Greasing the Skid for War: Trump and the Coming War on Venezuela

Arnd Jurgensen

The White House from Washington, DC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Mr. Trumps second arrival in the White House signifies a drastic transition in the nature of U.S. politics and in its foreign policy.    We witness the turn toward brutality in the enforcement of immigration laws and the signs of glee among Trump and his supporters revelling in the violence and humiliation of its victims.   This has been even more evident with the lawless “extrajudicial executions” in international waters of dozens of humans without the slightest sign of due process, evidence or attempts to arrest or interdict the boats targeted.    The name change of the “Department of Defense” to the “Department of War” is in this context a rare bit of honesty.    Whether honesty is the right word for it is doubtful, but Mr. Trump is explicitly stating things that were traditionally left unsaid, not least of which are his threats to annex Canada.

A good example of this is his announcement that he had authorized the CIA to engage in “covert actions” inside Venezuela to bring down the regime of Nicholas Maduro, due to his complicity in the killing of large numbers of Americans who die of fentanyl overdoses. This, despite the determination by his own intelligence community that President Maduro of Venezuela is not in fact the head of the Tren de Aragua or any gang and that Venezuela plays at most a negligible role in delivering narcotics into the U.S..    The vast majority of illicit drugs reach the U.S. via the Pacific Ocean and Mexico, not the Caribbean and involve U.S. allies like Ecuador and El Salvador far more than adversaries like Cuba or Venezuela.  

As the UN figures on the drug trade also show, U.S. citizens involved in the drug trade outnumber their foreign counterparts by more than 10 to 1.   The lion’s share of the profits from the illicit drug trade are made once these drugs cross the border into the U.S., not in Colombia, Mexico or Afghanistan, for that matter.   Furthermore, the proceeds of this trade are funnelled through U.S. (as well as European and Canadian) financial institutions.  A rational policy to deal with the problem of illicit drugs would begin by targeting the demand side of the problem, not supply.

Why is Venezuela in the crosshairs of the imperium?  The first thing to know is that U.S. policy with respect to Venezuela has absolutely nothing to do with either the “war on drugs”, the promotion of democracy or concern over human rights.   Whether it has much to do with access to oil is also debatable, as there is little evidence that Venezuela ever intended to restrict the flow of oil onto international markets.  Furthermore, the government of Maduro reached an investment deal with Chevron recently, that is likely to be undermined by a military conflict.   The fact is that “regime change” in Venezuela has been the bi-partisan consensus policy in the U.S. since the election of Hugo Chavez in 1999.   

Chavez’s overwhelming election victory over the traditionally dominant elite parties - centre left Accion Democratica and Christian democratic COPEI - was unlikely to be reversed by democratic means.  The old elites and the U.S. did not wait for elections to demonstrate that reality, opting for a coup that briefly ousted Chavez in April of 2002.   The coup government, led by the head of the Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce, was immediately recognized by the U.S. (and the recent Nobel Peace Prize recipient Maria Corina Machado).   It dissolved Congress and the Supreme Court and dismissed the constitution. 

Due to immediate public demonstrations, deft maneuvering by Chavez and his supporters and the refusal of soldiers to open fire on demonstrators, Chavez was restored to office two days later.   The subsequent elections, described by former President Carter as “a model of transparency and accountability that should be emulated around the world”, were won by Mr. Chavez with overwhelming majorities.   (But the Carter Center did not endorse the most recent re-election of Mr. Maduro.) This demonstrated clearly that the old mostly white elites that dominated the country for the previous century and made Venezuela one of the most inegalitarian in the world, would not regain their ability to govern by democratic means.   

The reasons for Mr. Chavez’s success are not hard to understand.   Rather than continuing to enrich the narrow elites with the oil revenues flowing into the country, he initiated a program of massive investment in public housing, education and health care aimed at the excluded majority.   He was helped in this regard by the high price of oil, especially during the U.S. “war on terror”.    He also used some of this wealth to solidify his relationship with sympathetic governments in the region through the promotion of initiatives like “Petrocaribe” and the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America (ALBA).    These represented a counterhegemonic project, intolerable to the U.S. and its Monroe Doctrine, through which it declared itself the permanent hegemon of the Western Hemisphere.

I believe that it is this counterhegemonic project and the “pink tide” it produced in the following years, that motivated and continues to motivate U.S. hostility.  

