Venezuela Symbolizes for the U.S. What Palestine Does for Israel

There is no legitimate justification for U.S. aggression against Venezuela. But there is a powerful symbolism. The ideological currents driving this aggression are the same ones that drive Israel’s actions in Palestine.

The U.S. is acting with complete disregard for any notion of international law. That was tacitly recognized by Marco Rubio when he said, after the G7 meeting in Canada: “I don’t think that the European Union gets to determine what international law is, and what they certainly don’t get to determine is how the United States defends its national security.”

Rubio was responding to a question raised by a Kaja Kallas, vice president of the European Commission, who had expressed doubts that U.S. attacks in the Caribbean were either self-defense or based on a U.N. mandate. Rubio added: “The United States is under attack from organized criminal narco-terrorists in our hemisphere, and the President is responding in the defense of our country.”

I do think that Trump and parts of his administration genuinely believe they are at war with drug cartels. Thomas Neuburger, commenting on a Michael Wolff post on how Trump arrives at his “facts,” which are often distorted if not outright wrong, describes it like this:

“A man wakes up, maniacally searches the news for what involves him — which is just about everything now — then maniacally seeks from his staff how to digest all that in a way that makes him look good, or at least makes his foes look bad. When he gets what he wants, stories that make him feel good — it’s all about feelings, it seems — he stores their spin and later repeats what he hears, happy to show he’s right.”

Some variation of that seems probable. The information loop feeds on itself and reinforces the same discourse. However, it is naive to believe that the entire foreign policy of the country, and specifically in Latin America, hinges on the president’s personal ideas. That is highly improbable. In Rubio’s answer, we have a clue as to where the real foundations lie.

Rubio says “our hemisphere” — almost certainly not a slip of the tongue, but an expression of what he really believes. He is part of a U.S. political class that operates under the ideological assumption that the United States has a right — almost a divine right — over what it considers its sphere of influence, “our hemisphere.” That is why “Europe does not determine what international law is.” How could they — those whom we basically rule — tell us what to do?

That is also why the U.S. claims a right to topple governments and meddle in the internal affairs of other countries, especially in the Americas, to promote its own interests. Rubio represents the bipartisan consensus that emerged from the hegemonic era of U.S. primacy.

However hawkish, he still dresses his position in the language of democracy promotion and freedom, which serves to mask the appropriation of resources. His agenda against Venezuela is dominated by ideological anti-communism. For him, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba are “enemies of humanity.”

But to think that U.S. foreign policy is still primarily driven by anti-communist propaganda is to cling to a paradigm that is already over. Other powerful currents are now moving the surface waters — currents that do not seek to build a bipartisan consensus but to do away with the need for one altogether. As Katherine Stewart puts it, this movement “isn’t looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy; it wants to burn down the house.”

This is the ideological current that Vice President J.D. Vance represents: the National Conservatism movement, which seeks to reshape the U.S. according to Yoram Hazony’s idea of Israel. Hazony is the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, whose stated aim is to promote the ideology of national conservatism and which organizes the NatCon conferences. Vance has attended and delivered key speeches at NatCon and declares himself an admirer of Hazony.

Hazony rejects liberalism as a rationalist “system of dogmas” and instead grounds political legitimacy in “God, the Hebrew Bible, family, and the independent nation state.” In his view, nations are not based on liberal principles of consent and universal equality, but on divine covenant and inherited obligations within a particular group. This provides the justification for an ethnostate such as the one he defends in Israel, in which the idea of the nation is tied to a specific people whose interests stand above all others, unconstrained by international law or minority protections.

The bridge between Hazony’s Israel and Trump’s America runs through Christian nationalism and the National Conservatism movement. He cofunded the Edmund Burke Foundation with David Brog, former executive director of Christians United for Israel. J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice president, openly cites Hazony as a key intellectual influence and describes Israel as an “island of shared values,” presenting it as a moral model rather than merely a strategic ally.

Christian nationalists — 80 percent of white evangelicals Christians voted for Trump — share the myth that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and believe that legitimate government rests not on the consent of the governed but on adherence to a particular definition of a religious and cultural heritage. This mirrors Hazony’s logic: if Israel is the God-given home of the Jews, America can be imagined as the God-given home of white Christians.

Peter Thiel emerges as a central figure here: financier of National Conservatism, mentor and patron of Vance, investor in surveillance and defense technologies, and architect of an alliance between neo-nationalists, tech oligarchs, and the military-industrial complex. Through this network, ideas first articulated in the Israeli context — biblical nationalism, siege mentality, the fusion of religion and force — are translated into a U.S. setting.

Thiel uses Hazony’s ideological biblical framework and the showcase of National Conservatism as a political vehicle for his own vision: an alliance between “Judeo-Christian” nationalism and a technocratic-oligarchic power capable of redesigning the Western political order in a more authoritarian, illiberal, and security-oriented way. He has famously stated that he does not believe that democracy and freedom are compatible.

The American “experiment” as an Enlightenment, secular, rights-based republic is being reinterpreted and hollowed out in favor of a Hazony-style model: a state defined by “Judeo-Christian” identity, suspicious of universal rights, hostile to international constraints, and increasingly comfortable with oligarchic, techno-authoritarian power.

Israel, as Hazony imagines it and as its most illiberal practices are admired abroad, becomes both mirror and blueprint for the direction in which Vance, Thiel, and their allies wish to push the United States. This is the symbolic function that aggression against Venezuela serves.

For Israel, the war that began in Gaza has been a way of signaling to the world that it no longer cares to abide by any kind of international law. In pursuing its ideological and strategic interests — however they are defined — and in promoting a Jewish ethnostate, it presents itself as unconstrained by any definition of law other than its own.

Those who support Israel because they think it represents a Western liberal democracy in the Middle East have completely misunderstood the meaning of this “eight-front war.” “Greater Israel” is not just a geographical concept; it is the epitome of Hazony’s ethnostate. That is what Netanyahu meant by “changing the face of the Middle East.” It’s the end of the liberal state and the real expression of “Israel first.”

U.S. aggression against Venezuela should be read in the same light. The complete absence of any legitimate justification is itself a signal to the world of the ideological shift the U.S. is undergoing. It is announcing that it will no longer be constrained by the nuances of liberal principles such as democracy or universal human rights, or by the international system built on them. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, put it succinctly: “This kind of behavior is more typical of those who consider themselves above the law.”