The course of history has been accelerating so fast that it is almost foolhardy to attempt to do more than comment on its day-to-day changes, but I thought it might be useful to take advantage of Trump’s recent flawless extraction of Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela to face trial in New York to suggest a perspective that can help us to evaluate its ups and downs. This Chronicle was composed before the onset of the recent turmoil in Iran, but regardless of the outcome of what we hope is an emerging political tidal wave, and of Trump’s role in its success or failure, it seemed to me worth focusing on a less crucial but wholly characteristic action of his that has allowed him to crack through the encrusted politics of post-WWII international relations.
The present state of the world is increasingly a scene of rivalry between (A) a Western camp, dominated by the USA and Israel, and (B) an increasingly unified anti-Western one that includes notably Islamists, led until recently by Iran, with Turkey seeking to take over, along with China, Russia, and various “southern” nations in Africa and South America. (C) Europe, after long abdicating its role in international affairs to the US on the one hand and the UN-“Third world” on the other, is beginning to seek to get back in the game. The current state of Great Britain and France, if not quite Germany, shows them in the throes of political stagnation, nowhere better illustrated than by the French parliament’s recent withdrawal of its decision to advance the retirement age from 62 to 64—at a time when other European nations are setting it closer to 70.
The nations in the B group, dominated by philosophies that partake of the epistemology of resentment, find in militant Islam—Islamism—its bellwether, if not its model, and in particular the guarantee for the vastly increased antisemitism of the group’s Western members, focused on the Israeli “genocide” of the Palestinians. The “Red-Green Alliance” links the Western political Left to the Islamist dream of world conquest, drawing strength (as well as cultural self-contempt) from the latter’s self-sacrificing religious fanaticism that justifies its followers’ claim to “love death” where the Judeo-Christian world—which they would reject—”loves life.”
One of the strangest recent developments of this conflict has been the (re)emergence of a “right-wing” antisemitism that includes nostalgia for Nazism as well as Holocaust denial-minimization in its rejection of the mid-20th century victories of liberal democracy on the American model. A lot of this playing at épater les bourgeois, stimulated by the internet-era mania for “self-expression” that favors the scandalous over the reasonable, can be used as a discovery-mechanism to ascertain the contemporary West’s degree of self-hatred: its rejection of Christianity along with Judaism. This nihilistic fondness for Mein Kampf and outlandish Jewish conspiracy theories stands in contrast to the at least nominal striving of both the green and red revolutionary modes toward an ultimate utopia, whether socialist or Islamic.
As Michael Doran suggests in “Giant Abroad, Midget at Home” (Tablet Magazine, January 2026), the hidden stimulus behind this tendency might well be traced to Tucker Carlson’s tenuous roots in the traditional Protestant American ruling class at the turn of the twentieth century, whose largely “social” antisemitism reflected a nativist reaction to the influx of European immigrants that ended with the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924. Thus, knowingly or not, today’s Gen Z groypers identify along with Carson with that now-defunct ruling class’s contempt for the “plebeian” 20th century wrought by European immigration, of which the Jews can be seen as the archetype.
Yet nearly every day serves to disprove Doran’s idea that Trump, while impressing the rest of the world, has become at the same time a “midget” at home by neglecting American voters’ increasing impatience with economic conditions.
As Jonathan Tobin writes for the Jewish News Service on January 6 in “Venezuela, Trump and the end of the liberal world order”, Trump’s unpredictable coup cut through the rhetoric of feckless diplomacy to reveal the obsolescence of the system of international law-and-order that had been inaugurated after WWII with the creation of the United Nations in the hope of establishing an international “community of nations.”
The flawlessly-carried-out kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and his wife with the purpose of dismantling the multi-billion dollar narco-terrorist trade that Venezuela has been providing, while hopefully initiating that nation’s liberation from a dictatorship that has driven perhaps a third of its people into exile, demands the same comparison to a post on X praising Hitler and blaming Churchill for WWII as to a “Democratic Socialist” speech condemning Trump’s act as in violation of “international law”: that between real action to solve the world’s problems and empty verbiage, whether “serious” or nihilistic. Doran has clearly been observing the social-media scene for so long that he has come to take it for the real world, when it is merely a self-mocking caricature of the realm of illusion that has emerged from the failed liberal dreams that built the UN, all too quickly transformed into the temple of world antisemitism.
Call it instinct or philosemitism, Trump has understood that antisemitism is no longer a foible of a semi-confident upper class, but a figure of the West’s death wish, and that to revel in one’s own society’s destruction is not a solution but a surrender. The “endless wars” of the Bush era failed because, in the spirit that founded the United Nations, they expected that the Western formula for the good society could be applied worldwide. What Trump has been doing is rather to confidently affirm the superiority of American values on the world scene. Neither Iran nor Venezuela can be said to “deserve” their current regimes, which was not true either in Saddam’s Iraq or Afghanistan, and it is not unlikely that Trump’s nearly casualty-free acts of aggression in both countries will ultimately have positive effects, given that, unlike the neocon wars, their aims are in synchrony with the fundamental social values of these nations.
John Podhoretz’ title says it all in his recent “Trump and the Gordian Knot” (Commentary, January 4, 2026). Slicing through the fatuous rhetoric about international law that permits the most egregious dictatorships and criminal enterprises to flourish, Trump dared to apply Alexander’s masterful example to Venezuela’s international drug trade by striking at its key figure, doing what had been supposed to be the UN’s job. Whether or not the end result will be a happy return to prosperity on the Western model may be yet unclear, but what justified Trump’s action is that only by demonstrating the continued strength of this model can the West, under the leadership of the USA, retain its position of world leadership.
It pays to reflect on what this tells us about the political instincts of the American population in giving Trump his solid victory in 2024. To elect Trump was clearly not to make a safe choice; in the face of the obsolescence of the postwar world order, only audacity, egocentric as it may be, can find new paths. In this sense, Trump’s MAGA slogan is anything but empty bravado. When, as Doran’s analysis malgré elle makes clear, our real choice is between Trump and the puerile insolence of the groypers, there is really no choice at all.
As readers of these Chronicles since 2016 will note, like most “brainworkers,” I have never taken Trump for a political ideal, in the way I might have felt about Reagan, for example. But his bull-in-the-china-shop antics, however I might on occasion find them egregious, reflect the kind of deal-making personality that alone in these times can break through the Gordian knots in which the post-WWII world has enveloped itself. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, as a relevant example, would have been unthinkable had Trump been president rather than Biden.
And although the consequences of Trump’s Maduro coup are anything but certain, the mere fact of pulling it off makes clear that, as Podhoretz realizes, the world of international relations today is so choked with irrationality that trying to solve the problems of Maduro’s illegitimacy by “diplomatic” means—certainly not the means he used to remain in the presidency after a lost election—would be in fact a category error worthy of an Orwellian satire.
Whatever else occurs, the USA, in Venezuela as in Iran, by the demonstrated skills of its military, have incontestably shown the world who is the “strong horse”—and as the Islamists know well, in an era of international tension, that is the closest we can come to certainty. So long as the US can convince its external enemies of this, it should be able to deal with the feckless partisans of the death-wish of Western civilization.