Much remains to be clarified about Saturday’s raid by US forces on Venezuela that ended with the country’s leftist dictator Nicolás Maduro in US custody on drug-trafficking charges.
How could the defenders of the largest military complex in the capital Caracas fail to lay a glove on the US attackers? Who could quickly pinpoint and extract Mr Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores?
It was widely speculated that members of the Venezuelan strongman’s own Chavista movement handed him over, in some sort of deal with the US. These suspicions grew later on Saturday after a Mar-a-Lago news-conference, in which US president Donald Trump said: “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”
Without any US troops on the ground, it appears Mr Trump intends to “run” Venezuela through the remaining Chavistas who are still in charge.
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Mr Trump said Venezuelan vice-president Delcy Rodríguez had been sworn in as interim president and in a “quite courteous” conversation had told secretary of state Marco Rubio “she’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again”.
To reinforce the sense that Mr Trump believes his administration is now running Venezuela through the Maduro-less Chavista regime, he dismissed the idea of working with opposition leader María Corina Machado, calling her “a very nice woman but she doesn’t have the respect within the country”.
The confusion about what is happening in Caracas only deepened when Ms Rodríguez appeared on Venezuelan state media flanked by military officers and denied Mr Trump’s claims. Dismissing reports of a deal with Washington, she denounced the raid as an “imperialist attack”, adding: “There is only one president in this country, and his name is Nicolás Maduro.”
Much hangs on which of these competing visions of reality is more accurate. Should it be Ms Rodríguez’s interpretation, then this first US military attack on South American soil might not be over. Further defiance by Caracas will have to be weighed against the threat made by Mr Rubio at Saturday’s press conference: “Don’t play games with this president in office because it’s not going to turn out well. I hope that lesson was learned last night and we hope it’ll be instructive moving forward.”
Perhaps Ms Rodríguez’s resistance is for show until Chavistas have time to adjust to a new reality, one in which their hated dictatorship will now rule Venezuela under the direction of “el imperio yanqui” they have defied for a quarter century.
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What is clear after Saturday’s dramatic events is the Trump administration’s strategic shift to prioritise the western hemisphere over the Indo-Pacific and Europe. It will also strengthen the belief among many in the foreign policy community that Washington now favours the division of the world by great powers into spheres of influence, with potentially grave implications for Ukraine and Taiwan.
At his press conference Mr Trump said the US needed to be “surrounded by safe, secure countries”.
After Venezuela the country with most to worry about in the region is communist Cuba. Regime change there has long been the goal of the Cuban exile community in Florida, of whom Mr Rubio is a leading light. Mr Trump has also signalled that Mexico and Colombia remain potential targets, and Saturday’s raid places a starker light on his move last month to appoint a special envoy to Greenland over the objections of Copenhagen as part of his long-stated ambition to acquire the Danish-controlled territory.
Across the western hemisphere, governments will be assessing the new threat from a US administration boasting of its revival of the Monroe Doctrine. This, it claims, gives the US special powers in its home hemisphere, unrestrained by international law.
Mr Trump barely mentioned the restoring of democracy to Venezuela or the war on drugs, ostensibly the motives for the apprehension of Mr Maduro.
Instead, at Saturday’s press conference he spoke enthusiastically about a US takeover of Venezuela’s oil industry.” We’ll run it properly, we’ll run it professionally,” he said, predicting “we’ll be selling large amounts of oil to other countries”, in reference to Venezuelan crude, which he claims was stolen from the US.
Even as they cheer on his takedown of Mr Maduro, Mr Trump’s ideological stable mates in Latin America will be nervous about such a naked display of self-interested power. Helping them win elections is one thing. Abject subordination to the self-interests of America First is something else entirely.
