Good morning,
European leaders were left baffled this week as Donald Trump’s administration abducted Venezuela’s president and, hours later, renewed threats to seize Danish-held Greenland, a Nato ally. “It doesn’t make sense,” Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen said.
In an interview published later today on this site, political scientist Abraham Newman argues that the Trump administration’s actions cannot be understood as if the liberal order based on rules, institutions, and national interest were still in place.
Instead, Newman says, Trump’s White House acts as a personalist regime, aiming to replace the rules-based system with a “neo-royalist order” where a small group of rent-seeking hyper-elites, not the national interest, drives policy.
"People say oil is old energy and difficult to extract [in Venezuela], and that is true. But the point is concessions. Control over access to these resources creates dependency. It binds government and economic elites together. That interdependence is the core of the system," he argues.
Read the full interview to see why, through that lens, actions that seem incoherent or irrational start to make sense.
- Wester van Gaal, economics editor
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