Transcendental banditry
2 days ago
The Cambridge Dictionary explains that to transcend means, “to rise above or be more important” (link). It is a concept commonly associated with positive transcendence. But some find that violently imposing one’s will can also deliver a transcendental experience.
Introduction
We typically associate transcendence with rising above the daily grind to achieve enhanced, positive inner understanding, peace and wisdom (link). However, Eric Fromm, the German social psychologist, argued that destructiveness could also provide a means to satisfy the deep human desire for transcendence (link).
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Finding transcendent meaning in 1942: An extreme example
Hannah Arendt, the German-American historian and philosopher, was one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century (link). In 1961, she wrote a controversial, still highly influential article for The New Yorker on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann in Israel.
Eichmann had played a pivotal role in finalizing (and executing) the hideous, mass homicidal “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” at the Wannsee Conference in 1942, which resulted in the murder of 6 million Jews (link).
Arendt argued, according to one commentator, that Eichmann was a fundamentally shallow man, who had primarily joined the Nazi Party “in search of purpose and direction” which he discovered as a fanatical architect of the Holocaust (link).
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Finding transcendent meaning in 2026 – A more recent example
Photos released from the situation room, taken as the extraordinary, illegal American plan to kidnap the President of Venezuela and his wife was being executed on January 3, 2026, showed President Trump and others tensely watching this unfolding project (link).
Once the quarry had been captured, after leaving Caracas bombed and over 100 killed, the mood swiftly become transcendently triumphant, according to The Observer (link) and the New York Magazine (link).
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Building the foundations
Three days prior to January 3, 2026, I published an article entitled “War and peace” which stressed how America’s very long-term addiction to intense, globalized warmongering contrasted with China’s long-term, determined avoidance of resort to warfare (link).
The article also noted how, over the course of 2025, America has emphatically confirmed a conspicuously galvanized Bandits of the Caribbean reputation for itself. This highly menacing national persona resonated with US Marine Major General Smedley Butler’s argument almost 100 years earlier that continuous, militarized American activity across Latin America proved that “war is a racket”.
In the conclusion I argued that:
America appears locked within a 200-year time-warp, where it cannot move beyond a continuous, default habit of imposing its will on neighbours by military force or other profoundly coercive means in order to secure a menacing American version of peace.
The American visit to Caracas on January 3 subsequently brought this image to mind:
You hear thunderous explosions followed by loud knocking on your front door. You open it to find a very large racketeer standing there, with ample back-up arrayed nearby. This man tells you: “Come with me. And leave this door open so we can take whatever we like, when we like. Or else!”
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Responses to the attack on Venezuela
Local reactions
The White House and a wide range of media, business and public supporters have celebrated this “stunning abduction” (link), with its added benefits of: bringing Venezuela to heel (placing it under American control); delivering a terrifying lesson to all of Latin America (and China); and opening the door to locking in predatory America control of Venezuelan oil reserves (link).
Meanwhile, the brazen illegality of the January 3 raid on Caracas and the immediate (and ongoing) immense cost of this operation, further undermining the emaciated American welfare regime, have both been stressed in critical responses within the US.
Various Democrat Members of Congress have argued that:
- “They lied to our face. The message they sent was that this wasn’t about regime change … They said this is just a counter-narcotics operation.”
- The invasion action was “wildly illegal.,”
- It was “another example of absolute lawlessness.”
- It was “paving the way for disaster.”
- “Once again, you’re seeing that this president’s foreign policy, the invasion of Venezuela, the ouster of Maduro, is about making his crowd filthy rich. It has nothing to do with American national security.”
- We have learned through the years, when America tries to do regime change and nation building in this way, the American people pay the price in both blood and in dollars” (link).
Shortly after January 3, as those violent Caracas events were being boisterously glorified by the White House, a masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office shot dead a young mother of three during a confrontation in Minneapolis, while she was seated at the wheel of her car. The Minneapolis mayor argued that the ICE self-defence explanation was a “garbage narrative” (link).
As it happens, a recent cogent commentary on the US observed how: “You cannot normalize lawlessness abroad and expect respect for law at home. Violence travels inward” (link).
Global reactions
The BBC confirmed how extraordinary American entitlement claims over Greenland were swiftly ramped-up as a component within Washington’s passionate celebration of the US attack on Caracas (link).
As it happens, a recent cogent commentary on the US observed how: “You cannot normalize lawlessness abroad and expect respect for law at home. Violence travels inward” (link).
