Fergus Finlay: Donald Trump has driven world into a might is right phase

A man in a Trump mask gestures during a protest in Seoul, South Korea, after the US captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro last weekend. Picture: Lee Jin-man/AP

Hours and hours of research blown to bits by Donald Trump.

I was going to favour you this week, and I know you’re dying for it, with a long thesis about the decline of social democracy in the world and its replacement by a nasty form of populism.

It’s a subject that matters because social democracy built the world and the country we live in.

Maybe not social democrats, but people who accepted and applied core social democratic values had profound influences on our lives.

Ireland is a social democratic country — perhaps one of the leading social democracies in the world.

It’s hard to imagine now, but thousands of young people in Ireland — perhaps the majority — up to the end of the 1960s finished their education at the age of 11 or 12.

In the days of wholesale emigration from Ireland, most of the people we sent abroad were illiterate, condemned to life as a navvy or a drudge for the rest of their lives, and found it financially impossible ever to come home again.

It was a hard-drinking and often raucous Fianna Fáil minister who changed that by suddenly introducing free secondary education.

He was followed not too long after by another tough man who had grown up as a butcher in Dublin, then became a trade union official, then became a junior minister in a government beset by oil crises and deep economic troubles.

But Frank Cluskey (who also, like Donogh O’Malley, would never have used the term social democrat to describe himself), used his time in office to introduce wide-ranging social democratic reforms.

He tripled welfare spending in four years, led European-wide campaigns to combat poverty, and transformed the lives of single parents — especially single mothers.

None of the drive and passion of those years is visible now in Ireland or elsewhere. It has been replaced by, on the one hand, technocrats who believe in little more than tiny increments of progress.

On the other are bullies who masquerade as populists, and who thrive on politics of othering and hate and blame.

But, in a sense, that doesn’t matter anymore, and I have to abandon the thesis I’ve been working on for now.

The world has entered a new phase, the phase of might is right

Donald Trump has driven a dagger through what was left of America’s commitment to democracy. The threat to social democratic values, which has been growing in recent years, has suddenly doubled or trebled.

Of course, we should have seen it coming. When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, and Trump blamed the victims of that barbaric attack with all its war crimes, we should have realised that Trump and Putin weren’t just allies or “friends”, they are the same.

The only difference is that, in the case of Ukraine, it was a dictator ruthlessly invading a democracy.

In Venezuela, a democratic country invaded a dictatorship.

Democratic countries don’t do that, or certainly they don’t do it lightly. It has happened in the past to prevent atrocities or to protect vital interests seen to be under threat.

But Trump has invaded Venezuela for its oil. No matter how corrupt Maduro is, there is no factual basis for asserting that Venezuela as a country represents a bigger drug threat to the rest of the world than others (including some of its neighbours).

Trump recently, and inexplicably, gave a full pardon to a former Honduran politician convicted by an American court of incredible amounts of corruption and drug trafficking.

It’s clear that Trump has no interest in democracy in that country. He’s not planning elections to enable the people of Venezuela to choose their own futures.

He may well replace Maduro with someone just as corrupt but more compliant.

His aim is to hand the effective governance of that country to enormous US oil companies.

If he has his way, those companies will reap enormous profits, and, of course, he will be on the take for whatever share of the profits he can get.

The overnight invasion of Venezuela was not an act of liberation, it was a further piece of the global corruption that the world’s greatest democracy appears to be reduced to — an act of cowboy piracy.

We don’t need to weep for Maduro, and that’s part of Trump’s calculation. He will be seen in America once again as powerful, decisive, strong, and his poll ratings will improve. Sleepy Joe would never have had the courage to do this.

But where does all this lead?

Last August, RTÉ reported that the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, together with Poland, have started work on a set of defences on their borders with Russia. It will be both physical and technological, and it will cost billions to complete. Those countries have already realised that any prospect of a ceasefire in Ukraine will immediately turn Putin’s eyes in their direction. They know they have to find ways to deter him or at least slow him down.

Now they know, after what Trump did in Venezuela, that Putin will get no grief from the US if he sends troops and helicopters from Belarus to Vilnius to arrest the leadership of Lithuania on some (pardon the expression) trumped-up basis. Trump has effectively given him permission.

Hardly a week goes by without Trump muttering (or shouting) that the US must have Greenland

There’s a woman called Katie Miller who runs a podcast aimed at glorifying all things Maga. Immediately after the attack on Venezuela she posted on X a picture of the map of Greenland draped in the stars and stripes. It was adorned with the word “soon”.

That might be dismissed as the work of one of the Trumpworld loons, but this particular woman is married to Stephen Miller — perhaps the darkest and most sinister of Trump’s advisers.

If Trump comes for Greenland, he’s coming for Denmark and the whole of Europe (yes, including us).

Already, I assume, the Danish government is desperately urging Europe to prepare for the worst.

There is Canada, there is the Panama Canal. There are US airstrikes in Somalia, coupled with endless slurs on Somali people living in the US. It is no longer a far-fetched conspiracy to believe that stretches of Somalia are being laid waste to to enable a joint US/Israeli operation to start “re-homing” millions of Palestinians.

There is now no reason to believe that Trump won’t take whatever he wants to take. The absence of any resistance in Venezuela will only embolden him. So too will the effective silence of European leaders.

They are all shocked and appalled, but terrified of turning Trump on them. They cannot , think of anything meaningful to say to stop this in it tracks.

What about us? We’ll stay neutral, of course, trusting our lucky stars that we have nothing in particular that Trump needs to steal right now. We’ll try to cling on to our social democratic traditions and values for as long as we can. For as long as Trump lets us.