When you look at the incredible expectations that were generated by the arrival to the U.S. presidency of the first Afro-descendent president and then look back at what it has meant in terms of destruction, death and violation of human rightsâthe violation of the most basic of international laws on the part of the U.S. government during the presidency of Barrack Obamaâyou think to yourself, âwe would have preferred anything other than this.â And in fact the people of the United States have changed course radically and have voted for a man who represents the exact opposite of Barrack Obama in every sense, not just physically but in his ideological and political position.
PĂ©rez Pirela suggested that U.S. foreign policy is basically oriented by imperialism and would not change. It would still focus on exploitation of the natural resources and human resources of the countries of the South. More interesting, he suggested, would be to watch what is happening internally, as Trump the Outsider struggled against transnational powers (Sin Duda, 2017):
We can see that for the first time a president arrives with the characteristics of Donald Trump, in other words who is from outside of the political establishment of the United States. That does not make him better or worse. But it provides some very interesting scenarios because there is already an open and frontal fight against him by U.S. transnationals, for example, the communication powerhouse CNN, both in its Spanish and English versions, and that is already complicating the Trump Administration.
As if to work both sides of a hoped for triangle of allies, two days before Trumpâs inauguration, Maduro announced that the first âHugo ChĂĄvez Peace and Sovereignty Awardâ would be given to Russian President Vladimir Putin, for his work in promoting a âmulticentered, pluripolar, worldâ (TeleSur, 2017).
However, it would not take long for these hopes to be dashed. In the rest of this paper, I will look at tensions between the Trump and Maduro administrations. I will show that the U.S. foreign policy apparatus was largely disengaged from Trumpâs actual policy preferences for most of 2017. During 2018, Trump gained more control over foreign policy, including Venezuelan policy. In 2019, the âMonroe Doctrineâ became the key metaphor for Trumpâs Latin America policy and Venezuela became the object of a concerted effort at regime change. What began as remarkable continuity became significant change in Venezuela policy by 2019.
2017: Venezuela Policy Adrift
Within a month of taking office, the Trump administration took the unprecedented move of sanctioning Maduroâs vice president, Tarek El Aissami (OFAC, 2017). He and an alleged confidante were being placed on the Office of Foreign Asset Controlâs list of drug-trafficking kingpins, resulting in a freezing of assets and their ability to travel to the U.S. The investigation of El Aissami and sanctions package had been in the works during the Obama administration. But sanctioning a high-level official like this was taken by many as an âopening salvoâ of the Trump administrationâs Venezuela policy (Herrero & Casey, 2017). Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin held a White House press conference suggesting that these sanctions were meant by Trump to be a signal to the Venezuelan people that the U.S. government stands with them (McClatchy, 2017). Trump took office interested in Venezuela, but it was apparently his meeting with Lilian de Tintori, the wife of political prisoner Leopoldo LĂłpez, in February that led him to prioritize Venezuela (Nakamura, 2017).
However, during 2017, the White Houseâs tougher line on Venezuela was not actually engaged with the larger U.S. foreign policy apparatus. Trumpâs choice for Secretary of State was oil executive Rex Tillerson, chosen precisely to reduce the importance of diplomacy in the United Statesâ way of engaging other countries. The naming of Tillerson made clear from the beginning that the State Department simply did not figure as a central player in Mr. Trumpâs foreign policy (Ioffe, 2017). During the course of 2017, Tillerson rid the State Department of dozens of top diplomats without replacing them, leading to low morale and also giving him little actual control over the agency (Zengerle, 2017). The resulting lack of synchronization of policy between the White House and the State Department meant there was more continuity than a change in course (Tamkin, 2017).
It was in this context that Timothy Gill and I suggested that there might be an opportunity for Latin American countries to develop a âPost-Westernâ approach to Venezuelan diplomacy (Smilde & Gill, 2017). If the Trump administration was uninterested in multilateral diplomacy, we argued, other leaders in the region should seize the opportunity. We suggested there was an opportunity for diplomacy with reference to Venezuela, to be led by countries outside of the United States and Europe that could work for a diplomatic solution in Venezuela. Such a process would move beyond the assumption that the United States or Europe must be involved in any viable solution to conflict in the Global South. This default assumption, popular in Western foreign policy communities, overestimates the success of such interventions, and forgets the history of SouthâSouth solutions, which are often harder to achieve but more effective.
