Democracy Isn't Part of Trump's Venezuela Op
PLUS: A discussion about great power competition in the Arctic on Jan. 7 with journalist Kenneth R. Rosen
U.S. President Donald Trump’s ousting of Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro and subsequent announcement that the U.S. will “run” the country has drawn comparisons to the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama and past U.S. efforts at nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, there is a significant difference: past U.S. presidents have cast regime change as overthrowing dictators to build democracy, while Trump cast the operation in Venezuela as an effort to make money from the country’s sizable oil reserves.
The closest analogue to the operation is the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama under President George H.W. Bush, where Washington ousted General Manuel Noriega, who, like Maduro, was wanted in the U.S. for drug trafficking. Noriega, like Maduro, had rejected the results of a democratic election and held onto power. The U.S. quickly swore in the opposition candidate, Guillermo Endara, as president, and the military dictatorship crumbled in days.
What happens next in Venezuela is unclear: Trump said the U.S. will “run” the country until a “proper transition takes place.” However, for now, the U.S. has bypassed the country’s pro-democratic opposition and instead chosen to engage with the heir apparent of the Maduro dictatorship, Delcy Rodríguez. In July 2024, Venezuelans elected Edmundo González, a retired diplomat backed by Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, but Maduro stole the election. On January 3, Trump said it would be “tough” for the opposition leader Machado to be president, adding that she is a “very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.” Instead, Trump said that the U.S. would cooperate with Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who was sworn in as the country’s interim leader on January 3. It’s not clear whether Rodríguez will play along despite Trump’s threats of further military action: less than two hours after Trump’s press conference, she denounced Maduro’s capture and said he was the country’s “only president.”
The collapse of the Bush Administration’s stated rationale for ridding Iraq of Weapons of Mass Destruction led to speculation that the unprovoked invasion was about gaining control of Iraq’s oil reserves. However, Bush Administration officials repeatedly denied this. Moreover, Brown University political scientist Jeff Colgan wrote that Iraq was “not a classic resource war, in the sense that the United States did not seize oil reserves for profit and control.” By contrast, Trump said in Venezuela that “the oil companies are going to go in, spend money, and we’re going to take back the oil.”
Bush repeatedly cast the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as efforts to build democracy in a troubled region; these efforts largely failed, as Iraq is a shaky democracy after the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the war and the Taliban retook Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrew in 2021. However, in his press conference, Trump didn’t even mention democracy and when asked by a reporter when elections would be held, said, “I’d like to do it quickly, but it takes a period of time,” and pivoted back to talking about rebuilding Venezuela’s infrastructure.
Had Trump cast the Venezuela intervention as part of a transition to democracy, there would have been more daylight between it and the possibility of China invading Taiwan and overthrowing its democratically-elected government. Trump’s operation is likely to be viewed by authoritarian Russia and China as a green light for further aggression against their neighbors. Trump said that “American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again,” which, to Beijing’s ears, seems like an invitation to do whatever it wants in its own neighborhood. If I were Taiwan, I would be very worried now.
At Public Sphere, I will be doing a live video on Wednesday, January 7 at 4pm CEST/10am EST with journalist Kenneth R. Rosen, the author of a new book, Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic. Rosen traveled across the Arctic to report on how the region has become the epicenter for a new cold war encompassing climate change and great power politics. You can join the conversation on the Substack app for iOS/Android, and there will be a video afterwards.
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