Donald Trump swept aside concerns about regime change and US military interventions overseas as he seized control of the world’s largest oil reserves after ordering US forces to abduct the country’s widely reviled President Nicolas Máduro in a daring midnight raid on the capital Caracas.
US General Dan Caine said the operation had been planned for months and was ready to go for four days, but poor weather frustrated the operation until a break in conditions on Friday night. The President gave the go-ahead at 10.46 pm. More than 150 fighter aircraft, positioned at 20 bases around the Western Hemisphere, including F-22s, F-35s, F-18s, EA-18s, E-2s and B-1 bombers, as well as drones, were used.
Forces landed at the President’s compound at 1 am. Mr Trump watched US forces capture Maduro and his wife in a major gun battle on live stream from his Florida golf resort, Mar-a-Lago.
“People were wondering, did we get him by surprise but they were waiting for something. It was a lot of opposition. There was a lot of gunfire,” Mr Trump told reporters at a press conference.
“He was trying to get to a safe place which was insane because we would have had the door blown up in about 47 seconds, they say on average, regardless of how thick the steel was. It was a very thick door, it was a very heavy door. He made it to the door, he was unable to close it.”
He posted to social media a picture of Maduro, blindfolded, handcuffed, wearing headphones, in a grey Nike sweatsuit on the US Iwo Jima en route to the US.
Maduro, first indicted in 2020, had a $50 million bounty placed on his head in August last year. He will face a court in New York on Monday on four counts relating to narco-terrorism, importing cocaine and possessing weapons, including machine guns and destructive devices. His wife is also charged.
A jubilant Mr Trump said the casualty-free “surgical” mission should be compared to Joe Biden’s botched and disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
But what comes next may humble the President.
Officially, the pretext for the snatch-and-grab operation was the flow of drugs.
“By in or about 2020, the State Department estimated that between 200 and 250 tons of cocaine were trafficked through Venezuela annually,” the US Department of Justice’s indictment said.
But Mr Trump himself said the US had “knocked out” 97 per cent of these drug flows with its numerous deadly strikes on boats off Venezuela’s coast since September. Last year he also pardoned the former president of Honduras who was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in US prison for creating a ‘cocaine superhighway to the United States.’
In his press conference, he was more honest about his real motivations.
“We’re going to run it, essentially, until such time as a proper transition can take place,” he said.
“As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time.
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
Mr Trump said he was not afraid of “boots on the ground” to achieve these aims, and when asked if the US could end up administering the country for years, he did not disagree.
“Well you know it won’t cost us anything because the money coming out of the ground is very substantial,” he said.
“We’re not spending money, the oil companies are going to go in, they’re going to spend money. We’re going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago. A lot of money is coming out of the ground, we’re going to get reimbursed for everything that we spend.”
Mr Trump pretended that the liberty of Venezuela’s oppressed people was also a factor when reading his scripted remarks. Venezuela’s opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year and dedicated her award to Mr Trump, said she was ready to “assert our mandate and take power”.
But Mr Trump dismissed her.
“I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman but she doesn’t have the respect,” he said.
He favoured Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, taking charge, saying: “She is essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to ‘Make Venezuela Great Again’ – very simple.”
Perhaps not. Ms Rodríguez popped up on state television to condemn the US operation, declared Maduro the only president of Venezuela, said his kidnapping was “barbaric” and that her country would ’never again be anyone’s colony – neither of old empires, nor of new empires, nor of empires in decline.’
Time will tell if this is genuine or posturing, but what it underlines is that the next steps are ill-defined. Is this a coup, regime change, or a slide into chaos? The next few days may clarify the answers to these questions and what happens next geopolitically. But if they don’t, danger looms.
In October, International Crisis Group warned that decapitating Maduro could bring about worse outcomes.
“There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of Venezuelans want to see an end to the Maduro government: they voted for change by a large margin in last year’s presidential election, but the government refused to accept the result,” Caracas-based senior analyst Phil Gunson wrote.
“Even if the voters opted for new rulers, however, any US effort to bring about regime change in Caracas that is based on military strike power, faulty premises and unwarranted assumptions is unlikely to bring about a smooth political transition – and could lead to far worse outcomes.
“Assuming that Trump is ready to up the ante and begin a campaign of targeted attacks on the country, it is possible but far from certain that schisms will emerge in Venezuela’s civilian and military commanding heights, potentially leading to the flight from power of Maduro.”