Global reactions
The BBC confirmed how extraordinary American entitlement claims over Greenland were swiftly ramped-up as a component within Washington’s passionate celebration of the US attack on Caracas (link).
One of the strongest EU responses came from former French Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin who said (bearing Greenland in mind): “[I]f Donald Trump goes forward, the status of the US will go from adversary or rival to the one of enemy” (link).
This was a particular exception to the general Western response-profile, however. Eldar Mamedov convincingly explained the broad EU response to January 3 in this way (link).
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the EU high representative for foreign affairs Kaja Kallas said that “sovereignty, territorial integrity and discrediting aggression as a tool of statecraft are crucial principles that must be upheld in case of Ukraine and globally.”
These were not mere words. The EU has adopted no less than 19 packages of sanctions against the aggressor — Russia — and allocated almost $200 billion in aid since 2022.
Surely one would expect, then, the EU to condemn the U.S. unilateral attack on Venezuela in early days of 2026, resulting in an abduction of its leader Nicolás Maduro? Yet, nothing of the sort happened. In fact, the EU has already demonstrated its selective approach to the international legality when it failed to condemn its violations in Gaza half as vociferously as it did in Ukraine, shredding Europe’s credibility in the Global South and among many European citizens as well.
Instead, the EU’s response to President Trump’s attack on Venezuela was a masterpiece of evasion. European leaders issued vague carbon-copy statements committing to, above all, “closely monitor the situationin Venezuela. This “collective monitoring” may be the largest and most passive mission in the bloc’s history.
This lamentable spectacle included the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz asserting that the legal circumstances of the U.S. action were “complex.” His Greek counterpart Kyriakos Mitsotakis went even further, dismissing legal questions as untimely — a reckless stance for a leader locked in long-simmering sovereignty disputes with Turkey.
As a result of these contortions, Kallas produced a tepid statement on behalf of 26 EU states which somehow managed to avoid rejecting the U.S. attack on Venezuela as a primary cause of the “crisis.” Instead it appeared to endorse the Trump administration’s case for war with references to Maduro’s illegitimacy, drug trafficking and transnational organized crime despite U.S. national intelligence’s conclusion that Maduro did not have any operational role in running drug cartels.
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An article by Nikolas Rajkovic, a European international law professor, entitled, “Welcome Back to the Rule of Guns and Lawyers: A Tale of Two Ursulas, From Ukraine to Venezuela,” confirms the essence of Mamadov’s assessment. In 2022 the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, spoke forcefully about, “The clash between the rule of law and the rule of the gun… between a rules-based order and a world of naked aggression” after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Around four years later, the president essentially sanitized the patently illegal, violently lethal American attack on Caracas as she articulated a need for the EU to do nor more than “closely monitor the situation in Venezuela” (link).
The rest of America’s Global West pilot fish allies, not least the UK, have proved to be largely just as selectively tepid as Brussels, though Spain, more defiantly, expressed its clear opposition and signed a separate statement with Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and Uruguay that expressed “deep worry and rejection” of actions which had violated “fundamental principles of international law” (link).
The South China Morning Post also emphasized how the US raid on Venezuela had triggered “Brazilian fury” and the pursuit of still closer links with China (link).
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Consequences
In a recent, compelling, extended essay, Chandran Nair argues that America today poses a most serious threat not just to itself, but to the rest of the world (link). American society, he says:
“[Is] not as a potential source of resistance but instead [is] often an enthusiastic cheerleader, a silent stabilizer and perverse beneficiary of the nation’s active pursuit of global hegemony. This is a condition layered onto a culture largely wedded to delusional exceptionalism, white supremacy, cheap overconsumption, and constant entertainment, including foreign wars, crassness, and violence.”
After quoting Oscar Wilde’s observation from over 100 years ago that: “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization” Nair argues that this “decadence has curdled into something more dangerous. The United States now sits on the edge of derangement.”
The White House itself provided stark confirmation of this bleak assessment just as Nair’s essay was published. President Trump told The New York Times that, “I don’t need international law” adding that his power is only limited by “my own morality” (link).
At about the same time, his most influential senior advisor, Stephen Miller said:
“The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. It is absurd that we would allow a nation in our backyard to become the supplier of resources to our adversaries but not to us, adding that “the future of the free world depends on America [being] able to assert ourselves and our interests without an apology” (link).
Meanwhile bandit-style, American hijacking of Venezuela-related oil tankers has already netted over $300 million in purloined cargo from five tankers (link).
