Military intervention in Venezuela is a bad option

Let’s be honest here: U.S. President Donald Trump is not driving American policy toward Venezuela these days. Clearly, it’s U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton, Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Venezuela point-person Elliott Abrams.

We also know that both Bolton and Abrams are proponents of using military force to advance U.S. vital interests in Latin America. Besides absurdly accusing Cuba of developing an offensive biological warfare capability in May of 2002, Bolton also worked behind the scenes to precipitate a military coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in April of 2002.

Abrams, for his part, has lots of blood on his hands for backing repressive military governments in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala during the 1980s — all responsible for hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian deaths. Moreover, he was intimately involved in supporting the viciously violent contras in Nicaragua (and was convicted for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid1980s) during the years of the Sandinista government.

The two men are adamantly opposed to leftist governments of any kind, disciples of settling internal country disputes via a military solution and proud displayers of ideological blinders. With a guiding compass of “the ends justify the means,” they will push hard for whatever it takes to remove Nicolas Maduro from power in Venezuela.

So, if diplomacy, economic sanctions and international political isolation don’t do the trick, they won’t hesitate to escalate things to the military level. And I would not put it past them to even create surreptitiously or to carefully orchestrate a set of circumstances that could be used as a pretext for U.S. military intervention in Venezuela.

When thinking about approach around U.S. policy and the current humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, it’s always useful to pose two key questions: what is motivating Washington’s involvement and, secondly, who actually benefits (and how) from its actions? It may be that the U.S. is looking at economic motives (e.g., oil interests, post-Maduro re-supplying initiatives and cutting off Cuba’s trade connections) in its Venezuelan calculations.

It’s more likely that Bolton, Abrams and Rubio are hoping to send a powerful message to the wider region — that is, don’t think about ever replicating in your own countries any anti-imperialist and anti-neoliberal posture like that in Chavista Venezuela. Of course, you could probably forgive the Cubans or the Nicaraguans from asking: are we next?

But make no mistake about it, using armed force in Venezuela would be an unmitigated disaster. Not only would it have significantly harmful repercussions for Venezuela in the short term, it would also have profoundly negative long-term implications for the United States and the overall region itself.

It is worth remembering that the United States has had an awful history of intervening militarily in the Americas or its so-called “backyard.” And the overall record, to put it mildly, has been absolutely horrendous. The list of disasters throughout the 19th and 20th centuries are multi-fold — including the likes of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Nicaragua, to name only a few.

More to the point, there is no disputing the fact that a U.S. military invasion of Venezuela would not be anything like Grenada (October 1983) or Panama (December 1989). While scores of people died during those two interventions, the expected numbers of killed in a Venezuelan operation would be astronomical.

There are plenty of loyal Venezuelan soldiers and armed militias who would fight to the end to defend the country’s independence and Bolivarian revolution. Indeed, it would be Iraq circa 2003 all over again — even facilitating a deadly and costly counter-insurgency that could last for years.

Additionally, such an invasion would have the deleterious effect of driving internal Maduro opponents to rally around the beleaguered government. Countries like Mexico, Uruguay and the 15-member Caribbean Community would also scream bloody murder in the UN and the Organization of American States (OAS). It might even precipitate outside involvement in Venezuela from friendly major powers like Russia and China.

Furthermore, U.S. prestige and standing in the hemisphere would plummet to its lowest levels in decades. Those countries in South America (Argentina, Brazil and Colombia) now supporting the anti-Maduro coalition would have to consider jumping ship if a U.S. invasion went sideways.

Unlike Bolton and company, I actually don’t believe that Trump seriously thinks about Venezuela in military terms. But with his poll numbers slumping badly, a Democratic-controlled House investigating him at every turn and a pending Robert Mueller report sure to excoriate him, it’s hard to know what a desperate and impulsive Trump would do for political reasons.