We’ve broken international law to violate the sovereignty of Venezuela. Why does this matter? The US just did something that’s good for the US, right?

I thought I’d write about stories or games today, but here we are. How about I tell you a story instead?

For decades we have been a dragon atop a hoard of power and wealth and influence…

Our greed is destroying our hoard. We’ll see how much remains, and if we can stop ourselves.

For the past eighty years, the US has sat atop a pile of international agreements. These are agreements that we’ve slowly built up since World War 2. They are agreements that we wrote so that they would benefit lots of people—and so that we were perfectly placed to benefit the most.

Those agreements have made us powerful. They have made us rich. They have brought money and power and influence to our hoard, like so many gold coins. They’ve brought other people to join us, to bring their own power and wealth to our pile. By joining us those people have made us more powerful and more rich again. Some have been true allies, some have been those who share our interests or goals, but all of them have strengthened us.

Yes, the agreements we made have required us to help other people sometimes. Yes, they’ve required us to share some of our power and influence with the others who joined their wealth and power to ours. Yes, they’ve required us to be (relatively speaking) polite to those same people. But those people have always known that we made this possible, and they’ve been willing to lend their strength when we all agreed that there was something big that needed doing.

Better yet, those agreements have given us peace. Not a world without conflict, but a world with fewer conflicts. A world with smaller conflicts. No third world war.

By kidnapping Maduro, regardless of what he may or may not have done, we are breaking those agreements. By saying that we will run Venezuela, by fantasizing about seizing Greenland, we are setting fire to that broken pile of agreements. We are destroying the very thing that brought us to our heights of power.

We have been a dragon atop a hoard. Now the dragon has lurched from its precious pile and scattered its influence and its allies and everything else that helped the hoard grow so large, all because it saw something shiny and it wanted it. The power that took most of a century to build is being destroyed in months, weeks, days, by shortsighted greed.

Trump, Stephen Miller, and those others around them, are either blind to consequences or have a cruel toddler’s understanding of the world. When Stephen Miller dismisses the “international niceties” that have given us relative peace in order to justify violating Venezuela’s sovereignty, or claims to have a clear understanding of our world—“But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake [Tapper], that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”—he ignores the dangers of war, of escalation, and of starting a new era of imperialism as countries around the world turn back to the idea that might makes right and every nation may invade another as they wish.

Trump and company would burn down the house that America has built to cook themselves a single meal.