The editorial board is the official opinion of The Georgetown Voice. The editorial board operates independently of the Voice’s newsroom and the General Board. The board’s editorials reflect the majority opinion of the board’s members, who are listed on the masthead. The editorial board strives to provide an independent view on issues pertinent to Georgetown University and the broader D.C. community, based on a set of progressive institutional values including anti-racism, trauma-informed reporting, and empathetic and considerate journalism.
To get a sense of our campus’s mood towards President Donald Trump’s violent attack in Venezuela, one needs to look no further than the student-run Philonomosian Society (also known as Nomos), which opened the spring semester debating whether abducting Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro “further[ed] U.S. interests.” This topic is preposterously misguided and reflects the self-centered exceptionalism that dominates U.S. foreign policy and extends into the halls of Georgetown.
For too long, our university has trained legions of foreign service officers, government officials, and politicians to hold the imperial line. Imperialism—the violent imposition of a country’s power and influence beyond its borders—has defined American foreign policy for centuries. Trump’s regime exposes the rawness of American actions in Venezuela and around the globe. In the face of his overt imperialism, we must reframe how we think about foreign politics. As Georgetown trains the next generation of politicians and State Department employees, it must lead this urgent shift away from Western-centric narratives.
Currently, Trump continues to see support for his actions in Venezuela and across the globe, despite the fact that they represent a flagrant disregard for international law and the separation of powers. As a school with both a robust undergraduate international law curriculum and one of the best graduate-level international law programs in the world, Georgetown should be acutely concerned by the Trump administration’s active contempt for the principles of the field. As Georgetown students sit in lecture halls learning about historical empirical violence, they should also be taught about how their government is currently and unequivocally violating the laws that have governed the use of force for decades. In just the last six months, for example, the U.S. disregarded international law by launching deadly strikes on Venezuelan boats last fall and abducting Maduro in early January. Professors should give their students tools to recognize the parallels between historic violations of international law and those being committed by the Trump administration today. Without that awareness, these future international lawyers, politicians, foreign service officers, and government employees may perpetuate the same cycles of abuse of laws and norms.
Beyond that, at this moment of aggressive U.S. imperialism, Georgetown’s administration must rethink who they platform in the lecture hall. Nearly all the required core classes in the SFS, such as Introduction to International Relations, are taught from a Western-centric perspective with only a lecture or two (if any) on other approaches to international relations. When this occurs, Georgetown and its professors are failing to give students the tools and diversity of thought they need to critically evaluate the U.S.’s actions on the global stage.
Georgetown must prioritize hiring academics who focus on anti-imperial scholarship and non-Western approaches to international relations. These professors should also be allowed to teach courses accessible to a wide range of students—classes that fulfill core requirements and are housed under or cross-listed with popular majors. There are certainly current professors at Georgetown who have this expertise; however, they are often relegated to teach in smaller programs to fewer students, rather than the 50-person rooms afforded to courses like International Security or the 200-person lecture halls for Introduction to International Relations. In doing so, Georgetown forces its students to actively seek out this content instead of exposing students to these schools of thought.
Yet, as we call on our campus administrators to act, we must also demand action from our peers. Many of our campus organizations operate under the assumption that U.S. interests justify all actions without bounds. While a debate among undergraduates held by a student-run club may seem trivial at first glance, if students are galvanized to put U.S. interests above all else, there is little doubt in the mind of this editorial board that they will bring that same harmful mentality to the workforce and potentially positions of immense power. Nomos’s tone-deaf debate resolution on Venezuela was likely related to the event being co-sponsored by the Concord Group, a national security technology consulting club that itself trivializes American violence and funnels students toward the U.S. national security apparatus.
The lack of critique toward Trump’s violation of international law speaks to an attitude of American exceptionalism and entitlement that is evidently as strong as ever, including within the walls of Georgetown. We, as students, must reject the supposed “neutrality” of campus organizations that pass off loss of life and warmongering as trivial academic debate. Instead, we must show up for peers through engagement with anti-imperial ideologies and frameworks in both our coursework and extracurriculars. This might include attending or organizing protests, joining student groups pushing for change on and off campus, enrolling in classes that center non-Western voices, and challenging our peers to decenter American imperialism.
