The Trump administration is moving this week to fix its faltering Venezuela strategy. The effort has two prongs: strengthening interim president Juan Guaido and increasing pressure on illegitimate president Nicolas Maduro.
These steps are long overdue.
The United States anticipated that Maduro would have been deposed by the end of 2018, but instead, he is holding firm, even as Venezuela’s catastrophe of medicine shortages, child starvation, and collapsed foreign investment continues. The central problem is that Maduro retains the military’s support, thus preventing a successful rebellion. With a mixture of patronage and intimidation from the security services, military personnel continue to judge that their best bet is to stick with the socialist kleptocrat. Although the U.S. and Guaido have come close to persuading major military defections, those efforts have failed to reach a critical mass. This needs to change.
The first challenge, then, is to find ways to put more pressure on Maduro.
That starts with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s meetings in Colombia on Monday, where the U.S. will push Latin American allies to obstruct Maduro’s financial networks and lobby Venezuelan general officers to abandon him. On Tuesday, as he and Guaido gather at the Davos summit in Switzerland, President Trump may announce further action. A Trump meeting with Guaido is likely, but so also is U.S. pressure on European allies to withdraw all support from Maduro’s regime. Trump might also threaten to impose sanctions on Spain, which facilitates Maduro’s money flows.
Will this be enough to tip the balance into Guaido’s favor? I suspect not, at least unless the administration is truly willing to cut off Maduro’s access to capital. And that would require responding to Guaido’s lawful requests and intercepting Maduro’s oil export tankers in international waters. That would block Maduro’s ability to retain power through bribery, and it would further prevent him from paying for the Cuban secret police who have been helping repress the Venezuelan population. New U.S. pressure on Cuba would be especially beneficial.
Still, it’s a welcome development that the administration is putting Venezuela back up at the top of its to-do list. Human suffering, the democratic rule of law, and regional stability are all calling out for an end to Maduro’s illegitimate regime.