And indeed, given Trumpâs disinterest in diplomacy, and generalized chaos in the White House, including the National Security Council, the State Department was basically allowed to govern itself. This meant that moderate, career diplomats like Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Shannon and Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs Michael Fitzpatrick were at the helm of Venezuela policy, with very little engagement from above. And while they were not clearly connected to the White House, they still had considerable power over diplomatic spaces, such as, for example, the U.S. mission to the Organization of American States (OAS). The State Department proceeded in 2017 in the ways they long had wanted to. Rather than carry out the unilateral actions that make U.S. Presidents look tough, they work through behind-the-scenes diplomatic engagement, allowing and helping countries in the region to take the lead. During the course of 2017, the U.S. took a back seat and allowed Latin American countries to lead the discussion on the application of the OAS Democratic Charter on Venezuela (Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, 2017). After the Maduro government pushed forward with an unconstitutional call to rewrite the constitution (Smilde & Ramsey, 2017), twelve countries in the regionâincluding Canada, Chile, and Mexicoâcame together as the Lima Group (Ramsey, 2017). The initiative did not include the United States, and this exclusion did not meet with protests from the U.S.
Of course, there were tensions between the State Department and hardliners close to the White House, involving, for example, Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio. When the Maduro government made a push for the election of a constituent assembly that would function as a super-body of government and rewrite the Constitution, the U.S. threatened there would be significant consequences. However, when the Maduro government went ahead and did so, the U.S. only responded with individual sanctions on Maduro himself and a couple of other administration officials. Journalistic reports suggested that it was Thomas Shannon who argued against tougher sanctions, on the suggestion that direct negotiations would still be preferable (Ordoñez & GĂĄmez Torres, 2017b). Towards the end of August, the Trump administration did roll out financial sanctions on Venezuelaâs ability to issue new debt (Mazzei & Ordoñez, 2017; U.S. State Department, 2017). These sanctions basically prohibited U.S. nationals, including companies, from purchasing Venezuelan debt. This was apparently done against the preferences of Thomas Shannon (Ordoñez & GĂĄmez Torres, 2017a). These measures were in part a response to criticism of investment giant Goldman Sachsâ purchase of âhunger bondsâ back in May 2017 (Smilde, 2017).1
More importantly, during a speech in August 2017, President Trump said that the U.S. âhad a military optionâ in Venezuela (WOLA, 2017). Trump would go on to discuss this possibility with his aids as well as other regional leaders (Goodman, 2018). Later journalistic investigations also revealed that Trump officials had secretly met with Venezuelan coup plotters several times over the previous year (Londoño & Casey, 2018). U.S. officials apparently rebuffed requests for material supportâsuch as encrypted radiosâin large part because they were not convinced the conspirators were trustworthy or had concrete plans for what to do after a coup occurred (DeYoung & Jaffe, 2017). But the fact that they would meet with coup plotters revealed the Trump administrationâs openness to non-diplomatic solutions.
Trumpâs floating of the military option was immediately criticized from all directions within the U.S. government and outside of it. However, he himself never retracted, and it had an important impact on the Venezuelan opposition. A little background here is necessary. At least since 2004, the Venezuelan opposition has been divided between two camps. The electoralists are moderates who oppose Chavismo but believe the best way to fight it is through political mobilization and participating in elections. Abstentionists are those who at any given point think that fair elections are not possible and that the opposition would be better off protesting by not participating. This division goes back to August 2004 when Hugo ChĂĄvez Frias won the recall referendum. MarĂa Corina Machado, then of non-governmental organization SĂșmate, put forward evidence-free accusations of fraud that led the opposition to sit out the local elections of 2004 and the legislative elections of 2005, with disastrous results. Electoralists and absten-tionists should not be seen as hardened political identities but as tendencies that grow or shrink depending on the circumstances. In 2006, Manuel Rosales participated in the presidential elections, strengthening the electoralist tendency. Even more important, in December 2007, the defeat of ChĂĄvezâs Constitutional Reform showed that the opposition actually could win elections, and ChĂĄvez would recognize defeat. This energized the electoralists and this tendency held sway through 2016. But the National Electoral Councilâs annulment in October 2016 of the recall referendum on the most specious of reasoning, as well as its acceptance of Maduroâs petition to call a constituent assembly in 2017 and its committing fraud in that same election, gave the abstentionists the upper hand (Faulconbridge, 2017). Indeed, there was a consensus among the opposition in 2017 that they should not participate in the 2017 election of a constituent assembly. However, after tha...
