Welcome to the Jungle: Venezuela and the Return of the Empire Trap
Hey, jungles have good points
On January 3, 1990, the United States captured Manuel Noriega. Exactly 35 years later, yesterday, we did the same to Nicolás Maduro. But there are differences. Mainly that in 1989, we launched a full-scale invasion, disarmed the Panamanian Defense Forces, installed the duly-elected Guillermo Endara as president, and then tracked down old Cara de Piña. In Venezuela, we have done it backwards. The Venezuelan government was decapitated, but the Venezuelan state is intact.
This poses a bit of a problem, considering that President Trump declared that we are now running Venezuela. He also declared that one of our principal aims is to get our expropriated oil investments back. I find that refreshing, to be honest, but it is a departure from the rhetoric around American interventions over the past 120 years. And it is not clear how we’re going to do that with the Bolivarian regime still alive on the ground.
So what happens now?
Well, let me first lay out what seems to have happened, and then lay out three possibilities. I would love to call them good, bad, and ugly, but the analogy to the movie just doesn’t hold.
What happened
The U.S. intervention came as no surprise. (I called it on December 14th.) But the rapid success in suppressing Venezuelan air defenses and the apparent lack of serious Venezuelan resistence to the raid comes as a huge surprise. Vladimir Putin can only wish that the Russians could have done something remotely close in Kyiv in 2022. Electronic countermeasures and F-35s took out the Bolivarian air defense systems, allowing the helicopters to come in at low altitudes from the USS Iwo Jima. That said, it seems that the country’s air defenses had already fallen apart years ago.
I am more surprised that there wasn’t more resistence on the ground, but I’m not quite willing to say that there was cooperation with Venezuelan military elements. Modern American helicopters have good defenses against shoulder-fired missiles. It is also true that the effectiveness of RPGs against helicopters is a bit overrated. Modern U.S. helicopters change heading and altitude constantly in flight — in the one second that it takes an RPG to get to where the shooter thinks the helicopter is going to be, the vehicle can move more than 60 meters. 50-cal machine guns are more effective, but not that much more effective.
So while we know that there was some support for the Americans from inside the Bolivarian regime — we knew too much about Maduro’s whereabouts — there is not enough evidence to conclude that it is widespread.
What might happen
The President also stated that we’re now running Venezuela. This poses a bit of problem, since we don’t have any soldiers or diplomats on the ground. We may have decapitated the Venezuelan government, but the Venezuela state remains intact. (For Venezuelan levels of “intact,” that is — this is not a country with a lot of state capacity.) So, scenarios.
(1) Collaborators emerge from inside the Venezuelan regime
President Trump threw Corina Machado under the bus in yesterday’s press conference — leaving the door open to someone else.
President Trump intimated that Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s constitutional successor, is willing to work with Washington. If it’s her, then she is going to have a problem threading the needle between giving the United States what it wants and upholding the Bolivarian Revolution. And so far, she is giving no sign of backing the United States.
Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello is preaching war — he has always been a Socialist Party hard-liner with deep ties to the military. Gustavo González still heads the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (Sebin).1 González does not seem to have an independent power base — Lavrenty Beria he is not — but when there is a power vacuum it helps to head the secret police. Finally, General Vladimir Padrino has run the Bolivarian armed forces since 2014. The Bolivarian armed forces are de facto autonomous: when Acting President Rodríguez says “jump,” they will say, “Tell me why and we’ll think about it.”2
So while the ease of the raid supports the hypothesis that there are U.S. collaborators inside the regime, the evidence for that is weak. And anyone who wants to collaborate is going to face internal resistance. To be honest, I think that could be faced down, but it won’t be easy.
