Tooze’s Imperialist-Cosplay VS. Stupid Imperialism
Adam Tooze put out a Chartbook today that suggested Trump’s imperialist war on Venezuela could be “imperialist cosplay”:
If I were to make a big noisy claim it would be that the entire exercise has less to do with actual resource imperialism than Trump’s feckless reality TV Cosplay resource imperialism. He likes demonstrative acts of violence. He likes to claim immediate economic paybacks. He singled out Venezuela in his first term. He has come back for more.
I don’t think he’s meaning to downplay the seriousness of what’s happening or its illegality. Indeed, Tooze’s following sentence subverts the above:
If you pushed me further I would say that the Trump administration appears to be serious about the Monroe … sorry Donroe … doctrine in the Western hemisphere.
The Monroe Doctrine is of course an imperialist doctrine, not cosplay. At the same time, Tooze is not wrong that Trump actually likes being thought of as a resource imperialist and openly declares that resource extraction is his motive. Trump also loves spectacular (as in spectacle, meant to draw attention) violence.
Can we reconcile these claims? I think so.
One way is to distinguish motivational causes from structural causes.
Foreign policy analysts are attracted to thinking about causality from the perspective of agents, deciders. What was going on in Trump’s head when he ordered an invasion of Venezuela to kidnap its president?
Trump does love spectacle, embraces violence, and also supposedly greenlit the kidnapping operation when he saw that stupid video of Maduro dancing in defiance of Trump’s threats.1 You could file these aspects of the decision under “imperialist cosplay.” But based on Trump’s own repeated admissions, his motive was oil, resource imperialism—an acute expression of the Monroe Doctrine.
If we’re thinking about why the invasion happened, though—and especially what made it possible—we have to open ourselves to structural explanations.
The reason I’ve argued (since 2023!) MAGA was pursuing imperialism in Latin America is the same reason I code Sino-US competition as inter-imperial rivalry and the same reason I was possibly the first to describe Trump’s foreign policy as imperialist: A crisis of capital accumulation brought on by long-term declining growth, which leads to an alliance between the national security state and key economic sectors.
Primitive methods of capital accumulation (violence beyond just wage-labor exploitation) drive the state toward imperialist foreign policy. Think of it as unlocking profits from unsettling geopolitics through violence. For this structural explanation to be true, we don’t need to discern the motives of the individual cogs in the machine. And if this is true, then we can’t think of Trump’s Venezuela invasion as cosplay—it’s the real deal.
But what lay underneath Tooze’s imperialist cosplay claim is an assumption of rational imperialism. If you’re going to mobilize state power for oil industry interests, as Trump has explicitly done, you might look for confirmation of that thesis in oil companies clamoring to take over the Venezuela market. But so far that’s not happening, and it’s because Venezuela’s oil industry has been hampered by the fact that much of its reserves are not economical to extract (a point Tooze makes) and because a politically volatile environment in Venezuela (brought on by first US sanctions and now a US coup) makes risks outweigh profit potential.
What Tooze calls imperialist cosplay, then, is imperialism done stupidly. Stupid Imperialism. Should we expect any other kind from the American far right?
Here’s what deeply worries me. If I’m correct about my imperialism thesis and the Trump administration is dead-set on seeing US oil companies gain maximum profits from instability in Venezuela, then US troops will be necessary—at scale—in order to pacify Venezuela sufficiently to allow oil companies to extract freely. That’s a fucking shit show quagmire.
Invaded Venezuela, did for the oil.
Empires never really care about who owns the soil.
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Should we mention that the day of the operation was also a key deadline for the Epstein files release?