Anyone But Trump

Venezuelans are euphoric. That is entirely understandable.

After years of economic collapse, repression and humiliation, the sudden removal of a hated ruler feels like oxygen after suffocation. People celebrate because something unbearable has ended. That reaction is not naive. It is human. History is full of moments where joy arrives well before clarity.

But euphoria is not legitimacy, and relief is not a plan.

People cheer when the gates open. What they do not yet know is who now owns the keys. “Beware of what you wish for” is not a sneer at people who have suffered. It is a warning written into history often enough to deserve respect. External force can remove a tyrant and still replace him with dependency, extraction and control by other means. Gratitude today does not guarantee sovereignty tomorrow.

That warning matters because Donald Trump has been unusually frank about motive. He has talked about the United States “running” Venezuela. He has talked about American oil companies fixing infrastructure and making money. That is not the language of transition. It is the language of possession.

The official justification leans heavily on drugs, but that story collapses under even modest scrutiny. Venezuela is not the primary source of the drugs killing Americans. Fentanyl, which dominates US overdose deaths, is produced elsewhere and trafficked largely over land via Mexico. Venezuela is, at most, a transit route for some cocaine, much of it destined for markets outside the United States. That does not make the regime benign, but it makes the “war on drugs” rationale a convenient banner rather than a serious explanation.

Which tells you the drugs narrative is a smokescreen.

Oil is not. Venezuela sits on vast crude reserves, and Trump has not tried to hide the interest. When intervention is openly linked to profit and resource control, the mask slips. This is not about public health or moral urgency. It is about leverage.

At that point, “Anyone But Trump” stops sounding partisan and starts sounding like basic risk management.

It is worth spelling out what is no longer being argued. This is not nostalgia for any particular American presidency. Barack Obama, Joe Biden, George W. Bush and even Ronald Reagan differed wildly in competence and morality, but they shared one assumption: that American power was embedded in a wider order that needed maintaining. They argued about how to wield power, not whether the system itself mattered. The point now is not to revive those presidencies, but to recognise that the conditions which made them stabilising can no longer be assumed.

With Trump, that assumption collapses. He does not see restraint as stabilising. He sees it as weakness. He does not think in systems. He thinks in deals, moments and headlines. When he says the quiet part out loud, it is not a slip. It is the point.

And this is where the analysis itself becomes uncomfortable, because everything above still assumes traditional geopolitical logic. Balance of power. Interests tempered by consequences. Even cynics who understand that the system itself is worth preserving.

We may no longer be in that world.

Trump and his dilettante cabinet do not behave like custodians of an order. They behave like opportunists passing through it. Geopolitics is treated less as strategy than as property development. If something looks profitable, politically or financially, it must therefore be right. Resistance is dismissed not as information but as disloyalty.

That is what makes this moment genuinely dangerous. Not that rules are being bent, but that the people bending them may not understand why the rules existed in the first place.

This is also where Orwell matters, but only up to a point. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the world is divided into three great blocs. The horror is not just division, but stability. The lies are constant, but the structure is legible. Spheres of influence exist, and everyone knows where they stop.

What we are drifting towards now is worse. Great powers asserting influence without agreement. Sovereignty treated as conditional. Enforcement without consensus. Everyone behaving as though they have a sphere of influence, and nobody agreeing where it ends.

That instability is already visible in the internal contradictions.

If Trump were to apply the same “we will run it” logic to Mexico, he would detonate his own border politics. You cannot blur a neighbour’s sovereignty by force and still expect the border to function as a hard line. If Mexico is treated as part of America’s enforcement space, millions of Mexicans will logically conclude they are already halfway inside United States.

People do not migrate because of ideology. They migrate because of signals. Authority asserted without responsibility is an invitation.

Unlike Venezuela, Mexico is deeply integrated with the US economy and society. Families, labour markets and supply chains already straddle the border. Any move that undermines Mexican sovereignty would not deter migration. It would accelerate it, at scale. Trump’s fantasy that force is a one way valve collapses the moment reality pushes back.

So Venezuelans celebrating are not wrong to feel relief. That tells you how bad things were.

What should worry everyone else is the precedent being set in their name, by people who may not understand the system they are breaking.

This is where Foundation matters more than Orwell. In the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov, the mathematician Hari Seldon does not try to save a collapsing empire. He knows that is impossible. His aim is to shorten the dark age that follows. The choice is not between decline and continuity, but between a brief interregnum and a long one.

That is the correct strategic frame for democracies now.

Trump and Vladimir Putin are not permanent. Trump is a disruption without a theory. Putin is a decaying strongman clinging to a shrinking base. Both are accelerants, not architects.

Xi Jinping, or more accurately the system and mindset he represents, is different. That is structural, patient and designed to outlast individuals.

Which leaves one plausible candidate to play the Seldon role. Not the United States, now erratic and inwardly consumed, but the European Union. Not as an empire, not as a superpower, but as a custodian of continuity. A bloc built on law, institutions, compromise and dull competence. Exactly the things that shorten dark ages rather than lengthen them.

There is one uncertainty that has to be owned honestly.

It is possible that restraint does not shorten disorder. History does not guarantee that prudence is rewarded, or that brutality always backfires. There are moments when force settles things quickly, when violence imposes a grim clarity, and when a chaotic transition is cut short rather than prolonged. It would be comforting, but dishonest, to pretend that outcome is impossible.

The problem is not that Trump’s approach cannot work. It is that he does not understand the difference between force that stabilises and force that corrodes, and he does not care enough to find out. Shortening a dark age requires discipline, consistency, and an acceptance of limits. Brutality without structure may end one crisis, but it usually seeds several more. Betting the global order on that distinction, with a leader who treats impulse as strategy, is not realism. It is recklessness.

If the old order cannot be preserved, the task is not to burn it down faster, but to ensure that what follows is not barbarism by default. To shorten the disorder. To keep enough of the wiring intact that recovery is possible.

Anyone But Trump is not nostalgia.

It is Seldon logic. A recognition that if you cannot prevent the fall, the least you can do is make sure the night does not last a thousand years.