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Trump Should Stick To His Original Foreign Policy Instincts On Venezuela thefederalist.com/2019/05/03/tru…
Juan Guaido, the suave Macronist liberal whom the West recognizes as the legitimate president of the oil-rich republic, was on the way to topple the Maduro dictatorship, flanked by dissident military men. But that didn’t work out.
What transpired since then is dodgy, but it appears the dissident military leaders and bureaucrats chickened out. In what looked like a replay of the failed coup attempt against Turkish despot Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the forces loyal to Maduro started to attack protesters.
This is by far the closest to an actual foreign policy crisis that Trump administration has faced yet. It is also the one for which a single misstep could cause total chaos. Naturally, there were prominent (and predictable) voices calling for an intervention.
Consider the similarity to Iraq immediately post-intervention, and the entire Baathist military and bureaucracy disbanded and pushed underground, fueling insurgency with the support of Iran. In other words, a regime change is a recipe for insurgency and civil war.
The same reason Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gadhafi chose to fight ’til the bitter end is the same reason Maduro would also not quit, and instead go down fighting a long civil war.
He has no incentive to quit, and nowhere to retire with his millions. For good or for bad, he enjoys the support of almost half his country and most of his military forces,
There are no signs of large-scale military defection. Nor are there signs that local powers, like Brazil and Colombia, are planning military action. This means toppling Maduro would require American armor and boots, a long civil war, and subsequent stabilization mission.
Our experience in regime change and nation-building in the last 15 years should give us pause. The only place where anti-Americanism is traditionally higher than the Middle East but remains dormant is in Latin America.
As the entire continent organically and slowly moves right-wing, any heavy-handed approach would turn the clock back to its default Marxist radicalism.
The Monroe Doctrine is still active, and America is well within her rights to intervene if any other great power approaches and forms a base that can change the balance of power of the region.
But 100 Russian military advisors don’t change the balance of power. It is not the Cuban missile crisis redux, and neither Russia nor China currently has any cross-continental power projection will or capability.
“The propensity in Washington on both sides of the aisle to take ownership of the Venezuela problem and fix it with an American-imposed solution must be tamped down in favor of the prudence and restraint so often thrown by the wayside. Emotion should not dictate policy.”
Venezuela is a humanitarian concern, not a strategic concern, a key difference that needs to be considered. It’s easy to sympathize and offer diplomatic support, aid, food, and even weapons. It’s entirely another thing to intervene militarily, and force regime change.
The local powers of Brazil and Colombia are the two most allied to the United States, and have conservative governments who oppose a Cuban satellite in Venezuela, and growing migration that is flooding their countries.
If American diplomacy were really prudent and capable, they would buck-pass the intervention and security burden to local allies, and provide diplomatic and material support, but without any U.S. troop involvement.
Let Brazil and Colombia topple Maduro and stabilize Venezuela, with America’s blessing—but without American guns.
President Trump stands within the cusp of history, of being the first American president in more than a quarter-century to not have started an open-ended and costly so-called humanitarian intervention.
He should trust his original electoral instincts and aspire to make that his legacy. There are genuine areas of threats to focus on instead, especially in Europe and Asia. Venezuela, behind the buffers of Colombia and Brazil, is not an existential threat to the United States.
