THE WORLD SHOULD CHEER IF TRUMP RIDS IT OF VENEZUELA’S MADURO

USS Gerald R Ford on its way to Venezuela

Donald Trump is preparing for a military intervention in Venezuela. You don’t send a dozen warships, including a nuclear submarine and an aircraft carrier, to interdict a few drug traffickers. You don’t deploy 10,000 troops to deter smugglers.

Many, especially in the Global South, will fall hungrily on the parallel with Russia. So much, they will say, for the pretense that Western countries uphold the international order. The US, they will aver, is no different from Russia, acting from self-interest, and then coating its Machtpolitik in cant about freedom and democracy.

The comparison is false, the opposite of the truth.

Trump has no interest in annexing Venezuelan territory. Whatever happens next, whether we end up with shots fired in anger or whether Maduro’s rotten regime agrees to free elections, no one can credibly claim that the US is commandeering Venezuelan resources.

Putin’s objective in Ukraine was to remove a freely elected government and replace it with a Russian client regime. Trump’s objective in Venezuela is to remove a Russian client regime and replace it with a freely elected government. That difference is categorical.

To understand why, it is necessary to recall some recent Venezuelan history. In the late twentieth century, Venezuela was the wealthiest country in the region, its quality of life drawing immigrants, not just from Latin America and the Caribbean, but from Spain, Italy and Yugoslavia.

Then, from 1998, came the baleful rule of Hugo Chávez, a megalomaniac former army officer who, while the rest of the world was going in the opposite direction, ordered nationalizations and expropriations. For a few years, Chávez was shielded from the consequences of his policies by the high oil price; but when the oil boom ended around 2014, the cataclysm hit.

The rule of Maduro, Chávez’s designated successor, has been marked by hyper-inflation, immiseration and emigration. There have been verified cases of death through malnutrition – an almost incredible fact in what used to be a developed country. No fewer than 7.7 million Venezuelans, some 30 per cent of the population, have been driven into exile, the biggest movement of people in the Western Hemisphere.

Maduro bolstered his position by raising a socialist militia, arresting opposition figures and closing down independent media. According to Amnesty International, there were “8,292 extrajudicial executions carried out between 2015 and 2017”.

He might have been toppled in 2017 when he dissolved the national assembly and the world refused to recognize his subsequent election. Trump mused about intervening: “I’m not going to rule out a military option for Venezuela. This is our neighbor.”

But the moment passed, Maduro survived and the repression continued. Then, last year, came another election. Talks with Opposition leaders in Barbados had produced an agreement on basic democratic norms and, following the disqualification of the Rightist leader (and winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize) María Corina Machado, it was hoped that there might be an agreed transition under the man nominated in her place, a harmless retired diplomat called Edmundo González.

Instead, Venezuela saw vote-rigging on a scale that, in other circumstances, would have been comical. Someone had evidently decreed that the minority candidates would get 4.6 per cent in total. But, through some miscommunication, they were initially allocated 4.6 per cent each, meaning that the preliminary results showed a total 127 per cent vote share.

Opposition scrutineers at local polling stations, knowing that the fraud would happen centrally, had kept records of the tally sheets, which showed González winning more than two thirds of the vote. But Maduro declared himself the victor by just enough to avoid a run-off, and blamed suggestions to the contrary on Elon Musk.

In a bizarre press conference, the former bus-driver lapsed performatively into the rough dialect of Caracas’s barrios. The closest I can come to translating him is: “Fink you’re ’ard, Elon Musk, do ya? Like we used to say in mah manor, Elon Musk, you an’ me, outside, nah!” His generals applauded through rictus grins.

Viewed from a distance, it had an opéra bouffe quality. But it heralded another horrific crackdown, with Opposition supporters disappearing in the night. González was allowed into exile after signing a statement to the effect that he had lost. But, with extraordinary courage, Machado remained in the country, moving from one safehouse to another while continuing to rally the democratic forces.

Over the summer, I arranged for her to speak to Conservative MPs by Zoom from one of these locations. I asked how she was coping without seeing her family, assuming that they would have been separated only since the rigged election. Her answer left both of us blinking back tears. “I haven’t seen my kids in more than eight years,” she said. “I missed the important moments in their lives. But I can’t conceive of my life, or theirs, except in a free Venezuela.”

Restoring democracy to Venezuela would be in the interest of every country except Russia, Cuba and Nicaragua. If even half the émigrés returned home, Venezuela would boom, for those émigrés represent the most entrepreneurial portion of the population. Oil would flow again, bringing down prices globally. And, no less important, the decade long march of autocracy across the globe would suffer an important regional reverse.

Why, though, is any of this America’s responsibility?

Theodore Roosevelt answered that question in 1904 in response, appropriately enough, to a debt crisis in Venezuela which had triggered European intervention:

“Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”

In other words, when a country in the Americas falls into such a disastrous condition that the entire region is feeling the effects, it falls to the US to act as the adult. It should intervene contingently, proportionately and briefly, with the aim of leaving a sovereign democracy behind it.

The people who pretend not to see the difference between what is known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, and straightforward Russian revanchism, are not arguing in good faith.

What form might intervention take? Trump is as usual talking big: “The land is going to be next,” he told a recent press conference, still officially claiming that all this is about drugs. But he went on to speculate about getting Congressional approval, which suggests something much more ambitious.

An all-out invasion seems unlikely. Maduro has taken steps to fill Venezuela’s security forces with loyalists, and 10,000 troops is nowhere near enough to overthrow him by force. At the same time, Maduro shows no sign of relinquishing power voluntarily simply because there is a big naval taskforce on the horizon.

The likeliest outcome is somewhere in between. The US is presumably working on Venezuela’s military and police leaders, telling them that Maduro is finished, but that they do not need to fall with him. The USS Gerald R Ford can launch 90 planes: enough to give total air supremacy to any insurrection.

If we see that level of deployment on the edge of Venezuela, we can believe Trump when he incautiously boasts of a covert CIA presence inside the country.

Perhaps Maduro will realize that the game is up and agree to free elections. Perhaps there will need to be an internal putsch. Either way, it is a welcome retreat from the sulky isolationism that we have recently seen from MAGA. If the United States is again engaging positively in world affairs, the rest of us should applaud.

Daniel Hannan is a prominent British conservative. Among several other books, he is the author of Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World.