The plot provides a bizarre throwback to the Cold War era, when the concept of spheres of influence, powered by the incendiary fuel of the global ideological divide, held Washington and in the ‘banana republics’ in the hemisphere in a crushing embrace. The political culture of the day periodically bred far right US Presidents driven by ideological bogeys, on the one hand, and in America’s ‘banana republics,’ either hardline despotic types or ‘romantic’ leftists, whose instruments of political control were tools euphemistically described as ‘people’s power’ and who, themselves, in the fullness of time, evolved into out-of-control delinquents whom the US felt it had to remove from office. That is a kind of shrunken description of one of the sideshows of the Cold War era.
There is no more Cold War and the despotic types have, we trust, become and endangered species. But the theatre persists. Donald Trump has refashioned the ‘US backyard bogey.’ Nicholas Maduro, the Venezuelan President, is the contemporary ideological bogeyman, the fly in the ointment of Washington’s backyardism.
Trump isn’t one of those US Presidents who stands on ceremony. He has responded to Caracas’ effrontery’ with an unpalatable diet of economic sanctions that has left Venezuela reeling. The consequential meltdown in Venezuela has manifested itself in the fashion of a gradually unfolding theatrical production…first, brooding then street riots and official crackdowns, debilitating scarcities… and after all of these had changed nothing, a sustained outward procession by Venezuelans to all parts…to Colombia or Guyana or Trinidad and Tobago or Brazil…or wherever the ‘victims’ could find a haven from Trump’s response to Maduro’s ideological brazenness.
Over time, the turning of the screws on Vene-zuela under Maduro has been manifested chiefly in Washington’s sickeningly cumulative pressure, the kind of pressure that causes things to stand still and to atrophy; and it is to that sickening condition that Venezuela’s once colossal petroleum industry has been reduced.
There was, recently, something surreal about the country which, not many moons ago, had afforded its citizens the cheapest gasoline in the world, reduced to scanning the horizon, awaiting a sighting of Iranian tankers not just bringing relief to a desperate gasoline shortage but sending a signal of sorts that Maduro’s beleaguered Venezuela still had a powerful friend or two, not afraid to cock a snook at Washington.
And as if to remind the rest of us that old hegemonic habits die hard, America, as well, has made Maduro a victim of its familiar practice of demonizing its enemies, an option that has been a long-standing facet of its foreign policy. Back in March the office of the United States Attorney General went public with its criminal charges against Maduro, which the US authorities declared had to do with “converting Venezuela’s state into a criminal enterprise at the service of drug traffickers and terrorist groups,” whatever that, translated, means. Washington says that the indictments cover a broad swathe of iniquities encompassing, among other things, money-laundering and drug-trafficking. Simultaneously, the U.S. State Department announced a $15 million reward for information leading to the arrest or prosecution of Maduro, providing a chilling demonstration of America’s power to fashion a President into a dangerous criminal, overnight.
US pressure on Venezuela has, of course, been imposed at a price. Moscow, particularly, through its food aid, has established a strategic ‘beach head’ of sorts in Caracas. For now, this may not amount to a serious strategic setback for Washington, though it at least sends a signal that there may be, down the road, a price to pay for attempting to fashion Cold War-style regime change.
If Trump is showing signs of impatience in Washington’s quest to send Maduro packing the question arises as to whether the US is prepared to push even harder and bring more of Venezuela’s friends, whom Washington would regard not just as unsavory, but unwelcome in its ‘backyard, rushing to Maduro’s rescue. Recall that part of the downside of US foreign policy in the hemisphere four decades and more ago had been the proclivity of that brand of ‘foreign policy’ to experience some spectacular implosions…as in the Nicaragua of the Sandinistas.
Mr. Maduro himself is wedged between a proverbial rock and a place. Trump’s sanctions have all but atrophied Venezuela’s economy. It doesn’t help, too, that the Bolsonaro government in Brazil appears to have decided that it will back Trump’s unrelenting push to unseat Maduro…so that the Brazilian government not only sent the entire Venezuelan diplomatic retinue in Brasilia packing earlier this year but also bowed to Trump’s wish that Brazil give notice to international shipping companies that once they do business with Venezuela’s oil industry their ships will not be welcome in that country’s waters.
Since the beginning of 2019 Washington and Caracas have shared no diplomatic relations though the Trump administration’s strategic think-tank are sufficiently shrewd not to have the US President cut ties entirely with oil-rich Venezuela, sustaining those through Washington’s links with Juan Guaido, the Leader of the Venezuelan opposition and the man who would be king.
There has been a jerky unfolding of Trump’s version of the backyardism that still, in large measure, passes for much of US foreign policy in the hemisphere. The more things change the more they remain the same.