A cocky Republican president, beleaguered at home, starts a foreign intervention to plunder for oil. How did that script end last time?
But there is some coherence to Mr Trump’s worldview, even though it is subject to his driving behavioural traits of instincts and impulses. Much of this was codified in the National Security Strategy (NSS) released by the White House at the end of last year. The NSS berated Europe, did not designate China or Russia as a threat, and revived the Monroe Doctrine. Mr Trump relished the idea of this being rebadged as “The Donroe Doctrine”.
“The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot, by a real lot. They now call it the Donroe document. American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” he said.
Mr Trump and Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, both intimated that Cuba could be next, and also made noises about Mexico’s cartels being a target.
Europe cannot ignore this latest warning siren. Mr Trump’s threat to take control of Greenland, administered by Denmark, should also be taken seriously.
If MAGA can mount a false claim to Venezuela’s oil reserves belonging to the US, as well as requiring “reimbursement” for investment, there is nothing to stop this grievance belief from being extended to NATO. MAGA already resents the defence alliance and feels it has disproportionately bankrolled it for decades, only for Europe to be incapable of adequately defending Ukraine these past four years.
But does US dominance of the Western hemisphere have implications for China and Russia, and even the embattled Iranian regime?
Potentially yes.
If Mr Trump’s move is about seizing control of oil — he cited needing “real energy” as the reason — and if the US succeeds in taking control of those reserves, then the implications could be enormous.
According to the US Department of Energy’s statistical agency, the Energy Information Administration (EIA), Venezuela had the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves in 2023 — approximately 303 billion barrels — or around 17 per cent of global reserves. But in that same year, it produced just 0.8 per cent of total global crude oil in 2023.
This is due to sanctions, a dud workforce hired on loyalty rather than ability, ageing infrastructure and Venezuela’s lack of expertise in extraction. (It gets help from China and Iran). Venezuela’s oil is heavy and high in sulfur, meaning it requires more complex refining — something American companies specialise in.
China is Venezuela’s largest customer, but the trade only accounts for around 4 per cent of China’s total oil imports. Beijing’s largest supplier is Russia.
Along with drug boats, Mr Trump has been blockading Venezuelan oil tankers as part of his pressure against Maduro’s regime, long prompting speculation that the resources were his true target all along.
One of the earliest and most interesting reactions to the news from Caracas came from the sanctioned Russian oligarch and industrialist Oleg Deripaska, who has been critical of Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.
He wrote on Telegram: “If our American ‘partners’ get their hands on Venezuela’s oil fields (and they have already gotten their hands on Guyana’s fields), they will control more than half of the world’s oil reserves. And, apparently, their plans include ensuring that the price of our oil does not rise above $50 per barrel.”
“This means that it will be difficult for our sacred state capitalism to leave everything as it is: not cutting costs, not getting rid of non-core assets, continuing to engage in grandiose projects without the necessary expertise and without the participation of private business in order to develop competition (and in general, it will become difficult to put pressure on private business, because starting this year, it is becoming the main contributor to the federal budget, and next year it will bear the main burden).”
This speaks to a broader internal struggle inside Russia. Bookmark that for another time. Back to the US.
Asked about China and Russia getting oil in this context, Mr Trump said: “In terms of other countries that want oil, we’re in the oil business, we’ll be selling oil, probably in much large doses, so we’ll be selling large amounts of oil to other countries.”
A Green light for Taiwan?
Once again, Mr Trump has surprised with his willingness to use US hard power. But there is a clear pattern here: he uses precision strikes on smaller targets and largely plays nice with China and Russia, whose leaders he prefers to see as equals and with whom he wants to strike deals rather than use military muscle.
China had a delegation in Caracas, headed by President Xi Jinping’s Special Envoy Qui Xiaoqi, who met Maduro just hours before his capture.
“China is deeply shocked by and strongly condemns the US’s blatant use of force against a sovereign state and action against its president,” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
“Such hegemonic acts of the US seriously violate international law and Venezuela’s sovereignty, and threaten peace and security in Latin America and the Caribbean region.
“China firmly opposes it.”
China and Russia, who have been flouting international law for decades and are partly behind the creation of MAGA politics, are hypocrites of course. But it is also true to say that the Trump Administration is joining their club.
