Some commentators are agitating for U.S.-led regime change in Venezuela. That would be a grave mistake.
Absent a serious threat to the U.S., or a regional alliance that sees Latin American nations taking the lead, the U.S. should avoid military action to depose Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuelan regime. In the case of genocidal concerns or a regional alliance-based intervention, the U.S. should seek congressional authorization before any action.
As Bloomberg notes, a rising chorus of voices is suggesting that the use of American force in Venezuela is now justified.
Now don’t get me wrong, I recognize that the Venezuelan regime’s conduct has been utterly catastrophic for the people it is supposed to serve. Many children are starving in record numbers, and many professional women are prostituting themselves. At the same time, Maduro’s government continue to wash themselves with the ill-gotten wealth they have plundered from the nation’s oil reserves (the largest proven reserves of any nation on Earth). This state of affairs is a humanitarian tragedy of significant order. And just as the Bosnian and Kosovan crisis’ of the 1990s were wake-up calls for the European Union, what is happening in Venezuela should be a wake-up call for Latin America.
Yet we must accept that the wake-up call has not yet found open ears. That while Colombia, Peru, and other nations are deeply concerned by what is happening, false moral prophets like Evo Maroles of Bolivia continue to defend Maduro’s starvation kingdom as the socialist utopia in waiting.
And while this activism in defense of despotism is disgusting, it does require U.S. attention. Because it means that were the U.S. to act to depose Maduro, we would be doing so without an obvious plurality of support in a region of the world that is important to U.S. interests but naturally skeptical of U.S. actions. In turn, any U.S. military action in Venezuela would risk a great deal to U.S. interests. It is crucial that the U.S. maintain a regional concert in our favor.
But there’s another factor here: History’s lesson. After all, the lesson of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and of many conflicts is that the absence of a compelling plan for post-conflict action is a recipe for disaster. In Venezuela’s case, such action would risk sucking America into a long term peacekeeping operation of high financial cost and great political uncertainty. To be sure, Americans might, assuming U.S. casualties were low, accept such a peacekeeping effort for a number of one or two years. But what after? What when the public opinion changed? And we know it would. Then we would risk withdrawal without having made things substantially better.
Ultimately, however, there’s the issue of whether this is worth American lives. And absent changes that make the need for action absolute, I do not believe it is.
