EXPERT OPINION — Rule by proxy just isn’t as simple as the Trump Administration wants to make it sound. While the long-term goals of the Administration in Venezuela are unclear, the tools they appear to want to use are not.
First, the Administration seems to want to dictate policy to the Delcy Rodriguez government through threats of force, wich President Trump recently highlighted by suggesting that he had called off a second strike on Venezuela because the regime was cooperating.
Second, the Trump Administration has stated that it will control the oil sales “indefinitely” to, in the words of the Secretary of Energy, “drive the changes that simply must happen in Venezuela.”
Leaving aside the legality adn morality of using threats of armed force to seize another country’s natural resources and dictate an unspecified set of “changes”, this sort of rule from a distance is unlikely to work out as intended.
First, attempting to work through the Venezuelan regime will drive a number of choices that the Administration does not appear to have thought through. Propping up an authoritarian regime that is deeply corrupt, violent, and wildly unpopular will over time increasingly alienate the majority of the Venezuelan people and undermine international legitimacy.
Regime leaders, and the upper echelons of their subordinates, are themselves unlikely to quietly depart power or Venezuela itself without substantial guarantees of immunity and probably wealth somewhere else. Absent that, they will have every incentive to throw sand in the works of any sort of process of political transition. Yet facilitating their escape from punishment for their crimes wiht some amount of their ill-gotten gains is unlikely to be acceptable to the majority of the Venezuelan people.
Elements of the regime have already taken steps to crack down on opposition in the streets.The Trump Administration is going to decide how much of this sort of repression is acceptable. Too much tolerance of repression will harm the already-thin legitimacy of this policy, particularly among the Venezuelan people, the rest of the hemisphere, and those allies the Administration hasn’t managed to alienate.Too little tolerance will encourage street protests and perhaps anti-regime violence and threaten regime stability.
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Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado has announced that she plans to return to Venezuela in the near future, which could highlight the choices the Administration faces. Some parts of the Rodriguez government will want to crack down on her supporters and make their lives as arduous as possible. The Trump Administration is going to have to think hard about how to react to that.
The tools of violence from a distance, or even abductions by Delta Force from over the horizon, are not well calibrated to deal with these dilemmas.
The Venezuelan regime appears to be heavily factionalized and punishing Delcy Rodriguez, which President Trump has threatened, could benefit other factions, such as, the Minister of the Interior or the minister of Defense, both allegedly her rivals for power.
Unless the Administration can count on perfect i