Four days since US President Donald Trump’s most strident military move yet, the gulf grows between his claim that the United States will “run” Venezuela and the reality of a continued dictatorship on the ground.
In the weeks to come, there is a risk for the White House that its brutal flourish of US power in the early hours of Saturday is undermined by a failure to follow through – a potential strategic defeat snatched from the jaws of a spectacular but short-lived win.
In a matter of minutes during Saturday’s press conference, Trump’s flex of American might flip-flopped from asserting US control over Caracas to moments later conceding that the vehicle for this was the presumed cooperation of Nicolás Maduro’s longtime deputy, Delcy Rodriguez, who has since been sworn in as acting president.
At present, the mechanism of American influence, at least in public, appears to consist of occasional phone calls from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, backed by the lumbering muscle of the USS Gerald R Ford aircraft carrier and other Navy assets.
The initial military assault was startling, but the “takeover” has so far been an anticlimax, one that relies on Rodriguez to embrace the role of overnight quisling and colonialist stooge. Publicly, she did the opposite, demanding Maduro’s release and expressing outrage, only on Sunday hinting that “cooperation” with the US might follow.
Given how Maduro’s displays of dancing defiance appear to have angered Trump into the raid, such rhetoric from Rodriguez was a risk, whatever backroom concessions she might also potentially be making. A crackdown of sorts appears underway, with loyalist gangs on the streets and media arrested. Within Venezuela, there are no celebrations of the end of the Maduro regime, as his people, many wary after years of authoritarianism, wait anxiously to see what comes next.
Reality may bite deepest when it comes to oil: Trump may have said “we will keep it,” and on Tuesday announced that 30 to 50 millions of barrels would be turned over to the US. But it will be a struggle for this vast concession to materialize, in part because the US oil companies the president hoped would charge into Venezuela live in a different world than after Iraq fell in 2003 – one of messy change and plentiful crude, where billions of dollars of investment into a still-hostile kleptocracy would be a wild risk. Chevron is the only major Western oil firm to have maintained significant Venezuela operations in recent years.
What has actually changed? Maduro is in US custody and faces court proceedings in March, after a dazzlingly executed extraction operation that took about 150 minutes. Otherwise, the dictator’s loyalists still – for now – run the show, despite White House assurances that, fearing the same fate as Maduro, they will fall in line with what the US wants.
Reality still matters, and the legacy of this latest Trump foreign policy foray will lie in its longevity. The Venezuela exercise risks joining a list of grandiose Trump proclamations of a changed world that stumble and sometimes collapse on contact with a complex, intransigent reality.
This White House’s significant yet limited success in Venezuela, has given birth to four days of outsized rhetoric from Trump and his supporters – a flurry of grandiose, ambitious statements about a Western Hemisphere reshaped, simply through the force of Trumpian will.
Among them: Cuba needs to watch out. (It might do, if Venezuelan oil dries up, but its leadership can lean on a resilient infrastructure of repression). The US “needs” Greenland and nobody could stop it taking the Danish territory militarily if it chose. (It would be a disaster for the US to try to seize 57,000 people on a sheet of well-defended NATO ice, not least given most Greenlanders’ desire for independence over becoming a US colony.)
Recall where other sweeping assertions by Trump have led over the past year: Canada is not America’s 51st state. The Panama Canal is not under US control. Neither is Gaza. Ukraine did not see peace within 24 hours of him taking office. Trump’s claims often just replicate a dealmaker’s sales pitch: Push hard the idea of what you want and see how close you can get. That suits the world of construction and business well, but risks falling short in geopolitics. Members of Trump’s team have themselves been at pains to emphasize the president means what he says, as if the point needed to be made.
The Trump administration is not the first to invade first, then think about the realities of occupation later. The Bush administration canned complex State Department plans for the running of Iraq after the US-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, leaving the Pentagon to bungle nation-building. The swift collapse of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 led to years of half-measures through a proxy Kabul government, before an insurgency kicked in. But Trump does not have troops on the ground in Venezuela, or even the numbers in theater to attempt that. So, his task is a more complex one of coercing Venezuelan politicians to comply with his wishes.
The signal the US raid sent on Saturday was powerful: Washington was capable of bold, speedy, ultra-capable special forces action that could depose and capture its foes in a matter of minutes. Mixed, even dizzying, signals have followed. Without demonstrating continued application and ultimate success in “running” Venezuela, Trump risks making his limited attention span the enduring lesson of this episode for China and Russia – adversaries unencumbered by democratic opposition.
Moscow and Beijing know they have three years left of this mercurial president – perhaps just one year, if the mid-terms in November hobble Trump’s presidency. They’ve learned that Trump can wield staggering power for a short moment. The test of the coming weeks in Venezuela is for this White House to show that the scope of its ambitions does not fade as the president’s attention drifts to another trinket: in effect, to enforce the idea Trump should be feared, rather than elegantly sidestepped.
