Poul Kalff

Venezuela killed the US. Or rather, it revealed it was already dead. In the history of the US’s relation with Latin America, what just happened in Venezuela is hardly unique: the U.S. government has intervened to change governments in Latin America a total of 41 times (revista.drclas.harvard.edu/u…). What is unprecedented however is the brazenness, the unabashedly predatory nature of the intervention. Trump is not pretending this is about anything else than resource extraction. He explicitly stated "we're going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground" and that this wealth would “go to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country." (npr.org/2026/01/03/g-s1-1043…). Stunningly, the US isn’t even insisting on regime change. They’re quite happy for the Chavista government to stay in place under acting president Delcy Rodríguez as long as she “does what we want,” (said Trump: edition.cnn.com/2026/01/04/p…), vowing to bomb the country again if she didn’t. In other words, there is absolutely zero pretense there: submission to the U.S.’s will is the only variable that matters. Never before in its entire history has the U.S. been so nakedly… bad. This might sound almost trivial. “So what if they admit they’re bad, at least they’re not hypocritical about it anymore,” you might tell yourself. Some might even find that refreshing in its honesty. Quite the contrary. The story a nation tells itself is not trivial - it is everything. We, human beings, for better or worse, are structured by mythology and self-deception. Think about yourself, what drives your own behavior? You have, doubtlessly, ideals you want to live up to. If you have kids you have ideals of what a good parent ought to be. If you have a spouse you have ideals of what fidelity and partnership mean. If you have a job you have some conception of integrity. You probably fall short - we all do - but the ideals still structure your behavior. They give you something to reach for, they provide the terms in which you can be criticized - including by your own internal dialogue. They make it possible for you to do better tomorrow. The hypocrisy - the gap between ideal and reality - is not the problem. It's the proof that the ideal still has a hold on you, that you can still be called back to it. As the saying goes, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. Now imagine you renounce all this. Imagine you stop being a hypocrite in the sense that you abandon your ideals entirely, that you start owning up to your worst self and become comfortable with your vices. You cheat on your spouse and stop pretending it bothers you. You neglect your children and make peace with it. Have you thus become “refreshingly honest”? Maybe. But you’ve also died inside. You’ve become something deeply broken - beyond shame, beyond appeal. You’ve lost the internal architecture that makes moral life possible. The little light that said “this is not who I want to be” is extinguished. That is what the United States just did. The consequences of this are, frankly, terrifying. What happens when a nation stops telling itself it should be good? This is precisely what I try to answer in my latest article: open.substack.com/pub/arnaud…