After the failure of the coup the Bush administration turned to destabilizing the Venezuelan economy by supporting a strike of workers in the oil sector among other measures.   President Obama went a step further in imposing “sanctions”, otherwise known as “illegal unilateral coercive actions” when not authorized by the U.N. Security Council), declaring a crisis in which Venezuela represented a threat to the national security of the United States.   Mr. Obama never explained how Venezuela and its government threatened the U.S. but the sanction along with the collapse of oil prices after the crash of 2008 wreaked havoc on the Venezuelan economy resulting in an explosion of migrants moving north.   

During Mr. Trumps first term as president he pushed this policy several steps further with the “maximum pressure” campaign he applied on Venezuela and Iran.  He then took the further step of “unrecognizing” President Maduro and instead announcing the virtually unknow Juan Gaido as the legitimate president.    This move, which was sadly supported by European governments and Canada and failed miserably, none the less gave Gaido control of Venezuela’s international assets, including the gold reserves held by the Bank of England.

While far from exhaustive, I hope this outline of policies pursued to destabilize Chavez and his successor Maduro demonstrates that “regime change” with respect to Venezuela has been the bipartisan consensus within the U.S. since the beginning of the current century.    While Maduro’s claim to have won the most recent elections is weaker than his earlier mandates, this clearly is not the cause of the rising tensions.  

In his second term Mr. Trump initially appeared to be torn between the hawkish approach of his Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the diplomatic overtures made by his envoy Richard Grenell.   The latter have now been terminated and Mr. Trump’s current escalations take the conflict to another level entirely.    He has ordered attacks on boats he claims, without evidence, are smuggling drugs to the U.S..   This policy is a shocking departure from international norms and indeed U.S. law, amounting to extrajudicial executions.   They will however have only minimal impacts on Venezuela, which as stated above plays at best a marginal role in the drug trade and none in their production.   They amount to publicity stunts and a demonstration that Mr. Trump will not be constrained by the rule of law. 

Far more worrisome is the deployment of major military assets off the coast of Venezuela and the announcement that Mr. Trump had authorized the CIA to take “covert” actions to bring down the regime. 

The CIA along with its civilian collaborators, like the National Endowment for Democracy… have certainly been busy within Venezuela over the last few decades, to little effect.    It is unlikely that they will have more success now, which is why the military option is being prominently put on the table.  

 A number of commentators have pointed to the removal of Manuel Noriega from power in Panama as a likely model for the operation in Venezuela.   The only similarities between the two cases is that both are in Latin America and both leaders have been accused of involvement with the drug trade.   

An invasion and occupation of Venezuela by the United States seems rather unlikely however, given the population size and geography of the country.    Unlike Panama, where the U.S. had extensive military assets and control of the canal, the US has no military presence in Venezuela.   Furthermore, the rising tensions with the U.S. have produced a “rally around the flag” effect in Venezuela.  The volunteer civil defense forces organized by Chavez in anticipation of a “Bay of Pigs” style intervention, have swelled from 5 million to 8 million since Trump made his threats.    

It looks unlikely that a traditional “military coup” could accomplish U.S. goals.   The senior ranks of the Venezuelan military most connected to and sympathetic to the traditional elites in the country were largely purged from the ranks after their participation in the 2002 coup.   Since then both Chavez, who began his career in the military and Maduro, who did not, have been very careful and skillful in not letting resentments build up in the ranks.   This was well demonstrated in the Guaido gambit, in which the Trump administration clearly expected the military to switch sides.  It is also instructive that the $50 million reward offered by the Trump administration for Mr. Maduro has had no effect.

This leaves the Libya option as the only model for “regime change” in Venezuela, meaning the extensive use of air power to undermine the regime.   The results of such a campaign would not look much different from those in Libya, Syria or Haiti.   The flood of migrants coming out of Venezuela would likely turn into a deluge, further exacerbating the domestic crisis Mr. Trump has used to consolidate his ever more fascistic regime.  

Trump’s approach also runs the real risk of destabilizing the whole region.   Brazil and Colombia have already declared their opposition to the Trump policies and could very easily be dragged into the conflict.   Colombia has several U.S. military bases along the border with Venezuela.   Furthermore, there is an ongoing territorial dispute between Venezuela and Guyana.     Lastly, Secretary of State and Mr. Trumps National Security Advisor, Marco Rubio, has already declared that regime change in Venezuela will lead to the same in Cuba.

Regardless of how one might feel about the legitimacy of the government of Nicholas Maduro, a regime change operation to remove him from power has all the makings of a regional disaster that by destabilizing the region is likely to increase both the flow of migrants and illicit drugs.    It is also unlikely to lead to a stable democratic government in Venezuela.

Arnd Jurgensen is Chair of the Nuclear Weapons Working Group and international relations specialist at University of Toronto.