As noted above, a renewed, ominous focus of all this fresh, transcendental, martial swaggering is Greenland. Soon after the attack on Caracas, President Trump told the world that the US needs to “own” Greenland threatening to to “take” Greenland, whether the self-governing territory of Denmark “likes it or not.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen subsequently warned that an armed US attack on Greenland could spell the end of NATO (link).
America is already conducting covert, disruptive activities in Greenland according to Denmark (link). Now a timeline of three years to secure American ownership is being discussed in Washington (link).
The US already spends more on defence than the next 10 countries combined. This, however, is apparently far from enough. Another post Caracas thrust was Donald Trump’s call for a 50% increase in US defence spending to US$1.5 trillion by 2027 for what he called “these very troubled and dangerous times” doubtless delighting his conspicuous military-industrial backers (link). It is hard to think of a better way to put immense pressure on China and Russia, just for starters, to move in the same direction.
Significant consequences will flow from the way the US is now emphasizing so many of the worst aspects of its collective, superpower DNA in a manner where no reversal is in prospect. Over time will we learn, often grimly, what these are specifically. But certain likely pivot points are clear, including:
This was a particular exception to the general Western response-profile, however. Eldar Mamedov convincingly explained the broad EU response to January 3 in this way (link).
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the EU high representative for foreign affairs Kaja Kallas said that “sovereignty, territorial integrity and discrediting aggression as a tool of statecraft are crucial principles that must be upheld in case of Ukraine and globally.”
These were not mere words. The EU has adopted no less than 19 packages of sanctions against the aggressor — Russia — and allocated almost $200 billion in aid since 2022.
Surely one would expect, then, the EU to condemn the U.S. unilateral attack on Venezuela in early days of 2026, resulting in an abduction of its leader Nicolás Maduro? Yet, nothing of the sort happened. In fact, the EU has already demonstrated its selective approach to the international legality when it failed to condemn its violations in Gaza half as vociferously as it did in Ukraine, shredding Europe’s credibility in the Global South and among many European citizens as well.
Instead, the EU’s response to President Trump’s attack on Venezuela was a masterpiece of evasion. European leaders issued vague carbon-copy statements committing to, above all, “closely monitor the situationin Venezuela. This “collective monitoring” may be the largest and most passive mission in the bloc’s history.
This lamentable spectacle included the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz asserting that the legal circumstances of the U.S. action were “complex.” His Greek counterpart Kyriakos Mitsotakis went even further, dismissing legal questions as untimely — a reckless stance for a leader locked in long-simmering sovereignty disputes with Turkey.
As a result of these contortions, Kallas produced a tepid statement on behalf of 26 EU states which somehow managed to avoid rejecting the U.S. attack on Venezuela as a primary cause of the “crisis.” Instead it appeared to endorse the Trump administration’s case for war with references to Maduro’s illegitimacy, drug trafficking and transnational organized crime despite U.S. national intelligence’s conclusion that Maduro did not have any operational role in running drug cartels.
.
An article by Nikolas Rajkovic, a European international law professor, entitled, “Welcome Back to the Rule of Guns and Lawyers: A Tale of Two Ursulas, From Ukraine to Venezuela,” confirms the essence of Mamadov’s assessment. In 2022 the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, spoke forcefully about, “The clash between the rule of law and the rule of the gun… between a rules-based order and a world of naked aggression” after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Around four years later, the president essentially sanitized the patently illegal, violently lethal American attack on Caracas as she articulated a need for the EU to do nor more than “closely monitor the situation in Venezuela” (link).
The rest of America’s Global West pilot fish allies, not least the UK, have proved to be largely just as selectively tepid as Brussels, though Spain, more defiantly, expressed its clear opposition and signed a separate statement with Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and Uruguay that expressed “deep worry and rejection” of actions which had violated “fundamental principles of international law” (link).
The South China Morning Post also emphasized how the US raid on Venezuela had triggered “Brazilian fury” and the pursuit of still closer links with China (link).
.
Consequences
In a recent, compelling, extended essay, Chandran Nair argues that America today poses a most serious threat not just to itself, but to the rest of the world (link). American society, he says:
“[Is] not as a potential source of resistance but instead [is] often an enthusiastic cheerleader, a silent stabilizer and perverse beneficiary of the nation’s active pursuit of global hegemony. This is a condition layered onto a culture largely wedded to delusional exceptionalism, white supremacy, cheap overconsumption, and constant entertainment, including foreign wars, crassness, and violence.”
After quoting Oscar Wilde’s observation from over 100 years ago that: “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization” Nair argues that this “decadence has curdled into something more dangerous. The United States now sits on the edge of derangement.”
