Well, that was interesting. The largest armada in the history of South America was not a prelude to a major, resource-draining operation. Weeks ago, I warned about what looked like a policy drift toward regime change. Instead, we got something else. More like a regime-stays operation. The president and his aides are apparently working with the Venezuelan vice president on a transition plan. This shows a pragmatic streak, in which the U.S. seeks to change the economic orientation of Venezuela away from our rivals and back toward the U.S., with its ample ability to process Venezuelan heavy crude. But it does so without the moral clarity, and attendant difficulty, of completely cleansing the regime of Chavism.
The success of our extraction operation is absolutely astonishing, and a credit to our special forces and intelligence. I’m not convinced this is a model that can be widely applied going forward.
Parallels to Iraq and Afghanistan are overblown. Parallels to Libya are probably misplaced. Venezuela was already a vector for crime and a migrant crisis — and possibly about to get worse. But there are still several unhappy precedents for our intervention in this region — Haiti comes most prominently to mind. We don’t know how the narcos will react, or other parts of the Venezuelan regime. Those collaborating with us could be subjected to a coup by the military.
Or perhaps, once again, instead of laboring to produce a tightly defined strategic outcome, Trump has put his faith in simply acting, and letting the opportunities and rewards of action present themselves to him as they come along. As with the tariff policies on “Liberation Day,” we have not yet seen what the next equilibrium looks like.
The operation was a success. But I don’t think anyone outside the administration knows enough about the policy going forward to make intelligible claims about its prospects.