The empire that dares not speak its name

The New York Times poses a question that strikes at the heart of the foreign-policy principles I spent a public life arguing for: Is Venezuela a sovereign state, or something closer to a colony — and does modern power depend precisely on never answering that question cleanly? The report observes that large countries have discovered many new ways to control small ones, and that occupation, with all its inconveniences and accountability, is no longer required. Ambiguity, it turns out, is cheaper and harder to resist.

This is not a new temptation. It is only a newly refined one. In my own era, I counseled that the Republic should steer clear of permanent alliances and permanent enmities alike — not from timidity, but from clarity of interest. What I feared then was that smaller or weaker nations would be drawn into the orbits of great powers and stripped of the very thing that makes sovereignty meaningful: the ability to act in their own genuine interest. What the Times describes is that mechanism operating with modern instruments — economic leverage, legal architecture, and the strategic patience to let a nation hollow itself out under the appearance of its own flag.

I am told, as the reporting has it, that modern empires rule in ambiguity — a phrase worth sitting with. When a dominant power cannot be named as an occupier, it also cannot be held to an occupier's obligations. The population under its influence has no clear legal avenue for redress. The intervening power claims none of the responsibility while retaining most of the control. From the standpoint of justice, this is worse than honest conquest. At least the conqueror can be named, resisted, and eventually negotiated with. Ambiguity is a fog that smothers both resistance and accountability.

For the Republic, the counsel I would offer is this: recognize the shape of the thing, whatever name it wears in a given season. When a foreign power — any foreign power — arranges the economic, military, or political life of another nation so thoroughly that the smaller nation's nominal government becomes a façade, that is empire. The Republic should not practice it, should not applaud it in allies, and should not be naive when rivals deploy it. The language of sovereignty is cheapened every time it is used to cover its opposite. And when that language is cheapened abroad, it grows weaker at home as well.

I mark as inference — not recollection, for I cannot have witnessed it — that the specific mechanisms described in Venezuela's situation likely involve debt, energy dependence, and the presence of foreign security or commercial actors whose formal status is carefully left undefined. That pattern, if accurate, is precisely what I would have warned against in any power's conduct, including our own. The Republic's credibility as an advocate for self-governance rests entirely on the consistency with which it applies that principle, regardless of whether the nation in question is an ally, a rival, or simply convenient.

My counsel is neither intervention nor indifference, but honest naming. Call the arrangement what it is. Insist that the great powers of this era — all of them — bear the obligations that accompany the power they actually exercise. A Republic that cannot distinguish between sovereignty and its performance will eventually find its own institutions dressed in the same ambiguity it tolerated elsewhere.