An early copy of John Bolton’s chapter on Venezuela, from his book, The Room Where It Happened, found its way to my inbox Wednesday night. According to media coverage of the book, Bolton regales readers with tales of President Trump’s willful ignorance and clumsy leadership. Clearly, Bolton thinks he is more clever and cunning than his old boss. Perhaps he makes that case more adequately in other chapters of his book than he does in the one entitled, “Venezuela Libre.”
In telling the story of the Trump administration’s 18-month campaign to topple the narcoregime led by Nicolas Maduro, Bolton exposes his own naivete and amateurish policymaking. He tries to blame Trump’s “wobbly” second-guessing for the failure of a flimsy and fatally flawed strategy, which was brought to Trump by career diplomats and a disoriented intelligence community vouching for double-crossing Venezuelans.
In his own version of how it happened, Bolton never stopped to assess the very complex target — a hardened criminal regime, not just another tropical dictator. If he ever asked the intelligence community to do its job, he might have realized that the strategy was a ruse served up by Maduro’s Cuban handlers. (Or he might have discovered an intelligence community utterly doubled-up by Cuban intelligence.) Instead, Bolton and senior advisers ruled out the use of force without weighing options for posing a credible threat and without informing the commander-in-chief who had sought such options expressly and repeatedly.
Trump was right to have doubts about a strategy that was faltering and about Juan Guaido, the U.S.-backed leader who Trump saw as weak, although Bolton was right to worry these misgivings were sown by Russian thug Vladimir Putin looking to have his own way in Venezuela.
Bolton explains that Trump wanted “to do something” on Venezuela, and it fell to him to find something to do. The United States quickly put all of its diplomatic weight behind Guaido, the National Assembly president, as the legitimate successor to the “usurper” Maduro. It was a constitutional, home-grown solution backed by a democratically elected legislature, certainly worthy of consideration.
However, by the time Bolton decided to write about his cleverness, well-informed observers knew how and why the strategy failed. Guaido’s bloc was not only irresolute — most of the opposition leaders had cut separate deals with the regime and its cronies. Washington policymakers were informed of this tragic flaw in their plan, but, apparently, no one told Bolton.
The Castro regime, which has spent 60 years watching Uncle Sam’s trigger finger, knew at the time that Bolton was not preparing military options. So did everyone else. Early in this campaign, Bolton kept up a barrage of tweets (three to five a day) intended to appeal to the conscience of would-be rebels in the military or sow discord among regime leaders. The joke among Venezuelans was “every tweet is on the table.” In other words, military force was not.
Apparently, Bolton still doesn’t realize that he was up against an enemy that was feeding him just enough disinformation to sustain a hopeless strategy. He suggests that Minister of Defense Vladimir Padrino Lopez was obviously pondering his future because he engaged Bolton in a Twitter battle. In one particularly pathetic passage in Bolton’s history (page 277), Bolton recalls Guaido’s wife saying, “The regime wonders if the U.S. military threat is credible, but they are most afraid when John Bolton starts tweeting.” Did Bolton ever believe something so utterly ridiculous?
Not coincidentally, Padrino Lopez would later play a lead role in a work of guerrilla theater, on April 30, 2019. Bolton explains in detail how close the Trump administration came to inducing a rebellion against Maduro. He still doesn’t realize, apparently, because diplomats and intelligence officers have yet to discover or admit that the whole episode was stage-managed by the Cubans, using regime cronies and so-called opposition allies to beguile Bolton and his team into thinking they had Maduro on the ropes.
Trump was never sold on Guaido and considered Maduro a “tough” customer. His instincts were right. He sought military options to confront the regime in Venezuela. He was right to demand options. On these extraordinarily important questions, Trump was right, and Bolton was wrong. As it happens, Bolton makes a strong case backing up Trump’s frequent complaint that the Obama administration left him many messes to clean up. Bolton explains what he found: “The growing Russian, Chinese, Iranian and Cuban influence across the hemisphere had not been a priority” for eight years. Fact check: True.
Roger F. Noriega was U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States and assistant secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs from 2001-2005. He is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and his firm Visión Américas LLC advises U.S. and foreign clients.
