Mat Messerschmidt
Venezuela, 3D Chess, and Self-Important Bores
John Mearsheimer: Why Venezuela?
In January 2026, John Mearsheimer gave a fascinating talk called “The Monroe Doctrine and the Invasion of Venezuela” to a standing-room-only crowd in a large lecture hall at the University of Chicago. Mearsheimer, known as a “realist,” is not easy to pigeonhole politically, but is generally a dove: he was against the Iraq war, against the recent Iran strikes and U.S. support of Israel in Gaza, against U.S. aid to Ukraine, and declared himself, during his talk, to be against the U.S. invasion of Venezuela.
Mearsheimer’s sense of Trump’s motivation for the invasion seems to have shifted dramatically between the time his talk was announced and the day on which the lecture was delivered. An email ad for the talk sent out on January 14 stated,
President Trump likes to argue that his decision to kidnap the president of Venezuela and ‘run’ that country for a long time to come was motivated by the Monroe Doctrine or by the need to deal with narco-terrorism. Both of these claims make no sense. It is now clear that his main goal was to steal Venezuela’s oil. This venture is an unvarnished case of old-fashioned imperialism.
Yet, on January 22, the day of the talk, Mearsheimer observed that, as Trump and the oil barons with whom he is in communication know, Venezuela’s oil infrastructure is in disastrous disrepair, to such an extent that it may well be beyond profitability for anyone – Venezuelan, American, or otherwise. To Mearsheimer’s point, American oil executives do not appear prepared to get involved in any effort to extract Venezuelan oil. It seems hard, then, to identify an American interest group that believes it stands anything to gain from an attempt to “steal Venezuela’s oil.” Mearsheimer concluded that the theft of oil was not in fact Trump’s real intention – that, in fact, the real motive was what it almost always is when U.S. governments depose Latin American leaders, namely, to get rid of a left-wing regime.
If Mearsheimer is right, this represents a remarkable reversal in the logic of American military adventures in the 21st century. In the 2003 invasion of Iraq, “War for Oil” was an anti-war slogan that claimed to state the real reason for a war that was ostensibly about democracy. In 2026, many have pointed out that the Trump administration has been over the top in its apparent “transparency” regarding the idea that we invaded Venezuela for oil. But Mearsheimer’s conclusion implies that oil has gone from the hidden true motive for war to the duplicitous cover story for war.
Even if he is right about this, his conclusion invites the question, Is Trump ideologically motivated enough to want to invade a country because it is governed according to the wrong stated principles? This seems like a neoconservative motivation, not a Trumpian one. Even on the picture of Trump offered by his opponents, he is vindictive toward his political enemies, but not likely rigorous and orthodox enough to care so much about an ideologically unsavory figure running a country in serious disrepair relatively far from American shores that he would contemplate military action. Besides, if ideology were really at play here, what about the fact that the Trump of 2016 distinguished himself and the MAGA movement from earlier Republicans through an opposition to military adventurism, perhaps more so than through any other policy issue?
“3D Chess”
What, then, isthe invasion really “about” – what motivates it? On some level, the absence of an answer may be the answer. The administration is far less interested in winning the argument over every single policy move – and certainly less interested in ideological consistency – than it is in creating shock and awe, creating the notion that something is happening.
This notion that something must be done, that the needle must finally be moved, that society is so broken that decisive action is needed more than fine-tuned and perfected action is needed, is widespread on the American right at the moment, although it has been argued that this impulse in American political thought, and even beyond political thought, is not limited to the right. When I listen to right-wing podcasts, I often get the sense that they are far less ideologically closed off than many progressives would assume them to be, far less opposed to non-orthodox views. There is, to be fair, a dim sense on the left that things aren’t like they used to be on the right – that, where Cheney evinced an evil consistency, Trump is not consistent at all, that he personally has no time for “orthodoxy.” But progressives nevertheless seem to assume that right-wingers live in the same kind of echo chamber in which they themselves live, and that this is why conservatives can believe, for instance, that the 2020 election was stolen or that climate change isn’t real. The truth is more complicated. Ross Douthat (a conservative who works for the New York Times, not a right-winger) recently said on his podcast that “Right now you can find basically any wild idea that any normal person twenty years ago would have considered insane in the right-wing ecosystem.” What one finds in this ecosystem is less echoes than it is chaos. And the diversity of attitudes is not limited to “wild ideas,” but includes divergences from Republican orthodoxy, if such a thing still exists, within the mainstream. On Tucker Carlson’s clearly right-wing podcast, I have recently heard sustained arguments that the United States will win the 21st century against China because of its liberal immigration policy (this was Mearsheimer), that what is taking place in Gaza is genocide, that unregulated buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) credit is a predatory and evil “crime” for which “the right” is enabling a “cover-up,” that the invasion of Venezuela was good, that the invasion of Venezuela was bad. I don’t hear the same ideological flexibility on left-wing programming, at least not in a way that is taken seriously by the host.
Yet all this apparent lack of ideological rigidity is not simply open-mindedness. Carlson is willing to go anywhere, as long as it does not lead to a criticism of Trump. There is no acknowledgement, over hours of discussion, that an opposition to U.S. support of Israel in Gaza is a direct affront to the Trump regime, or that Democratic politicians would listen far more receptively to the condemnation of BNPL credit than Republican politicians would. Carlson doesn’t give his listeners ideological purity, because his listeners don’t want ideological purity. They want action, and they believe they have found the ultimate man of action in Trump.
