration might be trying to takeover other countries and territories.
"The parade of threats, which had seemed absurd until Friday, has prompted many to wonder: Why? What is the point of invading other countries? Could it really be as simple as oil? A play for a sphere of influence? Age-old imperialism? Is it because, as Chuck Schumer meekly suggested, that Republicans just aren’t 'stepping up to the plate?'" she asked.
The idea of "neo-royalism" argues that the last century may have been one of "Cold War liberalism" and that the new century is one that will be shaped by "private interests of individual men and their fiercest allies, not the interests, private or public, fair or foul, good or bad, of a nation."
Georgetown University political scientist Abe Newman told Oh, “Neo-royalism says that the state, the country, is not the key actor. It’s groups of elites that are organized around political leaders. That system doesn’t play by the same rules.”
Newman coined the term.
Oh noted that she doesn't believe that the breakdown of the international world order is happening in a "Trumpian vacuum."
Newman cited a book by UC Irvine Professor Jeff Kopstein, who wrote about the rise of "patrimonial systems of government" and the "disassembly of the internal, bureaucratic state."
It isn't necessarily because of Trump, he said, rather it's due to things like the polarization of Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United and a slew of other things that disproportionately put more power in the hands of the president. In this case, Trump.
"It’s a version where there’s very little bureaucracy around the decisions of the leader, and instead, the leader can make decisions based on their personal interests," said Newman about the unitary executive theory of government. "That’s not just a change in the United States; you see that in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, wherein many states have seen the same evolution away from what people will call the Weberian state, to this more patrimonial system. And what our argument is that has international consequences. It’s not just changes domestically; it’s also having this transformative effect globally."
Newman cites Sen. Chuck Schumer’s response to Trump being something to the effect of "Republicans should vote against this."
"But there has to be a recognition that this is an attempt to transform how the international system works," he explained. "There’s a much larger agenda afoot, and it is basically degrading the norms and processes that we’ve based the international system on. Somebody needs to stay that rules are this way because they prevent violence, coercion, and corruption. If we get rid of rules, we’re likely to have violence and corruption — and we’re already seeing that play out. The stakes are very high."
Read the full report here.