There is an obvious temptation to view the United States’ flagrant breach of another country’s sovereignty, however few tears we should be shedding for Maduro, as a green light for China to take control of Taiwan.
Ryan Hass, a Brookings scholar on China and Taiwan, says he thinks it will factor, but not as a trigger or inspiration.
“Privately, I expect Beijing will emphasise to Washington it expects to be given the same latitude for great power exemptions to international law that the US takes for itself,” Mr Hass said.
“Beijing will be more focused on protecting its interests, condemning US actions, and sharpening the contrast with the US in the international system than it will be on drawing inspiration from today’s events to alter its approach on Taiwan.”
CIA-orchestrated regime change, pillaging foreign countries for resources and using the military to secure the booty is all an anathema to Mr Trump’s MAGA base, radicalised against foreign interventions and forever wars after Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr Trump justified seeking energy as compatible with America First and has previously said he determines what comprises MAGA or not.
John Bolton, who served as one of Mr Trump’s many first-term National Security Advisers, unsuccessfully tried to convince Mr Trump to carry out this action when in the White House. He failed and was bitterly opposed by Mr Trump supporters.
“The United States needs to stay out of Venezuela. Let the Venezuelan people determine their future. We don’t want other countries to choose our leaders–so we have to stop trying to choose theirs,” Tulsi Gabbard, who now serves as Mr Trump’s Director of National Intelligence and regularly repeats pro-Russian narratives, said in a post on Twitter in 2019.
“There’s no justification for our country to violate the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people,” she said, adding that it would undermine efforts to convince North Korea to denuclearise.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the MAGA congresswoman who has spectacularly fallen out with Mr Trump, used a facepalm emoji alongside Mr Trump’s quote about the US running Venezuela.
“The next obvious observation is that by removing Maduro this is a clear move for control over Venezuelan oil supplies that will ensure stability for the next obvious regime change war in Iran. And of course why is it ok for America to militarily invade, bomb, and arrest a foreign leader but Russia is evil for invading Ukraine and China is bad for aggression against Taiwan? Is it only ok if we do it? (I’m not endorsing Russia or China),” she said.
“Americans’ disgust with our own government’s never ending military aggression and support of foreign wars is justified because we are forced to pay for it and both parties, Republicans and Democrats, always keep the Washington military machine funded and going. This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end. Boy, were we wrong.”
At the time of publication, Ms Gabbard had not commented on the strikes. The CIA helped plan the operation for months, helping to “find Maduro and understand how he moved, where he lived, where he travelled, where he ate, what he wore,” according to General Caine.
And Ms Taylor Greene is an outlier. For now, Republicans in the House and Senate are rallying around Mr Trump and strongly endorsing his move. Top of the endorsement list was Vice President JD Vance, the supposed spearcarrier for the next generation of MAGAites. He and Mr Rubio are likely to compete to replace Mr Trump.
How the President’s intervention factors domestically will hinge on what Mr Trump manages to achieve or not in Venezuela. Mr Trump did not seek Congressional approval or inform Congress ahead of time, citing concerns about leaks, and he will face a Democratic pushback.
Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat who sits on the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, told NPR the strikes were “clearly illegal”.
“The US has tried to stand for the proposition that the sovereignty of nations should be respected,” Senator Kaine said.
“That’s why we’ve criticised Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. But we can’t, with a straight face, make the argument that we support the sovereignty of nations if we’re willing to engage in a unilateral presidentially declared war against Venezuela. And thus, he is really undercutting US’ moral stance for an international rule of law where nations can invade each other willy-nilly, just because a president decides it’s a good idea to do so.”
Bernie Sanders was punchier.
“This is rank imperialism,” the Senator from Vermont said. Citing the cost of living and housing crisis, he said it was time for the President to focus on “the crises facing this country and end this militarism abroad”.
“Trump is failing in his job to “run” the United States’. He should not be trying to ‘run’ Venezuela.”
As for Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky could only half-joke that if Mr Trump was in the mood for taking out dictators, he had an obvious candidate.
“What can I say? If… If it is possible to act with dictators like this, it means the United States knows what to do next.”
Touché.
https://thewest.com.au/politics/donald-trump/latika-m-bourke-what-trump-does-next-could-bring-chaos-as-us-presidents-daring-move-offers-a-green-light-c-21202240
