I have been struck by how little anyone actually had to say about President Trump’s attack on Venezuela and arrest of its president. Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeated a commitment to the people of Venezuela without much elaboration.
In the Washington Post Megan McArdle, after considerable throat-clearing, devotes the balance of her column to an observation I made here much more succinctly almost immediately: “running” Venezuela will be harder than arresting Maduro and we have no real idea how we’ll do that. The editorial in the Washington Post has a single good paragraph in the entire piece:
The best way forward is for the Trump administration to consistently take the side of the Venezuelan people — and to make clear that the end goal is economic freedom and democracy, whatever messiness comes first.
which is pretty much what Marco Rubio said.
In his Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead does them one better: he has two good paragraphs. First
Six months to a year from now, Absolute Resolve could be forgotten in the rush of greater events, look like one of America’s greatest foreign-policy successes, or become an albatross around the administration’s neck. Success won’t require only a mixture of luck, cooperation by the robust remnants of the Chávez-Maduro political machine, and the full engagement of Mr. Trump’s unrivaled political instincts. It will also require the kind of integrated, efficient planning and interagency cooperation that Mr. Trump’s penchant for personalistic management and chaotic governance makes difficult to mobilize and sustain.
and then
The blowback from Absolute Resolve won’t be confined to Venezuela. China and Russia will, rightly, look at the American strike against Mr. Maduro as a challenge to their power and prestige. The strike on Venezuela, like last summer’s Operation Midnight Hammer against Iran, was an American attack on the revisionist axis where the axis was weak. Planners in Beijing and Moscow will be hunting for areas of American weakness as they look to retaliate. Terror strikes? Escalation in Russia’s military campaign against European targets? Escalation in the undeclared cyberwar now raging between the West and its enemies?
The first is essentially what I’ve said in my posts and the second tells us that we don’t know what will happen.
Some things that are missing from all of these pieces are a) that Maduro’s regime in its incarnation as the Chavez regime was elected in a reasonably fair election by the Venezuelan people who b) have little tolerance for foreign companies making a profit by pumping and selling Venezuela’s oil. Have they learned state control has failed after decades of misery? I see few signs of it.
I do think “Maduro’s regime in its incarnation as the Chavez regime was elected in a reasonably fair election by the Venezuelan people” should have an asterisk.
Maduro won a close election in 2014 that while opposition claimed was unfair, likely did correctly represent the electorate (closely divided). The election in 2018 was not widely considered fair in the sense the rules were pretty rigged. 2024 was even worse, the rules were rigged and the vote counting was falsified, Wikipedia has a pretty good summary of the clear statistical anomalies and evidence of massive vote counting tempering.
With that said, that Maduro has lost the most recent election and rigged the previous election doesn’t justify what happened to him.
I will leave the observation is that what Venezuelans want currently is pretty low on most people’s list of priorities. Neither Maduro, the current government of Venezuela, the US government, Maduro’s supporters in the governments of Cuba, Iran, Russia, China, or even Europeans / neighboring countries have really cared for the last 10 years. Most of commentary is really an opinion on Trump; and his approach to international affairs.
One comment that I saw on twitter who had a take on Venezuela long before action got kinetic which I think is coming true.
The risk was not getting embroiled into nation building and some version of Iraq/Vietnam insurgency; it was that the operation would appear relatively successful and whet the appetite for threats and action elsewhere. What the administration (the President, the secretary of state, the deputy chief of staff) is saying on Iran, Cuba, Columbia (!), Greenland (!) is going to create far more blowback/trouble than the action on Maduro. It is both antagonizing and worse yet, it is all bluffs that would be called — none of the other countries have the same factors that made Maduro an “easy” target.