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Even as he campaigned for the Nobel Peace Prize, President Donald Trump sent eight warships, including a guided-missile cruiser, against Venezuela. In the name of fighting drugs he acted without congressional authorization, loosed the U.S. Navy on alleged drug smugglers, assassinated suspects without evidence or trial, and threatened the current government of the country. Trump, who during his first term proposed invading Venezuela, may plan to use drug claims as an excuse for regime change.
No doubt, Venezuelans deserve better government. For more than a quarter century they have suffered under left-populist strongmen, first Hugo Chavez and then his successor and current president, Nicolas Maduro. Model authoritarians, the latter destroyed democracy, ravaged the economy, impoverished Venezuelans, and drove millions of people abroad.
Alas, U.S. policy toward Venezuela has been a complete failure. Early on Washington backed a failed coup against Chavez, which only reinforced his hold on power. The economic wreckage left by sanctions made domestic resistance more difficult. Cuban agents, so effective at maintaining dictatorial rule at home, assisted the Chavistas in doing the same in Venezuela.
President George W. Bush imposed the first, though limited, economic sanctions on Venezuela, tied to lack of cooperation on terrorism and drug issues. The Obama administration targeted Venezuelan officials for human rights abuses. Trump greatly broadened penalties during his first term. As a result, the Venezuelan people suffered ever greater economic hardship, even as the ruling elite avoided the worst material discomfort.
Trump talked of invading Venezuela. He faced widespread regional opposition, even though there was little support for the Chavistas elsewhere in Latin America, other than in still-revolutionary Cuba: The long history of Yanqui Imperialism cast a long shadow. The Trump administration was suspected of involvement in the unintentional comic opera known as “Operation Gideon,” a failed 2020 plot against Maduro, but it was maladroit even by Washington standards. Little was achieved by the Biden administration, which paid minimal attention to the issue.
U.S. sanctions greatly exacerbated the hardship resulting from Chavista dirigiste mismanagement. According to Francisco R. Rodriguez, an economist at the non-profit Oil for Venezuela, U.S. policy has “made a sizable contribution to declining oil production, exacerbating the country’s fiscal crisis, and contributing to one of the largest documented peacetime economic contractions in modern history.” Economic collapse helped push millions of Venezuelans abroad.
Nevertheless, sanctions did not overthrow the regime. Rodriguez criticized the expectation “that depriving the country of the funds needed to sustain its economy will bring about regime change. It hasn’t, and it won’t. It will simply contribute to worsening the country’s humanitarian crisis, fuel animosity toward the United States, deepen opposition divisions, and weaken civil society.” Washington’s extended recognition of opposition politician Juan Guaidó as president also failed miserably. The Maduro regime shamelessly stole last year’s presidential election. Since then, observed Laura Cristina Dib of the Washington Office on Latin America: “a brutal wave of repression swept across the nation, silencing opposition voices and crushing dissent. In the months that followed, Venezuela has witnessed an unprecedented escalation of political persecution, the systematic closure of civic space, and a further deterioration of the humanitarian crisis that has plagued the country for years.”
What now? The Trump administration has deployed the U.S. Navy off Venezuela’s coast. The purported purpose is to combat drug smuggling. For decades, Washington has treated the ill social and health consequences of drug use as matters of criminal law. Instead of rescuing addicts, this policy added the travails of legal prohibition to those of baneful intoxication. Now, the administration has declared traffickers to be terrorists, which they obviously are not. The latter attack unwilling victims, while the former service willing consumers—who in this case are, embarrassingly, Americans. To be sure, there are ill social consequences of drug use, but by the same logic tobacco producers and alcohol manufacturers should be targeted.
Nevertheless, the administration has turned to the military. Opined Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt:
The Maduro regime is not the legitimate government of Venezuela. It is a narco-terror cartel. Maduro is not a legitimate president. He is a fugitive head of this drug cartel. He has been indicted in the United States for trafficking drugs into our country and it is the utmost responsibility of this president and this administration to prevent the illicit flow of drugs into our country and to protect citizens from those deadly poisons.
However, Venezuela’s role in drug trafficking is minor compared to that of its neighbors. Most seaborne smuggling originates in Mexico and occurs in the Pacific, not the Caribbean. Disreputable though the Caraccas regime is, even U.S. intelligence officials don’t believe the claim that it is running the drug trade, which infiltrates most governments in the region.
The administration apparently intends to strike seaborne and land-based Venezuelan targets with missiles. For instance, U.S. forces recently destroyed a Venezuelan vessel, killing its 11 occupants. This violated long-established procedures. Retired naval officer and Washington policymaker Jon Duffy observed: “This was not a counterdrug operation. It was not law enforcement. It was killing without process. And it was, to all appearances, against the letter and the spirit of the law.” This was not a one-off, but part of a pattern of the untrammeled and unaccountable use of executive power.
