“This is genius,” Donald Trump enthused. It was 22 February 2022. Vladimir Putin had just declared parts of eastern Ukraine to be independent and sent in Russian troops to serve as so-called peacekeepers. The once and future American president was impressed, even inspired. “We could use that on our southern border,” Trump mused.
Trump didn’t know then that he was speaking at the start of a full-scale invasion that has lasted nearly four years and inflicted upwards of 1.5 million casualties and counting. And Trump doesn’t know now what he has unleashed in Venezuela. The South American country is not Ukraine, nor, for that matter, is it Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya. But by ordering military strikes to seize dictator Nicolás Maduro, Trump has thrown a country of around 28 million people into uncertainty and tossed aside the most obvious, hard-won lesson of decades of US foreign policy failures: regime-change wars are easy to start and hard to win, much less to turn into anything resembling genuine success.
So far, Trump has taken step one, if that. He has yet to bring down Venezuela’s regime, only to decapitate it, scooping up the man at the top. In his speech announcing the war, however, Trump played the conquering hero. The president boasted at length about the “overwhelming military power” he had exhibited, as though the United States did not possess a long record of smashing operational triumphs — recall “shock and awe” in Baghdad – that gave way to strategic disaster.
To hear Trump tell it, the hard part is probably over. Now the peace, prosperity and freedom will begin. “We are going to run the country,” he declared, and to do so, Trump said he was willing to put boots on the ground and eager to get oil gushing out of it. Plan A for post-Maduro governance, Trump suggested, was to leave Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, in power, because she would help the United States do what it wanted. Within two hours, Rodríguez insisted that Maduro remained Venezuela’s rightful leader and denounced the United States as an illegal, imperialist invader seeking to plunder the country.
On to Plan B, then.
Whatever happens next in Venezuela, the consequences will not be confined there. Trump plainly intended his attack to assert US ownership of the entire region. “American dominance in the western hemisphere will never be questioned again,” he intoned. In the national security strategy released last month, the administration declared a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, claiming a mandate to use any means necessary to excise almost any kind of external influence from the Americas. The administration has barely begun to apply its ballyhooed corollary. Trump prefers to cast entities closer to home – migrants, gangs and cartels – as existential threats to the United States, invading the country from without, subverting it from within.
Trump’s attack on Venezuela confirms what his semester of speedboat strikes in the Caribbean suggested: the United States is transmuting the now-exhausted war on terror into a war on so-called narco-terror. Enmity once directed at terrorists in the Middle East is turning toward a kaleidoscope of border-crossing threats in the western hemisphere. Trump’s definition of these threats is almost infinitely porous, extending to what he has repeatedly called “the enemy from within”. Not for nothing did Trump pause from his address on Venezuela to ad lib about the troops he has sent to patrol American cities.
Today, the target was Caracas. What tomorrow? Trump has already drawn up a menu. He took office promising to annex Greenland and take back the Panama Canal. Now that he has ousted Maduro, he could apply much the same rationale to attack any number of countries. Trump claimed yesterday that “the cartels are running Mexico”, an assertion that contains all the justification Trump would need to invade it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, meanwhile, warned the government of Cuba to be concerned.
Even if the best-case scenario transpires in Venezuela – if a stable, oil-gushing, pro-American democracy suddenly springs to life — success may embolden the administration to find out just how far it can go to remake the region to its liking.
But best cases rarely come to pass. More likely, Donald Trump’s luck with hit-and-run military strikes is about to run out. “Great nations do not fight endless wars,” he said in his first term. Then what kind of nation is Trump’s America?
Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School
