On Saturday, a friend and I were comparing notes on the events following the U.S. raid on Venezuela. Setting apart all the questions about just what the White House is trying to accomplish in Venezuela, my most basic takeaway from the events of the last week is this: as President Trump’s popularity and power erode domestically he will respond with more aggressive assertions of power in those areas where his executive and prerogative authorities remain unbounded, where his domestic popularity matters the least. (This applies most obviously, though not only, to his military powers overseas.) Anything else wouldn’t be consistent with Trump’s character, which is inflexible and unchanging, though perhaps hardening with the progress of advanced age. The current situation between the U.S. and Venezuela shows how jagged, unstable and uneven this may become.
As best as I understand it, the U.S. conducted a military raid against Venezuela the tactical goal of which was to seize President Maduro. By this narrow definition, it was extremely successful. The White House, or maybe just President Trump, thought that this meant inevitably that the government itself would fall or perhaps had fallen. The White House and the president continue to claim the U.S. is now somehow in administrative control of Venezuela, will now restructure its oil industry and possibly even sell off the country’s oil or oil infrastructure assets to compensate U.S. oil companies or even sovereign debt holders. The president is now escalating and making new threats against Mexico, Colombia, Cuba and Greenland. But it’s pretty clear now that the existing state remains in place. And a couple days in we’re now seeing the existing state shake out of what we might call it’s collective state of shock and realize, “Hey, we’re still here. We’re still the state.” Perhaps this could change rapidly. We don’t know what military or diplomatic actions could be happening behind the scenes. It’s possible that the U.S. could be negotiating with Venezuelan in-country stakeholders who could manage the quick overthrow of the current state. But there’s little evidence of any of those things happening based on any news I’m seeing. Everything suggests the current state is shaking out of its shock and moving into a state of resistance. Indeed, on a related front, I just noticed this piece in the Times which reports that 16 sanctioned oil tankers have managed to run the U.S.’s purported naval blockade over the last two days.
It is easy and entirely proper to be outraged by the idea that the U.S. has overthrown the Venezuelan government for the purposes of the most brazen kinds of asset stripping. But I’m more hung up on the disconnect between those pretensions and the fact that the Venezuelan government is still there. We have the twin facts of a president able, willing and now existentially motivated to wield the vast kinetic and violent power of the U.S. military and the same man being humored by a cast of sycophants and time-biding toadies as a mad and decrepit old king as he makes wild and farcical claims that are demonstrably not true.
The stock story about the U.S. invasion of Iraq was that the U.S. managed a successful invasion and decapitation of the Iraqi state but had made few plans for how to govern or stabilize Iraq as an occupying power once it had overthrown the existing regime. We have a vaguely parallel situation in Venezuela, only the U.S. hasn’t even overthrown the current regime. It’s difficult to overstate how absurd this state of affairs is. And it’s a bit of a mystery why this disconnect still has yet to figure more prominently in U.S. news coverage. Obviously, it’s not entirely absent. I’m going on those news accounts. I mean that there is a thundering emperor-has-no-clothes situation here that somehow isn’t quite being identified clearly enough.
This is likely the lay of the land for the next three years.