Trump and Venezuela - Time For Hard Eyed Realism Not Wishful Thinking
From an informed source with many years of experience in the region.
The arrest of Venezuelan “President” Nicolas Maduro in an astonishing U.S. commando raid, shocked the world. The U.S. naval campaign against drug trafficking speed boats had caused unease among some sectors in Washington, but the Maduro operation was of an entirely different order of magnitude.
The Washington foreign policy, military, and national security/intelligence community has always been wary of Trump and his policies. Some of this concern is sincere and, up to a point, justified. Trump has led us into uncharted waters. Many are uncomfortable with the dramatic changes in the focus of U.S. foreign policy and some can’t cope with the disappearance of the geopolitical landscape that took form after WWII. They see Trump as reckless, ill-informed, and perhaps dangerous to world stability. All of this is understandable, but – at least on the issue of Venezuela and our position in the Western Hemisphere – the traditional Washington consensus is wrong.
More than a few of the Washington pundits have gone so far as to deliberately lie about Trump’s actions, the “Venezuelan fishing boats” canard being a shameful example. Most of the people making the false claim that “innocent fishermen” have been killed know next to nothing about Venezuela, the drug cartels, or the facts on the ground.
The boats that have been destroyed were indeed trafficking drugs, most on the Venezuela or Colombia route to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where the cocaine is off-loaded for further shipment to the U.S. or Europe. The crews are not “fishermen.” They are narco-terrorists, as Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth have described them.
The drug cartels are merely one part of a vast structure that includes not just criminal activity but an organized effort to undermine the United States and its friends in Latin America and other parts of the world. Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, China, Iran, Hezbollah, the Colombian terrorist organizations (the ELN and the so-called “Dissident FARC”) and the drug cartels of Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East, work together and all see the United States as an enemy to be weakened by any means necessary. The Biden “refugee” disaster is only one example; Cuba, Venezuela, and leftist NGO’s worked together to flood the United States with paupers and other even more undesirable people. This structure controls vast amounts of money and it has used it to buy elections for Globalists and extreme left politicians, finance the “refugee” invasion of the United States, and undermine our political and social stability. Time will show that much of the money which has funded the lawfare and street warfare against Trump had its murky origins in those countries and organizations.
The dramatic capture of Maduro was a strong signal to our enemies, but it appears that the president, although acting with the best of intentions, has been badly advised by the intelligence community on Venezuela, Cuba, and the rest of Latin America. He risks fumbling the ball and losing an opportunity to rid the Western Hemisphere once and for all of hostile foreign influence and local dictatorships.
The reason for the lack of solid professional advice on Venezuela and the region is not hard to detect. Since the end of WWII, Latin America has been seen by the Washington establishment as a backwater, a place for “second-rate minds”, as one smug diplomat put it. Service in Latin America for State Department officers, CIA officers, and others in the foreign affairs community, if not a career killer, was certainly not viewed as career-enhancing. Our personnel who served there generally fell in love with the region, but this did not translate into interest in the halls of power. Real experts on Latin America are thin on the ground in the higher reaches of the U.S. foreign policy club.
The second reason is that many of the CIA analysts. foreign service officers, think tank intellectuals, and NGO operatives are, to be polite, romantics who view such figures as Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende, and other Marxist or extreme leftist Latin American political figures as worthy of respect who should be taken seriously as examples of an authentic Latin American alternative to what they have been taught is “American imperialism.” They see Latin Americans as comic book caricatures, bemedaled military thugs, greedy landowners, effete urban oligarchs, all squatting on a long-suffering mass of honest, upright, saintly peasants. While such a view might have been closer to the truth in the 1930’s, it does not reflect the Latin America of today.
This lack of knowledge and realism about Latin America on the part of the U.S. government has been largely responsible for such things as the “triumph” of Fidel Castro in 1959, the rise of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, countless terrorist and guerrilla campaigns across the region, and a corrosive undercurrent of hate directed at the United States by the largely Marxist intellectual class in Latin America. The United States has certainly not been without sin in Latin America, but allowing guilt over past mistakes to hobble us in defending our vital national interests is a huge mistake.
Relatively few senior U.S. officials have spent significant time in Latin America. This is even more true of many of the analysts who prepare the briefing papers that get to the president and his close advisors. They may have spent a tour or two at a Latin American post or studied for a semester or two in a South American or Mexican university, but few of them have ever come face-to-face with the sort of people who run the Venezuelan regime, to say nothing of that of Cuba. If they have, it has been in controlled and sedate diplomatic settings. It is easy for a novice or even an experienced diplomat to be deceived by the surface charm of most Latin Americans, of any political stamp or social background. Hard-core Communists and their friends are usually quite careful to show visiting American officials a civilized face. The reality is very different.
