President Donald Trump recently presided over a National Security Council meeting with his top foreign policy advisers. The subject: what to do about Venezuela and its tinpot but stubborn dictator, Nicolás Maduro, whose only impressive quality in his ability to continue serving in the role despite years of U.S. sanctions seeking to topple him. The session broke up without a concrete pathway on how the United States will proceed. But given the relentless saber-rattling from the Pentagon and the fact that more than 10 percent of the U.S. Navy fleet is parked off the Venezuelan coast, a reasonable person could surmise that U.S. military action is around the corner.
On the surface, Trump has appeared unsure at times. On November 15, he told reporters that he “sort of … made up my mind” on the next steps. Yet as far as we can discern, he’s still debating his options. One day, Trump is threatening to deploy U.S. troops onto Venezuelan territory; the next, he’s chatting with Maduro and giving him ultimatums. What was possible on Tuesday might be ruled out on Wednesday, only to be reconsidered on Thursday. For those trying to make sense of the Trump administration’s policy, the entire process is one discombobulated mess. For Maduro himself, it could very well be a matter of life and death.
Given the Trump administration’s rhetoric, we can only assume that the White House is looking for regime change on the cheap. If Trump had his way, Maduro would mimic what former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad did a year ago by packing up his bags in the middle of the night, getting on a plane and flying into exile. Despite attempts by U.S. officials to pin Maduro as some grand mastermind who is directing Latin America’s cartels to ship cocaine into the United States, it’s more likely that the Trump administration is using the drug trafficking issue to make an otherwise unpopular regime change operation more palpable to the American people. The facts bear that out; if Trump was truly worried about drugs flowing into the United States, he would be spending more of his time on Mexico, Colombia and Ecuador and less on Venezuela, where only 8 percent of cocaine shipments bound for the United States originate from.
The rationale aside, there is also the question of whether regime change in Caracas should even be a U.S. objective in the first place. This isn’t meant to defend Maduro, a man who is currently being investigated by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, stole last year’s Venezuelan presidential election, uses political prisoners as bargaining chips and drove Venezuela’s economy into the ground. Nobody besides Cuba would shed a tear if Maduro was forced to vacate the Miraflores Palace.
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