America the Illusion: What Venezuela Operation Reveals

This essay appeared in the Jan. 8, 2025 edition of UNFTR’s premium newsletter. Become a UNFTR member to receive our bonus newsletter each week and for other perks.

With respect to all of the greatest magicians or sleight-of-hand artists this world has seen, America is perhaps the undisputed illusionist.

Democracy.
Freedom.
Shining city on a hill.
Fair.
Just.

All the ostensible ideals most people commonly associate with the United States have been propagated, regrettably—with incredible success, no doubt—as a sort of fan fiction, with the underlying theme of liberty lionized throughout generations. As they often say, to the victors go the spoils—and the penning of history, or the “truth.”

Of course, we can wholeheartedly believe that the American Dream—the most effective of illusions—has always been a capitalistic con, while also having empathy for the overtly patriotic neighbor. Perhaps they’re content with being sold a faux ideal, believe it outright, or perhaps their display of an American flag, or whatever form their patriotism takes, is simply an extension of their personal construction of “America.”

For the story of America to be as formidable as it is, there must be an origin—the time and context from which the ideals were forged, like the Rings of Power, but even more powerful because they live in our hearts and minds, passed down through time, in all of us.

Once the seed was planted, the origins grew like a beanstalk to the heavens.

“As nation-states emerged, they needed to explain themselves, which they did by telling stories about their origins, tying together ribbons of myths, as if everyone in the ‘English nation,’ for instance, had the same ancestors, when, of course, they did not. Very often, histories of nation-states are little more than myths that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state,” Jill Lepore wrote in her book, “These Truths: A History of the United States.”

“The origins of the United States can be found in those seams. When the United States declared its independence in 1776, plainly, it was a state, but what made it a nation?” she continued. “The fiction that its people shared a common ancestry was absurd on its face; they came from all over, and, having waged a war against England, the very last thing they wanted to celebrate was their Englishness. In an attempt to solve this problem, the earliest historians of the United States decided to begin their accounts with Columbus’s voyage, stitching 1776 to 1492.”

As Lepore notes, George Bancroft, the 19th-century historian and politician, wrote a “history” of the United States “when the nation was barely more than a half-century old.”

“By beginning with Columbus,” Lepore goes on, “Bancroft made the United States nearly three centuries older than it was, a many-feathered old bird. Bancroft wasn’t only a historian; he was also a politician: he served in the administrations of three U.S. presidents, including as secretary of war during the age of American expansion. He believed in manifest destiny, the idea that the United States was fated to cross the continent, from east to west. For Bancroft, the nation’s fate was all but sealed the day Columbus set sail. By giving Americans a more ancient past, he hoped to make America’s founding appear inevitable and its growth inexorable, God-ordained.”

Published in 1834, Bancroft’s account has effectively functioned as America’s underlying story, whether or not we ever heard of the man or his work.

“To write something down,” Lepore later writes, “doesn’t make it true. But the history of truth is lashed to the history of writing like a mast to a sail.”

And who doesn’t like a good story?

Which brings us to our current reality, in which the United States has been in a state of perpetual, borderless, and illegal wars for a quarter-century. Not only is it astounding to write that, but it’s equally shocking in the context of Americans’ disinterest in foreign interventions, dating to the disastrous invasion of Iraq. Perhaps not surprisingly, the wars in the Middle East and Africa, which have now stretched into the Western Hemisphere, continue unabated despite incredible wealth inequality at home and signs of looming economic disaster, not to mention erosion of our civil liberties.

If there’s no greater sign that the story of the American empire is changing course, then it’s hard to decipher what form such a signal would take.

Nothing exemplifies what America has truly become—a war machine for the oligarch class—more than the extraordinary rendition of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, captured by U.S. forces under the auspices of a law enforcement operation. Trump himself admitted that oil barons were informed of the operation in advance—an operation that also included strikes on Venezuelan territory, incursion into its airspace, and an apparent cyberattack that knocked out power near Maduro’s residence.

For months, the administration saturated the airwaves with claims that Maduro was a drug kingpin masquerading as the leader of a nation-state to justify its attacks on ships and extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and Pacific.

Some of us likened the narrative to the bogus WMD claims in the months before the invasion of Iraq. It’s as if they followed the same script, but somehow more brazenly—admitting after the fact that seizing Venezuela’s oil was among the justifications for toppling Maduro (but not his government).

The violent kidnapping is made much more shocking when you take the time to read the administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS), which it released in December.

Much of what it states couldn’t be more at odds with the reality of Trump 2.0, which includes strikes on Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Venezuela proper, and, relatedly, the Caribbean and Pacific oceans.

The NSS seeks to mythologize Trump as a peace-seeker. No doubt, you would have to have been brought up in the post-9/11 era to believe the fantasy that military strikes aren’t an act of war or inherently violent. It’s an extension of the narrative formed in the intervening years since 9/11, supported by a corporate media that has reduced the definition of “war” to mean only “boots on the ground.”

As Trump 2.0 gets to write the next chapter of the American story, here’s the contradictory vision they outlined in the NSS:

“In the Declaration of Independence, America’s founders laid down a clear preference for noninterventionism in the affairs of other nations and made clear the basis: just as all human beings possess God-given equal natural rights, all nations are entitled by ‘the laws of nature and nature’s God’ to a ‘separate and equal station’ with respect to one another. For a country whose interests are as numerous and diverse as ours, rigid adherence to non-interventionism is not possible. Yet this predisposition should set a high bar for what constitutes a justified intervention.”

“The world’s fundamental political unit is and will remain the nation-state,” it adds. “It is natural and just that all nations put their interests first and guard their sovereignty. The world works best when nations prioritize their interests. The United States will put our own interests first and, in our relations with other nations, encourage them to prioritize their own interests as well. We stand for the sovereign rights of nations, against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations, and for reforming those institutions so that they assist rather than hinder individual sovereignty and further American interests.”

Quite the story.

But the biggest tale told—about democracy and justice, fairness and a bastion of hope—has been shredded. Obviously, there have been so many other misadventures abroad and injustices at home that have helped lead the empire down this march to decline. Concerns about living up to the narrative ideals are not new. But we are now seeing the veneer of empire chip away, characterized by yawning inequality, shareholder capture of the economy, oligarchical rule, erosion of civil liberties and the flippant use of state force against the population.

America’s saving grace is its people—not only those who see through the mythology, but those who are simply trying to live the best life they can and hope for a brighter future. Without the latter, there would be no Zohran Mamdani, whose candidacy transcended political labels. To say the story of a declining empire is being written doesn’t suggest all is lost. The state may create the illusion, but the people are the truth. Americans are increasingly seeing through the oligarch class, working people are resisting, and a sustainable independent media is growing.

There is plenty of story to tell, and as always, there’s power in numbers—and hope.