The White House itself provided stark confirmation of this bleak assessment just as Nair’s essay was published. President Trump told The New York Times that, “I don’t need international law” adding that his power is only limited by “my own morality” (link).
At about the same time, his most influential senior advisor, Stephen Miller said:
“The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. It is absurd that we would allow a nation in our backyard to become the supplier of resources to our adversaries but not to us, adding that “the future of the free world depends on America [being] able to assert ourselves and our interests without an apology” (link).
Meanwhile bandit-style, American hijacking of Venezuela-related oil tankers has already netted over $300 million in purloined cargo from five tankers (link).
As noted above, a renewed, ominous focus of all this fresh, transcendental, martial swaggering is Greenland. Soon after the attack on Caracas, President Trump told the world that the US needs to “own” Greenland threatening to to “take” Greenland, whether the self-governing territory of Denmark “likes it or not.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen subsequently warned that an armed US attack on Greenland could spell the end of NATO (link).
America is already conducting covert, disruptive activities in Greenland according to Denmark (link). Now a timeline of three years to secure American ownership is being discussed in Washington (link).
The US already spends more on defence than the next 10 countries combined. This, however, is apparently far from enough. Another post Caracas thrust was Donald Trump’s call for a 50% increase in US defence spending to US$1.5 trillion by 2027 for what he called “these very troubled and dangerous times” doubtless delighting his conspicuous military-industrial backers (link). It is hard to think of a better way to put immense pressure on China and Russia, just for starters, to move in the same direction.
Significant consequences will flow from the way the US is now emphasizing so many of the worst aspects of its collective, superpower DNA in a manner where no reversal is in prospect. Over time will we learn, often grimly, what these are specifically. But certain likely pivot points are clear, including:
- The US has further compromised its capacity to deal effectively with China, its primary global competitor, despite any short-term advantage gained by undermining China’s extensive trading partnership with Venezuela.
- Beijing will not forget or forgive any disruption of China’s oil supply regime, still less any hijacking of Chinese oil or property (bringing-to-mind vital China-supplied rare earths).
- Blistering polarization within the US is guaranteed to intensify with many Democrats, predictably focused on exacting extended revenge against President Trump and his entire administration as the 2026, mid-term Congressional Elections loom (link).
The more deranged US geopolitical behaviour becomes:
- The more its closest allies, especially in East Asia (not least Taiwan) realize how untrustworthy America is.
- The greater the incentive for China and Russia to strengthen their already strong partnership of strategic coordination.
- The darker the cloud hanging over Ukraine.
- The darker the cloud hanging over NATO continuity.
- The greater the incineration of any remaining respect for the US across the Global South.
- The more globally terrifying the US seems.
This preliminary list could be extended.
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Before closing, one final impact-point is also worth attention: what does the movement towards American derangement mean for the role of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency?
First, Ian Bremmer’s acute caveat about what most underpins the dollar’s global role still applies: “You cannot replace something with nothing” (link). But Bremmer sharply summarized key internal aspects of the dollar’s vulnerability, at the same time:
“The United States is still the most powerful nation on Earth, but it’s also the most politically divided and dysfunctional of all the major industrial democracies. The single biggest risk to the dollar’s global status is that growing inequality, tribalism, polarization, and gridlock eventually undermine trust in America’s stability and credibility.”
He also listed further circumstances that have cast a cloud over the dollar’s supremacy, including chronic fiscal deficits; the growing debt burden; trade wars; financial instability; disruptive digital-monetary technologies; and imperial overreach.
Moreover, Keith Johnson, writing in the US journal Foreign Policy in 2024, argued that:
“It is hard to appreciate just how much resentment there is of Western hypocrisy and hegemony, all mortar helping to bond the loose membership of BRICS. That has become especially evident over issues such as the conflict in the Middle East, the hyperweaponization of US sanctions, and the outsized cost for middle-income countries of the dollar’s exorbitant privilege.”
All these rigorous, cautionary comments long pre-date the vast level of reputational self-harm the Bandits of the Caribbean version of the US has now visited on itself.
Is it likely that worldwide endeavors to establish fresh ways to avoid using the dollar are, accordingly, set to be greatly amplified?
Is the Pope American?
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Conclusion
Readers may like to consider if President Trump is, today, another shallow man in search of some sort of violently transcendental purpose and direction. In the meantime, if you have ever wondered how a massive hoodlum democracy operates, we are presently discovering a comprehensive answer to this question.
Richard Cullen is an adjunct law professor at the University of Hong Kong and a popular writer on current affairs.
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