People in Caracas, Venezuela, rip an American flag in half during a protest on Jan. 3.Ariana Cubillos/The Associated Press

“You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world ... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

– Deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, in an interview on CNN

At some point almost every young person comes to one of two startling realizations, that seem to upend everything they have ever been taught. The first: We’re the bad guys. America, Canada, the West: We’ve done all sorts of terrible things! All that rot about democracy and freedom, fighting dictatorships and all that, when it’s our leaders who are the real dictators. Only everyone else is too brainwashed to see it. But I, a second-year sociology major, have seen through the official lies …

And the other? There are no bad guys. Or good guys, for that matter. There is no such thing as right or wrong, or truth and falsehood: These are merely masks for the powerful to rationalize their grip on power, or for others to take it away from them. In such a dog-eat-dog world the only real sin is hypocrisy, and the only virtue is to be authentically what one is: selfish and amoral. As it says here on page 375 of my Collected Works of Nietzsche …

At some later point most people grow out of these sophisms. The intoxicating rush that comes with rejecting all conventional wisdom, or being released from all moral constraints, gives way before the twin realities that democracy, for all its faults, is superior to dictatorship, and that adhering to some sort of ethics, for all its tedium, is indispensable, not only to a functioning society, but to a decent life.

John Rapley: Trump’s thirst for Venezuelan crude will hasten the death of oil

Only Donald Trump, and the people around him, never grew up. Mr. Trump himself often sounds like the worst sort of whatabouting campus lefty when it comes to world affairs. Has Russia committed atrocities in Ukraine? Hey, we’re no angels, knowhatimean? Which may sound like “we’re the bad guys,” but as is often the way, turns out to mean “there are no bad guys.” There is only strength, and force, and power. Which is how you get to Venezuela. And Greenland. And beyond.

They are drunk on power, the Trump boys, but more than that, drunk on amorality. Why, in the end, did they invade Venezuela? Because they can. They may like........

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