A CHRONICLE OF MAGIC REALISM FORETOLD

By forcing brute American power on Latin America, Trump is blending reality with the surreal. None of it is likely to go according to plan in this diverse region

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DURING the past 10 days that shook the world, two fault lines have appeared in international politics—principally, the regime change project of the US President Donald Trump in Venezuela and, two, a potential breakup of the Western alliance.

If only the celebrated Latin American literary giant Gabriel Garcia Marquez were alive today, this would have been a fitting moment in his tumultuous career—marking the entry of magical realism, a literary genre blending the mundane with the fantastic, into the realm of geopolitics.

Herein lies a paradox. While Trump may have missed the Nobel Peace Prize, he can still claim a legacy of making magical realism a global phenomenon in politics—a potentially more enduring legacy for some. He has succeeded in situating us onlookers in a predominantly realistic setting while his fantasies are rolling out in an unreal world, with unreal characters. He brings alive Garcia Marquez’s powerful metaphor of cows wandering through and eating the curtains inside a deposed dictator’s home.

The regime change in Venezuela had an easy explanation—it is a vivid display of the Trump administration’s prioritisation of the Western hemisphere in its foreign policy strategies, as outlined in the recent National Security Strategy released by the White House. This hypothesis was articulated, albeit somewhat crudely, by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the most experienced top diplomat in the entire Trump team, when he spoke to a TV network on Sunday, “This is the Western hemisphere. This is where we live—and we're not going to allow it to be a base of operations for adversaries, competitors and rivals of the United States.”