Are Americans still the good guys? It pains me to have to ask the question. Throughout my life, the United States was the definition, the epitome, the essence of a good nation. When we spoke of a country improving, we meant it was becoming more like the U.S. We meant that it could vote out its leaders without the losers being imprisoned or exiled; that its legislature acted as a check on its executive; that people could speak freely against their government; that its armed forces were under civilian control.
A country’s foreign policy, like its domestic policy, reflects its values. The U.S., founded 250 years ago in a popular revolt against autocratic rule, had a natural sympathy with open societies. When it intervened overseas, it was usually to nudge countries in a democratic direction. Not always, of course. The imperatives of the Cold War involved propping up some nasty regimes. More often than not, though. And when errors were made, as in Iraq, they tended to be errors of exuberance, errors of excessive optimism.
Which brings us to Venezuela. When it comes to interventions in the Americas, it was the laissez-faire Obama and Biden administrations that were anomalous. President Donald Trump is returning to the traditional American hemispheric policy practiced by every one of his predecessors between Theodore Roosevelt and George W. Bush. Some of their interventions were more high-minded than others, and not all of them worked out. But they were at least notionally about supporting human rights and good governance in the region.
Is Venezuela in that category? So far, the signs are not encouraging. Yes, the removal of Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s dim and venal autocrat, is welcome. But, as I write, there has been no attempt to dismantle the dictatorship over which he presided. Power has passed to his Vice President, Delcy Rodriguez, a career Chavista who went into politics to avenge her father, a Marxist agitator who had died in custody, having orchestrated the kidnapping of an American businessman. She has been sanctioned by the U.S., Canada, and the European Union for presiding over human rights violations, yet Trump now calls her a “terrific person.”
The real power in the land, the Interior Minister, Diosdado Cabello, continues to preside over his prisons and torture chambers, despite having a $15 million American bounty on his head and being listed on the same New York indictment as Maduro. Some political prisoners have been released, but the arrests have not stopped.
How does Trump feel about leaving these tyrants in office?
“We are making tremendous progress, as we help Venezuela stabilize and recover,” he declared after talking to Rodriguez. “Many topics were discussed, including Oil, Minerals, Trade and, of course, National Security. This partnership between the United States of America and Venezuela will be a spectacular one FOR ALL.”
Opposition figures are hoping that all this is simply a way of encouraging Venezuela’s rulers to agree to a peaceful transition. After all, the Chavistas still have the police, the army, and their socialist militias. The opposition, led by the heroic Nobel Laureate Maria Corina Machado, controls neither land nor armed forces. They are holding out, seemingly on the strength of prior conversations in Washington, for a gradual handover, in which the current leaders are granted immunity in return for agreeing to free elections.
Perhaps things will work out as they hope. Heaven knows they deserve it. But a horrible suspicion is growing in me, after watching Trump’s behavior over Ukraine and Greenland, that he has no interest in Venezuela beyond oil. That he is, in fact, living up to the caricature that Latin American leftists always had of the bullying yanqui.
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What, after all, has happened to date? U.S. naval vessels have looted Venezuelan oil on the high seas, the proceeds from which have then been transferred to a slush fund in Qatar beyond congressional oversight. The leader of Venezuela’s opposition, whose candidates won two-thirds of the vote six months ago, pleadingly hands over her Nobel Prize, but is told that she is not strong enough to run the country.
Has Trump got what he wanted? Was it all a straightforward grab for mineral wealth, stripped of any pretense of morality? Is the president happy to work with a regime that has killed or exiled nearly a third of its population, that destabilizes the entire region, and that makes no secret of its loathing for American values? Does he ignore all that, provided U.S. oil companies can operate on its territory? Is the U.S. now behaving in the way that Russia would, without even feigning an interest in the welfare of the local people? Are Americans, in short, still the good guys? I wish I could answer with confidence.