After the Trump administration launched its military operation in Venezuela on Saturday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for international law to be respected.
But that horse would have bolted with Trump's unilateral use of force.
Then there's Roberta Metsola, the European Parliament president. She was cheering on the events in Venezuela, writing in Spanish that "Venezuela será libre."
Yes, Maduro was terrible. But Trump's Venezuela operation is an oil grab, not an exercise in democracy: Trump has given no date for America's exit; he was dismissive about Maria Corina Machado, the opposition leader; and he's avowedly focused on the oil-rich Orinoco Belt.
And there's EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas. On Saturday she called for a peaceful transition, which is quite some gaslighting seeing as US missiles had just blown up parts of Caracas.
Ok ok I hear you say. The EU needs to play nice with Trump to keep US troops in Europe to ward off Russia. And besides, the EU never had much leverage with the US, even less so in the western hemisphere.
True. Back in 1989, big European states reluctantly fell into line with the US after Bush senior ousted Manuel Noriega from Panama — also on the grounds of drug trafficking.
But Venezuela is different to Panama. Especially for Europe. And especially for Denmark. Future leadership of the Danish territory is what Europeans need to be thinking about after what Trump did in Venezuela.
"We're going to get it one way or the other," Trump said about Greenland in March. He wants its minerals and, it seems, to fulfil a warped manifest destiny.
There's also what amounts to Trump's call for regime change in continental Europe itself. Last month, as part of a new security strategy, he vowed to help neofascists like the German AfD get into power in order to stop the EU in its tracks.
That is also what makes the EU's milquetoast statements on Venezuela so astoundingly inadequate.
Von der Leyen, Metsola and Kallas seem to inhabit an alternate reality, where the US is more embarrassing rich uncle than strategic threat. But it's not because the EU cannot do anything that it should normalise its actions in Venezuela.
As former imperial stewards, and with Ukraine now fighting off a neo-imperial Russia, EU leaders, however weak by comparison with the US, have a duty to warn Americans and Europeans alike about the hazards of this new mad rush to empire.
James Kanter is the founding editor of the EU Scream politics podcast and a former correspondent for Dow Jones and the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times, based in Paris and Brussels. James began his career at The Cambodia Daily newspaper in Phnom Penh, and is a recipient of a Reporting Europe prize for his coverage of energy and climate.
