On Venezuela, Trump Needs To Ask the Big Question | Opinion

President Donald Trump recently presided over a National Security Council meeting with his top foreign policy advisers. The subject: what to do about Venezuela and its tinpot but stubborn dictator, Nicolás Maduro, whose only impressive quality in his ability to continue serving in the role despite years of U.S. sanctions seeking to topple him. The session broke up without a concrete pathway on how the United States will proceed. But given the relentless saber-rattling from the Pentagon and the fact that more than 10 percent of the U.S. Navy fleet is parked off the Venezuelan coast, a reasonable person could surmise that U.S. military action is around the corner.

On the surface, Trump has appeared unsure at times. On November 15, he told reporters that he “sort of … made up my mind” on the next steps. Yet as far as we can discern, he’s still debating his options. One day, Trump is threatening to deploy U.S. troops onto Venezuelan territory; the next, he’s chatting with Maduro and giving him ultimatums. What was possible on Tuesday might be ruled out on Wednesday, only to be reconsidered on Thursday. For those trying to make sense of the Trump administration’s policy, the entire process is one discombobulated mess. For Maduro himself, it could very well be a matter of life and death.   

Given the Trump administration’s rhetoric, we can only assume that the White House is looking for regime change on the cheap. If Trump had his way, Maduro would mimic what former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad did a year ago by packing up his bags in the middle of the night, getting on a plane and flying into exile. Despite attempts by U.S. officials to pin Maduro as some grand mastermind who is directing Latin America’s cartels to ship cocaine into the United States, it’s more likely that the Trump administration is using the drug trafficking issue to make an otherwise unpopular regime change operation more palpable to the American people. The facts bear that out; if Trump was truly worried about drugs flowing into the United States, he would be spending more of his time on Mexico, Colombia and Ecuador and less on Venezuela, where only 8 percent of cocaine shipments bound for the United States originate from.  

The rationale aside, there is also the question of whether regime change in Caracas should even be a U.S. objective in the first place. This isn’t meant to defend Maduro, a man who is currently being investigated by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, stole last year’s Venezuelan presidential election, uses political prisoners as bargaining chips and drove Venezuela’s economy into the ground. Nobody besides Cuba would shed a tear if Maduro was forced to vacate the Miraflores Palace. 

Even so, there are legitimate concerns about what a post-Maduro Venezuela would look like. Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado and far-right Venezuelan exiles based in Miami insist that democracy, freedom of speech, political pluralism, free elections, personal liberties and a market economy would sprout out of the ground the moment Maduro and his criminal clique depart the country. Machado has written a so-called Freedom Manifesto promising great things to come. 

Yet we’ve heard similar optimistic declarations before, only to be disappointed. After the Taliban was deposed in November 2001, the Bush administration insisted that Afghanistan would be the home of an emerging democratic government. Former President George W. Bush said the same thing in the lead-up to the 2003 war in Iraq, claiming that a democratic Iraq would be the genesis of a broader political transformation in the Middle East. And former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton teased a new democratic utopia in Libya after longtime dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime was overthrown. None of it turned out well—Afghanistan is back in the Taliban’s hands, Iraq is at best a corrupt kleptocracy where armed militias play an outsized role and Libya is split between competing authorities.

Could Venezuela be different than these earlier cases? Of course. Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, Venezuela was an imperfect but still functional democracy before Chavismo consolidated power and turned the country into a one-party state. Sectarianism, regional divides and tribal-based social structures don’t exist in Venezuela. 

Historically speaking, changing one regime for another through the force of arms can cause more problems than it solves. The haves turn into have-nots, and those who previously profited from the old order could just as easily pick up a gun to battle the new one to protect what they still have. Even some of the most successful U.S. regime change operations during the Cold War proved to have high costs and minimal gains; the 1954 coup in Guatemala was considered one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s most successful initiatives in the annals of covert operations but also helped unleash three decades of civil war in the Central American nation. 

If Trump isn’t aware of this history, his advisers need to clue him in on it. Because the absolute worst thing he could do is fail to ask the most fundamental question of them all: If Maduro departs, what’s next?

Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.