WTF: Venezuela

This is not about the marching powder...

You’d be absolutely shocked at just how easy it is to orchestrate a coup d’etat in Latin America… but it’s not that easy. If President Trump manages a trigger coup d’tweet, and he seems to think that he can, it would be one hell of a foreign policy innovation. And a new low for Latin America politics.

Playing it safe, Trump has authorized the CIA to start monkeying around in Caracas with an eye-ball towards regime change. The authorization isn’t that strange, the boys were monkeying around in Greenland back in August. What is strange is that he publicly announced the CIA skullduggery. Normally presidents go to great lengths to keep cloak and dagger foolishness quiet. The optics are terrible and more practically, it’s a good way to blow an operation. It's not just bad tradecraft, it’s a near-total vacuum of common sense. It also tells us, and Maduro, something. The CIA-backed coup treat loses its credibility when the commander-in-chief announces it. While Trump thinks he is engaging in his usual "escalate to deescalate" psych-op to destabilize the Maduro regime by making the man paranoid. The man is already paranoid - which will entrench him in power. And know he knows what the gringo’s won’t do.

The carrier strike group that moved from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean, on the other hand it very credible. Maduro knows that he’s in for a long squeeze. But is hardly answers the Whisky Tango Foxtrot of the situation. That none of this appears to be about the drugs at all.

While the Pete Hegseth was trying to wriggle out of the soup for killing people who’d already abandoned ship after a strike, one Juan Orlando Hernández – the former President of Honduras who was one year into a 45 stretch for using the Honduran Army to facilitate cocaine transshipments to the US – walked free after a presidential pardon by Trump. Using the army to facilitate cocaine transshipments to the US is exactly what the White House is accusing the Maduro regime of doing in Venezuela and why the navy has been blowing-up drug-running vessels. So if the escalating action in Venezuela isn’t about the devil’s dandruff, what is it about?

Existential Sticks and Fat Carrots

What we are seeing is what refined Monroe Doctrine pointed not a Europe but China. The strategy was largely hammered out by undersecretary of defense policy Elbridge Colby on the thinking that America can’t police the entire world and should prioritize what it can control vis a vis our national interests. Which is something that every administration since the end of the Cold War has attempted. To this end, it makes sense to demand that Europe do more of the heavy lifting for its own defense, that the Middle East lift a finger for its own stability and that the US prioritize its own sphere. Whether Latin Americans want to admit it or not, the waves of displaced people making their way illegally to the US is a US problem. So what’s the play here?

Leaks from the assessment show a strategy of denial rather than control. Which also suggests that outright war is less likely that the White House and the press would have you believe. Control strategies involve ill-advised things like “nation-building” and forcing nations to do as they are told. We tried control strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Russia tried it Afghanistan and is trying in Ukraine. Control strategies are time-consuming and wildly expensive in blood and gold but they are consistent: They never work. As anyone who ever tried to persuade a child to eat something healthy knows… denial strategies are far less taxing. They also work.

So the White House is offerings fat carrots – financial support for Javier Milei’s reforms in Argentina or Honduran president walking free of drug trafficking charges – for US allies in the region who spurn investments from China (and largely symbolic ones from Russia and Iran). And devastating, existential sticks for Latin America countries cozying up to rivals. Back in 2008, I decided it would be terribly clever to write a novel, Yellowcake, about exactly that. In light of a strategy of denial regarding China in LatAm, the current foolishness starts to make more sense.

The administration’s policy in the Caribbean is old-school British Naval Gunboat diplomacy. Not about colonies or starting a war but about signally to a country that simply can’t fight back to deny access to a rival. It’s a tad Machiavellian for an electorate that prefers "truth, justice and the American way?" as a holy calling, but there it is.

A wider question is why does the US care about Venezuela and not that perpetual bugbear Cuba?  The Castro regime may be fiery about their hate for the imperialist yanquis, but it drove the country into the stone age. As a national portfolio, the regime has presided over some decent music and, impressively, Ana de Armas. She lives in LA now.

Venezuela is a different kettle of fish: When Hugo Chavez died in 2013, Maduro was his hand picked successor. The timing was bad. Next year the oil prices halved along with the funding funding for Chavez’s socialist revolution. The economy collapsed. Venezuela sits on the world’s largest oil reserves but, socialist revolutions unfolding the way that they do, there was a brain drain of anyone who could actually get the stuff out of the ground. So the goons running the place literally (not figuratively) started tearing up and looting the oil infrastructure to sell off the kit.

So…the sooner Maduro is gone, the sooner the rush will be to rebuild the country’s oil infrastructure and capacity will kick off. That’s a pay day in the trillions for whomever is the big player, and Trump wants it to be the US. And if Washington can keep Maduro from actually attempting to seize its neighbor Guyana’s disputed but oil-rich Essequibo region, which Maduro claims as the country’s birth right, then the US will be the big player there as well.

Admittedly, none of this is terribly fair, but denying a foothold to a hostile Beijing is a sensible thing to do.