The people who run the Venezuelan regime are dedicated, convinced Communists. Delcy Rodriguez is the daughter of a terrorist “hero” of the Venezuelan extreme left (they blame the CIA for his death), and, it is reported, she is connected to the infamous international terrorist Carlos the Jackal. She is not a nice lady, and whatever she is saying to President Trump and CIA Director Ratcliffe is a carefully contrived falsehood. To paraphrase Mary McCarthy’s comment about Lillian Hellman, every word she says is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.
It is indeed possible that Rodrigez (and perhaps Diosdado Cabello) betrayed the hapless buffoon Nicolas Maduro to Trump. They are perfectly capable of such treachery towards their “comrade.” The slimy nature of the cartel running Venezuela makes such a thing entirely believable. This does not mean, however, that they have any intention of “bending the knee” to the United States. Her meeting with Trump was choreographed in detail by the Cubans with the objective of buying time, while they hope for something to turn up that will save their milk cow.
Venezuela is atypical of South American countries in many ways, but the basic mindset of Latin American Communists and their friends never changes. The core of their belief system is a burning hatred of the United States, coupled with a thirst for power at any cost. Fidel Castro is their god and Che Guevara an apostle.
As for the Cubans, they are desperate men, and desperate men do desperate things. They know well what the future holds for them if they lose their grip on power. None of them, Cubans or Venezuelan Chavistas, will give it up without a fight.
The Russians, Chinese, Iranians, the drug cartels, and the Colombian ELN and “dissident” FARC terrorists are not inclined to go quietly into the night either. If they lose Venezuela, they lose everything in Latin America. It is their base and rear-guard area.
The U.S. stood by and allowed the so-called “Bolivarian Revolution” to put down roots across the region. It will take more than a successful raid on a house in Caracas to destroy it.
In the U.S., it is likely that there are hundreds of people, many in high positions and occupying prestigious offices in think tanks, NGO’s, and government agencies, who also have everything to lose if the Venezuelan and Cuban intelligence archives fall into our hands, or if after the regimes stumble some of the henchmen decide to save themselves by spilling the beans on those in our own country who collaborated with them.
In 1948, the Soviet spy Laurence Duggan “fell to his death” out of a ten-story window in Manhattan a few days after the FBI began to question him. Duggan had been an American diplomat – and head of the South American desk at the State Department - in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Should those Cuban and Venezuelan archives ever come to light, it would be a good idea to avoid walking close to tall buildings near key U.S. government office buildings. Those potential “fallers” have much to gain by advising the Trump Administration to “go slow” on Venezuela and Cuba.
Direct military action against either country is a risky course for Trump and probably not necessary. What is necessary is a clear understanding of who and what we are dealing with. Constant pressure and demands for verifiable results from such as Delcy Rodriguez must be the order of the day. If she does not come through, the screws must be turned tighter.
The Venezuelan military must be forced to work with U.S. and Colombian forces (long-time U.S. allies) to eradicate Colombian terrorists and drug cartels operating in Venezuelan territory. The Cuban “advisors” must be shown the door. The Iranians and Hezbollah should follow them through it. As for China and Russia, perhaps some reasonable agreement can be reached for legitimate loans made to Venezuela, but Venezuela can no longer be a South American beachhead for either country.
Internally, the “Colectivo” criminal gangs must be disarmed and disbanded immediately.
The appropriate U.S. agencies should work side-by-side with Venezuela in these tasks. Among other things, new cedulas and passports should be issued to all Venezuelan citizens, and the old ones (produced under Cuban supervision) must be invalidated. This will go a long way towards separating the sheep from the goats who have acquired dodgy Venezuelan “citizenship.”
We can assume that there is a viable provisional government in waiting for Venezuela. It must be supported, funded, guided, and – security permitting –be gradually allowed to take over the levers of power, until free elections can be held.
This leaves Cuba. For all their bluster and obsolete Soviet-era equipment, the forces of the Cuban regime have up to now shown no sign of facing reality. Driving a wedge between the Cuban military and the Communist party bosses (and the Ministry of Interior thugs and intelligence agencies) must be a priority. The Cuban armed forces are the only force in Cuba able to both rid the country of the existing regime and maintain order until a legitimate government can be established. The Cuban military is, of course, led by loyal Communists, but they have sent subtle signs from time to time that they want to change Cuba’s relationship with the United States. One can’t put too much faith in this, but as the saying goes, it is the only game in town for the moment.
It goes without saying that we should use every tool at our disposal to increase financial pressure on the regime, encourage Cuban dissidents (without encouraging a suicidal direct confrontation), and work with friendly countries to urge the Cuban leaders to accept that the game is over.
What we do not want is a chaotic, violent end to the Castro regime. This would cause a humanitarian catastrophe that would make the perennial Haitian collapses look positively sedate.
Venezuela is only one of the many initiatives of Trump to change the geopolitical map in our favor, but it is the most important in the Western Hemisphere; Greenland is an entirely different matter. We should hope that our decisions and actions are guided by hard-eyed realism and not wishful thinking or the promises of the crime syndicate in Caracas.