The daring raid that snagged Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was an awesome display of the capabilities that make the US military the world’s best by far. It serves as proof that President Donald Trump’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine is real, and reminds us of his penchant for using force in novel, surprising ways.
Trump has, undeniably, struck down a bad leader — and struck a blow that matters in the fight for global power. Yet the raid in Caracas also raises harder questions about Venezuela’s future, the clash for influence in the Western Hemisphere, and the rules of conduct in a disordered world.
The operation’s success, with no reported US fatalities, is testament to the ability of America’s intelligence community to find hard targets and America’s military to strike them. It also gives Trump a trophy in his Western Hemisphere campaign.
Since taking office last year, Trump has used various measures — diplomatic pressure on Panama, support for friendly rulers in Argentina and El Salvador, escalating coercion against Maduro, lethal strikes against suspected narco-traffickers — to reassert US primacy in the Americas.
Maduro seems likely to spend many years in a US prison. His fate is a stark warning of how seriously this administration takes the threat of hostile Latin American leaders that seek ties to Beijing and Moscow — a fact Trump emphasized after the strike.
The raid also showcased Trump’s preferred way of war. In June, Trump used misdirection and disinformation to disguise preparations for his strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. In recent days, his administration ran the same play again.
Reports that Trump would settle for a blockade of Venezuelan oil, or that he was preparing to negotiate, were presumably meant to give Maduro a false sense of security. Trump’s way of war involves maximizing secrecy and surprise that accentuate US advantages — and clear the way for precise uses of force that allow the president to start and end conflicts on his own terms.
There is, additionally, another parallel to Trump’s Iran strike: This attack shows the limits of solidarity among other powers.
Russia and China are howling about violations of Venezuelan sovereignty. They have sustained Maduro for many years. But they can only offer thoughts and prayers in the face of determined American power projection in the Western Hemisphere — just as they couldn’t or wouldn’t save the Iranian regime from military humiliation at the hands of Israel and the US.
There’s much to applaud, then, in a tactical success that will likely have real strategic benefits. There are also uncertainties ahead.
The first involves the future of Venezuela. Trump has achieved leadership change, but not regime change, since many hardline figures in Maduro’s government remain.
Trump has pledged that the US will “run the country” to oversee a democratic transition; he has threatened additional attacks if regime remnants don’t play along.
But even if this squeeze play works, any political transition could be long and messy, since it involves undoing the damage — economic, political, social — from nearly 30 years of Chavismo. We’ll see how much appetite an anti-nation-building president has for that.
Second, the great-power fight for the Western Hemisphere is far from over. China has spent decades investing in infrastructure, trade and other relationships with Latin American countries. The monuments to its influence include mega-ports in Peru and a massive space-tracking station in Bolivia. Its police and security ties have been expanding, as well.
Beijing, coincidentally, released a paper on its involvement in Latin America in December. The thrust of it was that the global balance of power is changing in ways that favor the expansion of Chinese influence.
Trump has served notice that there’s only one great power in the Americas, when it comes to military muscle; Latin American countries will surely be even more cautious about offering Beijing access to anything that looks like a base, at least for now. But China will keep seeking economic, technological and political ties in the region, as part of a play for long-term advantage.
Finally, bad actors may exploit this precedent. The Trump administration argues, plausibly, that this operation was legal because Maduro was under US indictment. It can point to the invasion of Panama in 1989 to depose Manuel Noriega, as evidence that Washington has done this before.
Yet if Beijing has been watching closely, perhaps that’s because Trump’s tactics — blockading a hostile country, decapitating its leadership — could ultimately be useful against Taiwan.
In a unipolar post-Cold War era, the US didn’t have to worry about rivals emulating its tactics. In today’s more challenging environment, its example might, one day, be used in nasty ways.
Bloomberg
