Venezuela for dummies

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.