Donald Trump is “reaping the bitter fruit” of erroneously thinking that the capture of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, offered a blueprint for toppling the Iranian regime, according to one of the US state department’s most respected former Latin America experts.
John Feeley, a Marine helicopter pilot who later served as the US ambassador to Panama, believed Trump had been “flush with the victory from Venezuela” when he made the ill-fated decision to attack Iran in February, leaving a trail of destruction across the Middle East and dealing a hammer blow to the global economy.
Maduro was seized during a special forces mission on 3 January, with the remnants of his authoritarian regime quickly capitulating to US demands under the leadership of his replacement, Delcy Rodríguez. More than 100 Cuban and Venezuelan troops lost their lives during Trump’s Operation Absolute Resolve but not a single member of the US military was killed.
“This was one of the most stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history,” Trump boasted last month, calling his attack proof the US had “the strongest and most fearsome military on the planet”.
Feeley accepted Maduro’s capture had shown Trump’s administration was “willing to use force to get rid of somebody they don’t like”. But he and other former senior US diplomats believed it had also lulled the US president into the false belief that removing Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and his regime would be as straightforward as overthrowing the South American autocrat.
“We are now literally reaping the bitter fruit of a decision made in large [part] to go into Iran based on the unbelievable good luck that he had in Venezuela,” said Feeley, emphasising that his comments were not a criticism of the elite forces who snatched Maduro.
“As somebody who flew in those units … I can’t tell you how many things could have gone horribly wrong,” he said of the night-time raid involving Delta Force commandos and members of an elite aviation unit known as the Night Stalkers.
Feeley, who left the foreign service during Trump’s first term, said the Venezuela assault had led Trump to expect a similarly “marvellous little two-week, three-ribbon war” in Iran. “I think it’s very true that the success of the Venezuela episode led him to give the green light … and begin the Iran episode,” he said, voicing fears that a similar miscalculation might soon be made in Cuba, which Trump recently vowed to “take”.
“I think these guys will make the very jejune and naive mistake of thinking that Cuba is going to be just like Venezuela, in the same way they misunderstood that Iran was going to be just like Venezuela,” he said.
“These are 70-year regimes, 50-year regimes in the case of Iran. They’re decentralised, the ranks are trained, they’ve been indoctrinated … That’s a very different scenario than Venezuela, which was a criminal mafia that had only really consolidated its position in the last decade. But I think this administration is shortsighted enough … to still foolishly believe: ‘We’ll just go in there’.”
Thomas Shannon, a Venezuela specialist and former ambassador to Brazil who was responsible for Latin America policy under George W Bush, was also convinced Trump’s Venezuela intervention had caused him to make a grave miscalculation in the Middle East.
“He actually thought Iran was going to be the same thing. I mean, [Trump] knew that they couldn’t sweep in and arrest the supreme leader. But he thought they could go in and kill him and that they could kill any number of other leaders, both civil and military, and that that display would have the same impact the raid on Caracas had,” said Shannon, who believed Trump had hoped to replace Iran’s ayatollah with a compliant, Rodríguez-style figure. No such leader has emerged.
Shannon said: “In many ways, Venezuela becomes the wrong example. But it’s the one that the president has in mind when he decides to join the Israelis in the 28 February attack. The problem is that the circumstances are quite different and the Iranians are different. And they have a resilience and a kind of internal capacity and structures to endure these kinds of assaults without having to surrender or to pretend to surrender.”
Feeley saw an irony to how, by yielding to Trump’s January attack, the US president’s longtime foes in Caracas had inadvertently lured the US into making such a damaging misjudgment more than 7,000 miles away in Tehran.
“Obviously, hard power is hard power and there’s nothing that they could do to prevent Trump doing what he did [in Venezuela],” Feeley said. “But their ultimate revenge is that they kind of laid down and made it look easy – and so [Trump] thought: ‘Oh, I’ll try that in an ancient Persian empire, a millennial civilisation. Threaten to blow the whole civilisation up.’ And we are where we are.”