However, the operation was feted as a grand victory by administration officials. “There’s more where that came from,” declared the president, while Vice President J.D. Vance, a Yale law school graduate who should know better, celebrated the passengers’ deaths. Media cheerleaders, such as Fox News, have joined in applause. The administration presented no evidence to back its allegation of drug smuggling. Identifying the owners and mission of one small boat would be no easy feat even for the Pentagon. Nor did the vessel fit such a purpose. Smugglers load boats with product, not people, employing as few of the latter as necessary for such an operation. Treating the issue as a matter for the military rather than law enforcement ensured that we will never know the truth.
Most likely, the administration, without legal or constitutional authority, intends its deployment for political purposes. But why the focus on Venezuela? The president has demonstrated minimal concern for human rights elsewhere, nor is national security at stake. Exiled Nicaraguan ambassador Arturo McFields claimed that “Regime change in Venezuela would deal a devastating blow to the agendas of China, Russia and Iran in the Western Hemisphere.” In fact, the Caracas regime is a cost to those nations, useful mostly in annoying Washington. For the latter, Venezuela is a security nuisance, not a military threat. (Caraccas dabbles with China, Iran, and Russia, but American domination of the Western hemisphere remains overwhelming.)
In any case, what does the administration intend? Tulane University’s David Smilde suggested that “what they are trying to do is put maximum pressure, real military pressure, on the regime to see if they can get it to break.” After Venezuelan military aircraft buzzed U.S. vessels, the Pentagon ominously intoned: “The cartel running Venezuela is strongly advised not to pursue any further effort to obstruct, deter or interfere with counternarcotics and counterterrorism operations carried out by the U.S. military.” Alas, such attempted intimidation seems unlikely to achieve much. Absent a credible threat of forced regime change, the Chavistas are unlikely to yield power or even moderate domestic repression.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently doubled to $50 million the reward for Maduro’s capture, which has yet to secure a successful bounty hunter. One unnamed administration official declared: “I am 100 per cent sure that the aim of this operation is to arrest Maduro and get him out of power.” However, talk of a “snatch and grab” raid to capture Maduro sounds fanciful and even if successful would leave the Chavista apparatus intact. An invasion would require congressional authorization, at least if the president followed the Constitution. Moreover, just 2,200 of the 4,500 military personnel aboard are Marines, far too few to conquer and occupy a country as large and rugged as Venezuela.
Even with substantial reinforcement such an operation would be problematic. Although the Maduro regime appears to be deeply unpopular, and some, perhaps many, Venezuelans would welcome its forced ouster, nationalism could inspire resistance, since the “rally-around-the-flag” effect is common worldwide. Maduro has been enlisting people in a “Bolivarian Militia,” which will have little combat capability but could target regime opponents and critics. Maduro is unpopular at home, but he is likely to gain at least some determined support since the Chavistas represent an antagonistic ideology, in contrast to being a common dictatorship, like that of Panama’s Manuel Noriega, who was ousted by the George H.W. Bush administration.
While U.S. intervention conceivably could spark local uprisings, the country is already divided and features multiple armed gangs. History warns that such action is most likely to yield civil war, armed chaos, and persistent instability. Americans would be left to clean up the mess. Moreover, the longer and more complex the fight, the greater the chance of outside involvement. Warns Eldar Mamedov, a member of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs: “hardliners in Moscow might push to intensify a conflict in America’s backyard as payback for the Ukraine proxy war.” Simply flooding post-liberation Venezuela with weapons would fuel destructive instability.
Although candidate Trump cultivated a reputation as a closet peacenik, he, apparently no less than President Joe Biden, believes that he “runs the world.” This evidently involves using military force in an attempt to impose his will on other nations. Doing so against Venezuela would be a tragic mistake.
Geography gives Washington a legitimate interest in the nature of Venezuela’s ruling regime and its relationships with potentially antagonistic states, certainly more than in those nations that most often draw American military attention. Nevertheless, such intervention can be justified only when necessary to vindicate vital interests, which are absent in the current case. Rather, Trump should, as Rodriguez urged, reverse “a failed sanctions policy that exacerbates the suffering of millions of people who should not be made to pay the cost for the atrocities of their ruler.” This would benefit the Venezuelan people, the chief victims of the Chavistas, and reduce the regime’s power over them. It would also prevent Maduro from donning the nationalist mantle and standing against the traditional enemy of Yanqui imperialism.
Next would be to cultivate, rather than antagonize, left-ish governments such as those of Mexico and Brazil, neither of which is enamored with the Maduro regime, and pursue a multilateral strategy to press for a democratic transition in Venezuela. A process led by Venezuela’s neighbors is still a longshot but remains the best hope for change. The president’s confrontational approach to countries in Latin America and around the world has undermined American credibility, already damaged by Washington’s dubious history in ousting democratic governments and overturning democratic systems. If some event eventually warrants the use of military forces, congressional authority would then be necessary.
Venezuela is in crisis. The greatest blame falls on Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. However, the Venezuelan people are also suffering as a result of U.S. policy. Despite decades of U.S. meddling, the regime appears no closer to falling. Good answers are in short supply, but doubling down on past failed policies is a dead end. Starting another war would be even worse.