When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he said George W Bush’s decision to invade Iraq “may have been the worst decision” in American presidential history. Yet, by removing Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, Trump has repeated Bush’s mistake. We don’t know whether this error will lead to a catastrophic occupation of a foreign country. Once again, the US has brought about regime change without having any clear plan for what is to follow.
The capture of Maduro was a testament to American military prowess, which was at least part of the reason for it. The same logic lay behind both US wars in the Gulf by Bush and his father. In 1992, American conservative writer Michael Ledeen reportedly said: “Every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Actually, such gratuitous demonstrations of might betray the fear that American world power is slipping. Beating up a weaker opponent to prove your strength is the action of an insecure bully.
As Iraq demonstrated, military conquest is the easy part. Far more difficult is ensuring political stability once the regime has been toppled. The Trump administration has seemingly put very little thought into a political strategy. Trump announced that the US will “run” Venezuela until it is ready to return sovereignty, but offered few details on what that actually means in practice.
As an authoritarian who believes world leaders are the ultimate sources of power in their societies, the US president is particularly prone to the fantasy that simply removing the head of a state will lead to the fall of its government. In Iraq, regime change resulted in years of deadly civil war and a costly US occupation that lasted nearly a decade.
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Maybe that can be avoided in Venezuela. Perhaps all Trump has in mind is the turning over of oil rights to American companies; maybe Maduro’s successor will go along with this. But Trump has not ruled out “boots on the ground”. A catastrophic, open-ended invasion and occupation of Venezuela would be the inevitable outcome if Caracas decided it does not wish to be “run” by Washington.
[ How the US’s audacious operation to capture Nicolás Maduro unfoldedOpens in new window ]
The Bush administration sold the Iraq War to the American public with lies about Saddam Hussein’s ties to Osama bin Laden and stores of weapons of mass destruction.
Trump, likewise, is relying on a series of falsehoods to defend the attack on Venezuela. He bizarrely accused Maduro of “emptying his prisons and insane asylums” and “forcing” these inmates to migrate to the US to rape and murder. Trump has fancifully claimed that Maduro is a narco-terrorist who heads a drug cartel exporting cocaine and fentanyl to the US. What sort of evidence will he be able to present of such far-fetched charges when Maduro is tried in a US court?
Even if Trump’s claims about Maduro are proven true, it does not follow that this was the reason for the US attack. In December, Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was convicted in American court of narco-trafficking.
Trump’s military action in Venezuela is, like the Iraq War, about an assertion of American dominance over a world region – only this time it’s Latin America. Trump has suggested that the US might seek to remove other left-wing Latin American leaders such as Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and Cuba’s Miguel Díaz-Canel. As with Bush’s effort at remaking a region, however, Trump’s may well backfire and invite instead a wave of anti-US sentiment.
Bush justified his war on Iraq with high-minded rhetoric about spreading democracy, but Trump has given the cruder – and perhaps more honest – justification of US access to Venezuelan oil. He promises to return nationalised Venezuelan oilfields to the hands of American corporations. With expanded production, this oil is improbably meant to profit American companies, enrich Venezuelans and pay for any expenses the US incurs as a result of regime change. American control over Venezuelan oil will be a means to reward American friends and punish American enemies.
Trump’s removal of Maduro makes Bush seem like a conscientious international lawyer with a deep respect for world opinion; Bush at least made the effort to have his war approved by the United Nations and to assemble a coalition of partners.
But regime change is a US tradition that long predates Bush. Trump is hardly the first US president to depose a Latin American leader he didn’t like: the CIA-backed coup of the democratically elected Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973 is only the most famous example. The main difference is Trump’s brazenness – he did not even tip his cap to international law.
Another key difference between Bush’s war in Iraq and Trump’s in Venezuela is that Bush was a far more popular president. Bush held a 58 per cent approval rating before Iraq; Trump’s approval rating is about 38 per cent. Twenty years ago most Democrats were afraid to speak against the Iraq War; now many Democrats, including several possible contenders for the party’s 2028 presidential nomination, have condemned the attack on Venezuela.
Trump cares little what Democrats think. While American presidents since the second World War have routinely ignored the constitutional provision that gives Congress the power to declare war, he did not even bother to inform congressional leaders of the impending attack. Still, the growth of a powerful resistance movement both inside and outside the US political system – including perhaps some Republicans who believed Trump’s pledge to avoid foreign wars – is the most significant possible check on his ability to escalate matters.
As for Ireland, Opposition parties were quick to denounce the US attacks and to call on the Government to do the same. They will hardly be satisfied by Minister for Foreign Affairs Helen McEntee’s call for “full respect for international law and the UN Charter”, in the absence of a specific denunciation of the nation that flagrantly disrespected these.
McEntee and other Government Ministers no doubt calculate that any more explicit statement would do little to hamper Trump’s actions, yet might do a lot to incur his economic wrath. Our Government has every reason to be cautious, and yet its immediate silence betrays the principles of neutrality, peace and law for which Ireland claims to stand.
