Review of World Affairs

Trump’s Phony War in Venezuela

By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

The United States has formally designated President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela and his allies in government as members of a foreign terrorist and narcotic organization called Cartel de los Soles, a group that is fictitious and does not exist at all!

“There is no such thing as the cartel,” Phil Gunson, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, told The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg from Venezuela’s capital Caracas (Nov. 26).

Cartel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns, is just a pejorative Venezuelan term for corrupt figures in the armed forces who take money from drug traffickers.

The name is a reference to the sun insignia on their uniforms.

It was coined over 30 years ago, according to Gunson, as journalistic shorthand, “and it hung around as a kind of jokey label.”

It is as if Donald Trump classified the “deep state” as a criminal gang.

However, declaring this fake cartel a terrorist organization could have real world consequences.

“I think it is intended to send a message to Maduro, that you are now considered a terrorist, and, therefore, you might suffer the same fate as Osama bin Laden,” said Gunson.

It’s at once the threat and a rationale for a possible regime change operation, a military adventure that would be utterly preposterous but also looks increasingly likely (Goldberg).

No one knows if America is about to bomb Venezuela, but the Trump administration’s demagogy about the Cartel de los Soles is just one of many alarming signs.

For months now, the United States has been committing extra-judicial killings of suspected drug runners, many from Venezuela, in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean.

The Trump administration is justifying these strikes by claiming that America is in a state of armed conflict with drug cartels.

Now the administration seems ready to expand this ‘armed conflict’ into Venezuela itself.

The US Navy’s largest aircraft carrier also recently arrived in the region, part of the biggest military build-up in the Caribbean since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1982.

The NYT has reported that Trump has already authorized plans for covert CIA action in Venezuela.

Airlines are cancelling flights because of a Federal Aviation Administration warning of a “worsening security situation”.

According to the administration, U.S. hostilities with Venezuela are largely about the country’s role in drug trafficking.

But fentanyl, the drug at the centre of America’s drug addiction crisis, neither originates nor passes through Venezuela.

The country is a transit hub for cocaine trafficking, but mostly to Europe.

So the administration’s drug war rhetoric seems like a pretext. But a pretext for what asks the NYT’s Goldberg.

Pretext for Trump’s Venezuela Policy

Gunson of the International Crisis Group speculates: “My sense of it is that there’s a kind of unstable coalition in the administration behind this.”   

Marco Rubio, who serves as both secretary of state and acting national security adviser, is driving the White House’s Venezuela policy.

Rubio is an ardent anti-Communist who seems to believe that taking down Maduro could help bring down the Communist regime in Cuba, where Ruby’s parents were born.

Others according to Gunson, wish they could bomb narco-traffickers in Mexico, where most American fentanyl originates, and hope that an attack on Venezuela will at least send a message.

And then there is Trump.

He is subscribed to   the 19^th century idea of dividing the world into spheres of influence dominated by great powers.

Ousting Maduro could be a way to exert command in the Western Hemisphere and resurrect the Monroe Doctrine – the latest version of which would be the ‘Donroe Doctrine’.

And, of course, Venezuela has the world’s largest known oil reserves.

The fact that Americans can only speculate about why the administration is menacing Venezuela underscores how weird its policy is.  

As Gunson sees it, the Trump camp hoped its pressure campaign would lead to Maduro fleeing or being overthrown, which was always unrealistic.

“Short of actual military expansion, I don’t think there’s a point at which Maduro would suddenly conclude, ‘Oh, yes, they’re not bluffing,’” he said (NYT).

If Gunson is right, Trump could still cut a deal with Maduro or just declare victory and go home.

But Gunson fears that that is not the most likely outcome.

“My sense is that they essentially created this phoney war,” he said, “and they’ve gone so far down the road with it that they now kind of have to have a real one” (NYT).

The US Case for Overthrowing Maduro

In an opinion piece in the NYT, the star columnist Bret Stephens argues the US case for regime change in Venezuela (Nov. 19).

With an aircraft carrier strike group and some 15,000 service personnel deployed in the region, Stephens finds it hard to imagine that Trump’s decision will be to stand down and go home:

1.  There is a vital American interest at stake.

Besides drugs, Venezuela “is both an importer and exporter of instability” in the region.

•  There are no viable alternatives to conflict.

Economic sanctions have only immiserated ordinary people while “allowing the regime to entrench itself through its control of ever-scarcer goods.”

• There is a moral case for regime change

The self-destruction of this once rich country has led to starvation, political brutality, corruption, social collapse, endemic violence, collapse of the medical system, environmental catastrophes.

Outside of North Korea, few governments have produced more misery for more of their own people than Venezuela.

• Could this turn into another fiasco?

It has a democratically elected leader, Edmundo Gonzales who could govern with immediate legitimacy and broad public support.

•  What is the balance of risk?

Unintended consequences must be weighed against the predictable risks of inaction.

If Maduro is allowed to survive, the Venezuelan dictator will see it, rightly, as a resounding victory and vindication.

•  What is to be done?

Stephens suggests that Maduro should be given a final chance to flee with whomever and whatever he can take with him and leave unharmed and unpursued – whether to Havana or Moscow or another friendly capital.

Barring that, Stephens is of the opinion that he deserves the Noriega treatment: capture and transfer to the U.S. to face charges.

This should be accompanied by the destruction of Venezuela’s air defences and command-and-control capabilities, the seizure of its major military bases and arrest warrants for all senior officers – with promises of leniency for those who turn themselves in.

Stephens quotes the great Napoleon who is said to have told one of his marshals: “If you start to take Vienna, take Vienna.” The same applies to Caracas, Mr. US President.

The writer can be reached at: shashimalla125gmail.com