New York – The raid on Caracas to distract from the difficulties of the economy and other internal issues in the United States. The literature on “weapons of mass distraction” as a political tool to divert voters’ attention from the most important problems is extensive and well documented: this phrase was used for the first time in the 1970s, but became commonly used towards the end of the 1990s and was then widely used during the second Iraq war in 2003: in that case the then president George W. Bush had justified the invasion of Iraq with the presence of “weapons of mass destruction” which then it turned out not to exist. Thus several commentators began to speak of “mass distraction” in a satirical way, to define a tool used by the White House to divert attention from internal problems including the economic slowdown and post-9/11 tensions.
Now, several commentators maintain that the attack in Venezuela and the capture of President Nicolás Maduro were also planned in a very difficult moment of the Trump administration, in an attempt to shift the attention of American citizens from other problems, especially internal ones. There has been talk for some time about the American president’s attempt to eliminate the issue of the Epstein files from the news cycle, the millions of documents containing photos, emails, information and friends of the financier convicted of pedophilia and trafficking of minors who died in prison in 2019. But the most important issue at the moment for the White House is the economy, which is not going very well, especially the real one, given that inflation, a decline in jobs and the deterioration of the middle class are giving important signals to American citizens in view of the midterm elections next November.
As journalist Mark Leibovich explained in 2015 in an article published in the New York Times Magazine, “distraction has become a political tactic: politicians and media figures frequently exaggerate trivial or dramatic events because they capture attention, even if they end up diverting public debate from important political issues.” One of the analogies often invoked by critics of recent US foreign policy is that with the film Sex & Power, in which an American president invents a fictitious war to distract public opinion from an internal scandal.
Last June, Democratic Senator Brian Schatz attacked Trump on the same issue: on that occasion, Schatz said that the president used authoritarian techniques, such as sending the army into the cities, to prevent citizens from realizing that Congress was passing an unpopular bill that included deep cuts to health care and food assistance programs to finance tax cuts aimed at the super rich. Now Trump is trying to address three even more complex problems: on the one hand there is the economic question.
Although Wall Street is doing very well (Trump recently said it is thanks to his tariffs), the wealth and purchasing power of American families is worsening. While Trump talks about victories, tax cuts and the arrival of a new golden age, middle class citizens, as happened before under Joe Biden, are suffering the effects of the real economy: ever higher prices, rising energy and housing costs, and more generally a profound sense of insecurity. Trump knows that it is essential to prevent public opinion from drifting away from his winning narrative, because the risk is that the November vote will lead to a victory for the Democrats who could thus regain the majority in the House and Senate, slowing down the president’s agenda.
In addition to the economic difficulties and the elections, for some months Trump has been facing a deep division within his movement: on one side there are the Maga, who would like the publication of the Epstein files and who are generally against interventions abroad, supporting the America First doctrine. On the other hand there is the rebirth of the neocons and of a movement that is strengthening around the Donroe doctrine (from the fusion of Monroe and Donald) which, like the original one, provides for the control of the Western Hemisphere and the Americas without the intervention of other geopolitical powers. From all this, some observers write, a future clash for control of the party could arise in 2028: Vice President JD Vance will lead the Maga, while the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, will take over the neocon movement.
Trump knows that to win he must expand the number of his voters, as he did in 2024. According to David Frum, columnist for The Atlantic and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, the movement led by Donald Trump has transformed into a cult of personality, devoid of coherent principles and little attentive to the truth. Its supporters, Frum writes, often don’t care whether the boasted “successes” are real or fake, nor whether the initiatives they praise produce concrete or lasting benefits: “They celebrate peace plans that don’t bring peace, trade deals that don’t improve trade. The Trump movement exists to glorify Trump in his erratic mania. Real-world results don’t matter.” But only with the most convinced Maga do the Republicans know that they will not win the elections.
The problem, however, is much more delicate than it might seem and risks giving space to the propaganda of regimes and of Maduro himself. In 2019, in an interview with ABC News, Maduro reiterated his opposition to the United States, claiming that the American administration was trying to “manufacture a crisis” as a pretext to justify a military escalation against Venezuela. That interview occurred about a year before Maduro was indicted in the Southern District of New York on narco-terrorism charges; on that occasion he did not say that he was aware of an investigation against him nor did he suggest that he was about to be formally accused. “They always make up pretexts, always excuses,” he said, referring to the United States, and added: “To invade Iraq, they made up that there were weapons of mass destruction… it was an embarrassment when it turned out it was all a lie; it was just a pretext.”
There is a well-known theory among international relations scholars that helps to read certain foreign policy moves more as acts of political survival than as responses to real threats. It is called “gambling for resurrection”, literally “betting on the resurrection”, and was developed by academics George W. Downs and David M. Rocke. The idea is simple: a leader in serious internal difficulty, with declining consensus or under pressure due to scandals or economic crises, is incentivized to launch into risky operations abroad (including military ones) in the hope of regaining the favor of public opinion. In the Anglo-Saxon world this theory is often combined with that of diversionary wars, wars used as a diversion. (by Angelo Paura)