Again and again, the U.S. and its citizens have failed to learn their lesson from atrocities in Iraq and Vietnam, cataclysmic regime changes in Chile and Guatemala, and countless unwarranted brutalities around the world, relegating these moments to supposed flawed strategy rather than human depravity. Georgetown and its students must actively work to ensure that we do not perpetrate and support these same cycles of violence, contrary to Trump’s actions.
The U.S.’s history of shamelessness can be easily traced back to its founding. The lack of cultural consensus on the horrific legacy of Christopher Columbus, North America’s great butcher, is an indicator that there continues to be no accountability or recognition of the violence upon which the U.S. was founded. Georgetown itself fails to take a stance on America’s original sin of colonialism, referring to Indigenous Peoples’ Day (formerly Columbus Day) as a “Mid-Semester Holiday” on its academic calendar despite Washington officially changing the name four years ago.
Beyond the hilltop, many current Georgetown students were raised in a world where, both politically and culturally, U.S. imperialism has been front and center, especially in the aftermath of Al-Qaeda’s attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. This reality should sit at the forefront of our minds as we engage in our studies. The perceived threat of terrorism laid additional groundwork for invasions abroad and heightened Islamophobia and state-perpetrated violence across the U.S. in the name of security interests. As Americans reeled from the shock of 9/11, the Bush administration stoked fears of supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, while much of the media uncritically parroted the president’s claims without any independent investigation.
The uncomfortable truth is that the “war on terror” was a great victory for a handful of political and economic elites who used their power to trade lives for money. The results are underscored by the immense wealth defense contractors have accrued from U.S. defense spending since 9/11, and the generous kickbacks received by a swath of politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties. As we sit at Georgetown, we must remember that violent U.S. imperialism created the world order we will ultimately inherit. This institution is training us to assume leadership in U.S. industry, foreign policy, defense, finance, and politics. Our studies can either set us up to unquestioningly perpetrate these same international abuses of power, or they can teach us how to challenge the systems that have blindly supported U.S. imperialism.
And while Venezuela is undoubtedly different from Iraq, it is the latest in a long line of examples of U.S. imperialism, supported uncritically by our executive branch. Through this attack on Venezuela, Trump’s invocation of the Monroe Doctrine, and an increasingly heavy-handed approach to foreign policy in which we attempt to seize control of the territory of Greenland, governed by our NATO ally Denmark, the Trump administration has laid bare its imperial ideal.
Without the veneer of good intentions, the U.S. certainly does not look like the benevolent leader of a democratic and free world which it has long claimed to lead. Trump and his allies’ blunt words and brash actions speak to the country’s greedy chauvinism in explicit terms. This should feel deeply disturbing, yet it also presents an opportunity for people to seriously demand something different. The question becomes whether or not we will. Guiding all of this, we must remember that it is as little Trump’s responsibility to decide Venezuela’s future as it is ours; it is the people of Venezuela who have a right to determine their own governance.
While the U.S. spends trillions of dollars inflicting violence abroad, it leaves many Americans without reliable healthcare, housing, and basic amenities. Most Georgetown students will never experience this kind of insecurity, with 74% of students coming from the top 20%, according to a 2017 New York Times study, so it is easy to forget this. If we are to avoid the disastrous mistakes of our predecessors, we must connect the vast inequities at home to the calamitous policy abroad. Of course, that requires Georgetown to stop giving preference to the rich when reviewing applications, but it also demands reorienting the school’s and our individual priorities from implicit support for systems of oppression to interrogation and dissolution of those structures.
With the mask off, the U.S. no longer even has an imaginary claim to moral superiority over its rivals. There are no pretenses of adherence to international law or concern for human rights. It is long past time that the world, especially the U.S.’s allies, start treating it like the rogue state that it is. Nonetheless, change starts from within, and we have an opportunity to shift the narrative that the U.S. has long put forth, starting here at Georgetown. Long used to train servants to the imperialist cause, Georgetown—and the School of Foreign Service in particular—ought to make itself known not for its unflinching commitment to U.S. interests but for its unflinching commitment to international peace and justice. Georgetown administrators and students must rethink what ideals they platform in the lecture hall, during course registration, in assigned readings, in salaries, and more. If we really want to claim to be “people for others,” now is a decisive moment to match our words with our actions.
The choice is ours.
