Four days after US President Donald Trump’s most violent military action to date, the gap between his claims that the US “runs” Venezuela and the reality of a continuing dictatorship there is widening.
In the coming weeks, the White House risks seeing a brutal flourish of American power early Saturday morning undone by its inability to follow through. This would snatch from the jaws of a spectacular but short-lived victory and open the door to a potential strategic defeat.
In just a few minutes during Saturday’s press conference, President Trump’s American soft stance pivoted from asserting U.S. control over Caracas, and moments later acknowledged that it was done with the presumed cooperation of President Nicolás Maduro’s longtime lieutenant Delcy Rodriguez, who has since become acting president.
Currently, the American mechanism of influence, at least in public, appears to consist of occasional phone calls from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with energetic support from the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier and other naval assets.
While the initial military attack was surprising, the “takeover” is the climax so far, relying on Rodriguez assuming the role of overnight conquistador and colonialist pawn. In public, she did the opposite, calling for Maduro’s release and expressing anger, but only on Sunday hinted that “cooperation” with the United States could continue.
Rodriguez’s comments were a risk, no matter what concessions she might make behind the scenes, given that Maduro’s defiant stance appears to have angered Trump into participating in the raid. There seems to be a kind of repression going on, with loyalist gangs being arrested on the streets and the media being arrested. There are no celebrations in Venezuela to mark the end of Maduro’s regime, and many in Venezuela, wary of years of authoritarianism, are anxiously awaiting what will happen next.
The reality may pose the most serious problems with oil. “We’ll keep it,” Trump may have said, announcing on Tuesday that he would hand over 30 million to 50 million barrels to the United States. But the huge concessions will be hard-won, in part because the U.S. oil companies the president wanted to invade Venezuela now live in a different world than they did after the fall of Iraq in 2003, one of messy change and abundant oil, and where investing billions of dollars in a still-hostile kleptocracy carries tremendous risks. Chevron is the only major Western oil company to maintain large-scale operations in Venezuela in recent years.
What has actually changed? President Maduro is in U.S. custody and will face court proceedings in March after a staggering extraction operation that took about 150 minutes. For now, the dictator’s supporters are still running the show, despite assurances from the White House that otherwise they would go along with the US’s wishes, fearing the same fate as Maduro.
Reality still matters, and the legacy of this latest foray into Trump foreign policy will be its longevity. The Venezuela exercise risks joining the list of President Trump’s grandiose world-changing proclamations that stumble and sometimes collapse when they come into contact with complex and inalienable realities.
This White House’s significant and limited success in Venezuela generated four days of outsized rhetoric from Trump and his supporters. It was simply a flurry of grand, ambitious statements about how the Western Hemisphere would be reshaped simply by the force of President Trump’s will.
Of these, Cuba requires attention. (If Venezuela runs out of oil, which it might do, its leadership could rely on a resilient infrastructure of repression). The US “needs” Greenland, and no one can stop the US from militarily occupying Danish territory if it chooses. (It would be a disaster for the US to try to capture 57,000 people on heavily defended NATO ice, especially given that most Greenlanders would rather be independent than become a US colony.)
Recall how other sweeping claims by President Trump have played out over the past year. Canada is not the 51st state of the United States. The Panama Canal is not under US control. Nor is it Gaza. Within 24 hours of his appointment, Ukraine did not feel peace. In many cases, Mr. Trump’s claims simply echo the sales pitches of dealmakers. “Let’s really push our idea of what we want and see how close we can get.” While this fits well in the world of construction and business, it risks falling short in geopolitics. Members of the Trump campaign have been at pains to emphasize that the president meant what he said, as if the point was necessary.
The Trump administration does not want to invade first and then consider the reality of occupation. After the U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the Bush administration shut down the State Department’s complex plans to manage Iraq, leaving the Pentagon to fail in nation-building. After the rapid collapse of Afghanistan’s Taliban in 2001, there were years of half-hearted measures by the Kabul proxy government, before an insurgency began. But President Trump has no troops on the ground in Venezuela, or even theater forces to try that. His task is therefore more complex than forcing Venezuelan politicians to comply with his wishes.
The signal sent by the US raid on Saturday was strong. Washington was capable of daring, rapid, and ultra-capable special forces actions that could eliminate and capture enemies in minutes. Various and even dizzying signals follow. Without demonstrating sustained application and ultimate success in “managing” Venezuela, President Trump risks his limited attention to the lasting lessons of this episode against China and Russia, adversaries unencumbered by democratic opposition.
Russia and China know that their mercurial president has three years left in office — perhaps only one more year if November’s midterm elections prevent him from remaining in office. They learned that Trump can wield incredible power in a short amount of time. The test of the coming weeks in Venezuela will be to show that the scope of the president’s ambitions has not diminished even as his attention shifts to other trinkets, effectively enforcing the idea that Trump is to be feared, not brilliantly avoided.