Which brings us to a kind of answer, in the form of a non-answer, to the question regarding the motivation for the invasion of Venezuela. A certain line of rhetoric became widespread among Trump supporters online before being swallowed by ironization by Trump opponents: the notion that Trump is “playing 3D chess.” What this means is that Trump’s machinations outweigh in complexity whatever strategy might be legible to an average, human, sublunar being. This sort of faith-based endorsement, which admits it cannot see the grand plan according to which policy is being made, violates the spirit of democracy, according to which the grand plan is explained legibly in the agora to a voting public, who chooses to take or leave the grand plan. Trump’s ways, then, are above our ways. When we ask what the invasion of Venezuela has to do with MAGA’s alleged stance against nation building and military adventures, we can rest comforted by the fact that Trump is playing 3D chess, which those not born into the Star Trek universe do not understand, but which Trump apparently does understand. Trump is not giving us reasons – he is giving us action.
Democrats’ Astonishing Incapacity
This sounds incredibly brutish, so how has it succeeded? The comfortable, self-satisfied progressive answer is that Trumpian brutishness has succeeded because America has enough natural-born brutes to have elected Donald Trump as president. But a more realistic answer is multifaceted, and cannot exclude the brutal failures of the Democratic Party, both left and center.
Trump’s action may well look to many like an antidote to Democratic inaction, Democratic fecklessness. The left wing of the party acknowledges this, but would love to comfortably, and disingenuously, chalk this up to the timidity of centrist, establishmentarian Democrats. But even progressive Democrats have been complaining about their party’s systemic inability to do just about anything efficiently, even, or especially, in urban progressive bastions of power, where Republicans hold no real political influence. Progressive New York Times podcaster Ezra Klein and Argument editor-in-chief Jerusalem Demsas spoke recently of a San Francisco single-user toilet that cost the city $1.7 million to install, and argued that this seemingly outrageous incident was in fact an example of how things usually work in Democrat-run cities. To their point, housing advocate Aaron Lubeck reacted with astonishment when Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson bragged about spending only $1.1 million dollars per unit on tiny “affordable housing” units. These are not cherry-picked examples. Even at the federal level, the ambitious Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s $1 trillion bill, has been criticized for allocating energy infrastructure funds so slowly that it is easy to forget how “ambitious” it was originally understood to be. Most funds have reportedly gone to red states, which is, according to progressives Klein and Demsas, in large part for the same reason that a toilet can cost $1.7 million in San Francisco and a housing unit the size of a hotel room can cost $1.1 million dollars in Chicago: socially conscientious red tape in blue America – whether focused on environmental protection, equal opportunity in contracting, or whatever else – makes public construction on just about anything cripplingly expensive in places where Democrats are in charge, rendering blue states effectively anti-government. The San Francisco toilet and the Chicago housing units are merely local quagmires, but the Inflation Reduction Act, now seemingly forgotten, was presented to America as the anti-Trump Democratic administration’s signature move. The dramatic cost of that bill suggests that the party’s problem is not a centrist fear of going too far, as leftists perennially wish to believe, but a self-induced incapacity to follow through on big plans with practical action.
This Democratic failure is not by any means the origin of the Trump movement. But in this environment, in which the alternative to Trump is felt to be exorbitantly expensive impotence, the desire for someone who will do something, anything can thrive. In such an environment, major political decisions, such as the invasion of Venezuela, do not have to have anything beyond the most muddled and incoherent justification. The perceived moralizing rigidity of American progressivism – its wokeness, its inclination towards “cancellation” – is perhaps more caustic precisely because progressivism has gotten so little accomplished of late: a zealot who is passionately completing the wrong kind of social project is at least interesting and worth taking seriously, but a zealot who cares more about what words people are allowed to use than about anything resembling a “project” is a self-important bore, or a Democrat. And the focus required to complete an ambitious social project requires a kind of groundedness that today’s progressives appear to lack. Following the logic of Twitter/X, according to which all statements of political purpose must become more extreme every year or be cast out as apostasy, they have arrived at the point where they are repeatedly telling us that we are not living in a democracy, and that we are living under a fascist dictator. This way of putting things leaves no distinction between our current political situation and that of an imaginary dystopia in which North Korea is ruled by Benito Mussolini. Anyone who really believed this to be the case would not – and should not – bother to vote in the upcoming midterms, which, in fascist dystopia, would surely be rigged.
Still, it is not worse to be rigidly attached to narrow ideas, as today’s Democrats are, than to be piously trusting in the inscrutable higher wisdom of a single human being at the expense of all stated principles, as today’s Republicans have shown themselves to be by falling into line on Venezuela. 3D chess is a game that only exists on Star Trek, as far as I am aware, and anybody playing it is living in his own head, as Trump very much seems to be. The question is whether Democrats can muster anything that looks like a plan for decisive action to an American public that is hungry for it.
INDICAȚII DE CITARE
Mat Messerschmidt ,,Venezuela, 3D Chess, and Self-Important Bores’’ în Anthropos. Revista de filosofie, arte și umanioare nr. 1 / 2026
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