Venezuela for dummies

How does Trump’s Venezuelan action fit in with his Make America Great Again and America First philosophies? Is this just more opportunistic chaos or is there method in his “madness”.

After listening to Trump’s occasionally rambling press conferenceimmediately after “Operation Absolute Resolve” I have a pretty good idea – the rambles often tell you more than the prepared script.

MAGA has never been isolationist in Trump’s mind, just parsimonious in the use of external force. This is spelled out in the 2025 United States National Security Strategy. That parsimony sees the US as the preeminent world hegemon but supported by a web of allies, who contribute much more of their own resources to defence than they have been.

Treasure will be spent judiciously. It will not be spent to evangelise liberty, it will be spent to purchase security.

The “Trump Corollary” - a conscious reference to the “Roosevelt Corollary” of 1904 which innovates on the Munro Doctrine - locates the Americas as the US’s primary sphere of influence.

Underlying MAGA is a sense that the US has been in an undeclared war at home and abroad since at least Barack Obama. Trump made this plain in his address to the 800 generals at the Quantico marine base in September last year.

This position draws a thread between kinetic actions in Ukraine and the Middle East (and the threat of them in the South China Sea) and weak borders, street demonstrations, crime, drugs, as well as states and courts which refuse to enforce laws they don’t like.

Despite his apparently chaotic style Trump is actually the law and order president – a familiar role for the right to play – and on the broken windows principle, he’s starting close to home, with the smaller things, while at the same time still engaging with the larger issues.

Trump was elected on closing the borders. He’s done that. He was elected on the basis of fixing the drug problem. Death from drug overdose is down, partly due to a shift in the type of drugs being used, but they are still historically high, and they affect working age males the most.

Apart from general despair at senseless death, if you are going to retool America, this is the demographic you need the most.

Trump was also elected on the basis of fixing Biden’s inflation. One of the biggest price effects was caused by the price of oil. Again he’s had some arguable success with gasoline peaking at $5.00 per gallon in 2022 under Biden and falling to less to $3.00 per gallon now.

But he wants the price of oil much lower, particularly as the Democrats are leveraging cost of living as an issue against him.

Trump made crime an issue. Since he deployed the National Guard in Washington DC there has been a 50% year on year decline in homicides. While homicide had been in decline before that the decrease was approximately 30% pa. That’s non-trivial and note the message that using the Guard sends – these are not ordinary circumstances.

The arrest of Maduro pulls all of this together. If DC is a broken window, Venezuela is like a squatter encampment to clean-up.

This time it wasn’t the National Guard that Trump sent in, it was the combined military, but as an adjunct to law enforcement. If he just wanted decapitation he could have done what Obama did to bin Laden, Bush to Hussein, or what he himself did to Soleimani. He could have had Maduro killed.

He didn’t. While Abbottobad, where bin Laden was killed, had a degree of difficulty of 10, what Trump did in Caraccas was orders of magnitude off the scales. And he brought Maduro back to justice – American justice, with an arrest warrant executed after a grand jury indictment, and to be tried in the most liberal city in the USA, New York.

While some argue what Trump did was a breach of international law, Trump would argue that you don’t owe a nation held captive by criminals any niceties, and that Maduro had breached so many laws himself that this was the only way to kick down the door and arrest him. And taking him back for trial, at the risk to the law officers and marines capturing him, shows an extreme respect for the only law that matters to MAGA supporters – US law.

Beside MAGA is extremely skeptical of international institutions.

For the domestic audience the action symbolizes the drive of the Trump administration to go the next step in tidying-up. Venezuela is the source of some drugs to the USA, and this fact has been reinforced by the bombing of alleged drug trafficking ships. It is also a source of the pressures for illegal immigration.

Probably for Trump, his over-riding concern is Venezuela’s willingness to accommodate China, Russia, Iran and non-state actors like Hezbollah. That has links to domestic terrorists, street violence, and larger international problems.

Many of these issues are larger problems in neighbouring countries like Colombia and Mexico, but Venezuela is smaller and manageable. It has less internal strength, international support, and entanglement with the US. Start small and work out.

Demonstrating military capacity and resolve provides an object lesson to more difficult countries, that the US is not afraid and will not be deterred in pursuing national interests. That’s why the mission was called “Operation Absolute Resolve”.

If you are Iran, for example, it adds extra menace to “locked and loaded”.

In his press conference Trump probably used the word “oil” more than any other. That’s an affordability signal, along with his “drill baby drill”, to his domestic audience.

The infrastructure and the oil are already there in Venezuela and they might provide possibly Trump, but definitely his successor, with geo-strategic, as well as cost-of-living options.

But it also plays a role in how Trump distances this action from the Forever Wars he promised to end. If Trump is going to get into any wars they have to be self-funding. He has a plausible mechanism for this through Venezuela’s vast oil wealth.

The cost of rehabilitation is touted as maybe $50 billion. Not a massive amount for the potential profit and it will be recovered over time out of sales with an acceptable internal rate of return.

That is only half of it. Unlike George Bush II he has no desire to export democracy, and he wants to avoid being sucked into administering a country, particularly with troops on the ground. When Bush went into Iraq he decapitated the whole of the Baathists, in the process giving us chaos along with Islamic State. Trump instead wants to work with whatever acceptable faction can be manouvred into replacing Maduro’s.

There are likely to be a number of candidates, apart from the current opposition.

Venezuela is a country at, or close to, a tipping point. It has inflation of 270-550 per cent. High inflation is a sign that the ruling elite has cannibalized almost all the resources and is passing on the cost of its profligacy to consumers by debasing the currency.

The situation is explosive, and many members of the elite will be looking for off-ramps. Oil gives Trump leverage with them. He’s not proposing to take all the profits from it, and a restoration of national wealth will solve many monetary problems, but this will only happen if you play along with the USA, who has the skills to rebuild the oil industry, and the ability to prevent its export.

Trump discounted opposition leader and Nobel Prize winner Maria Machado because “she doesn’t have the support”. The opposition won the last election but was fraudulently denied government by Maduro. What support doesn’t she have? She obviously has majority support of the population. He didn’t say it, but the missing support must be the army – that’s the support you need in Venezuela.

So the oil can potentially buy the military, or at least a faction within it, and who knows what deal Trump can do then? Trump has also made the Venezuelan military look foolish and impotent with his operation costing no American lives, while 41 Venezuelans at least were killed in Maduro’s compound alone. The military’s hand has been weakened.

Oil also influences another constituency. Trump made a promise to Venezuelans driven into exile by Maduro to share the wealth with them. While Venezuelans in the US number only 900,000, total Hispanics in the US are about 68 million and you would expect this promise to resonate with that group.

Arguably Trump won in 2024 because he won the largest slice of the Hispanic vote for a Republican ever. He will most likely be trying to top that in the mid-terms, and for his successor in 2028.

The last issue is what this does for America’s international security situation. Do China and Russia say “Look, the US broke the rules. If we do the same thing we’ll be able to deter them from fighting us by accusing them of hypocrisy.”?

Or do they say “They play dirty like us but look how effective their military is. Do we want to tangle with that?”.

I’d put money on the second. The only people running the hypocrisy line will be some useful academic idiots and fifth columnists in sophisticated Western countries where talk and signaling count for far more than action and achievement.