Strongman Nicolás Maduro should have been out of office by now. That was the whole point of internationally backed and legitimate interim president Juan Guaidó’s call to arms on Tuesday. Instead, protests turned to violent clashes and the soldiers that rallied around Guaidó weren’t enough to persuade the rest of the Venezuelan military to drop their support for Maduro.
In the U.S. the seemingly fizzled uprising and the threat of protracted instability or Maduro keeping his grip on power has promoted new calls for America’s favorite tactic: military intervention.
As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo put it:
And dropping a few bombs, attacking the military directly or perhaps initiating a covert operation to quietly take out Maduro might seem like an easy solution. After all, what better way to send a message of U.S. power than commandos to the rescue against a socialist dictator?
But if history is any lesson, a quick hit from the U.S. is unlikely to go as planned. Those operations haven’t worked out so well in the Middle East (forever wars anyone?) and have a checkered past in Latin America, with more scandal than success. Nevertheless, die-hard interventionists seem to think that this time victory and a decades-old goal of regime change in Venezuela, might finally be at hand.
Military intervention, however, isn’t quite the easy solution its advocates seem to think it is.
Violent protests and a fractured military, with armed troops backing both Guaidó and Maduro, won’t exactly make for an easy mess to untangle, not even with superior firepower. Add to the mix a planeload of Russian troops and the heavy hand of Moscow’s oil-focused influence, and it’s not just a complex domestic situation but an international struggle for influence with high stakes and the possibility of drawn-out conflict.
Even if you don’t mind sending Americans to join the fray, there’s no guarantee that we’d be successful or that whatever destabilization we instigate wouldn’t have an even worse result than Maduro’s failed state.
Besides, even if we were successful and an intervention went off without a hitch, there’s still likely to be lingering consequences from sticking our fingers too deep into another country’s politics. If we were to succeed in ousting Maduro, U.S. intervention would likely taint whatever government succeeded him. Already, Guaidó has been labeled a U.S. puppet and calls for intervention denounced as imperialist. Given our history of botched attempts at regime change, U.S. influence, even with the best of intentions, is unlikely to pave the way to a successful, or even peaceful, transition of power. That, of course, would leave the problems that we set out to fix unsolved while hurting our credibility and regional power in the process.
Calls for military intervention and suggestions that all options are on the table are easy. Actually following through and successfully forcing regime change is much, much more difficult and we should think twice before jumping in head-first and trying to sort out the consequences later.
