Venezuela for dummies

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.