Two days before it was announced that he would take the lead on the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Iran, U.S. envoy Elliott Abrams testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the pressure campaign he was already leading against Venezuela.
Over more than an hour of testimony and questioning, Abrams reaffirmed that the administration’s Venezuela policy is regime change. Asked by Sen. Ted Cruz whether Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whose authority the United States does not consider legitimate, will “survive the year,” Abrams said the administration “obviously hope[s] he does not.” His team is “working hard to make that happen,” Abrams continued. To that end, he said, he hopes to see domestic rejection of Venezuela’s upcoming election, international denunciations of the election as fraudulent, more sanctions and travel restrictions, and suppression of Venezuela’s relations with other nations, like his new charge, Iran.
The sole significant challenge to this agenda came from Sen. Rand Paul, who, with the caveat that “no one disputes the disaster that is Venezuelan socialism,” observed that “when it comes to regime change, the U.S. track record has been less than stellar.” Paul’s neoconservative critics have slammed his suggestion that U.S.-recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido may end up no better for Venezuela than Maduro given that are socialists. The problem in Venezuela isn’t socialism, Abrams himself shot back, but rather that “it’s a vicious, brutal, murderous dictatorship.”
So it is, but one need not share Paul’s fixation on socialism to take his larger point about hubris in American foreign policy. To suggest that Washington is not well-equipped to direct Venezuela’s future is no concession to Maduro, who unquestionably should not be in power. Two things can be true at once: that Maduro’s regime is evil, a “vicious, brutal, murderous dictatorship,” if you like, and that ending this regime is not a task for the U.S. because “when it comes to regime change, the U.S. track record has been less than stellar.”
This dual truth is easier to perceive elsewhere with the aid of hindsight. Saddam Hussein should not have been in power in Iraq, nor Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Both were dictators, both vicious, brutal, and murderous. If they did not match Maduro’s systematic destruction of his country, it was not because of greater virtue. But their U.S.-forced deposition has hardly been a success. The post-Hussein power vacuum fostered the spread of terrorism, greater Iranian influence in Iraq, and the war in Iraq (a disaster that Abrams, incidentally, helped initiate) is now in its 17th year and shows no sign of true conclusion despite broad U.S. public support for exactly that. In Libya, there’s evidence that the U.S.-led intervention prolonged and exacerbated the initial conflict, and Libya remains in turmoil to this day, host to slave traders.
The unpleasant reality is that externally orchestrated regime change typically does not work no matter how well-intentioned or how much its target deserves to be brought low. “Studies have shown that foreign-imposed regime changes do not improve political or economic relations between the intervening and target states,” explained Boston College political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke at Foreign Policy. “They rarely lead to democracy, and, regardless of whether they are conducted covertly or overtly, they increase the likelihood that the target state will experience a civil war.” The recent history to which Paul alluded reveals that Washington’s regime-change projects are no exceptions to this rule.
Yet with Abrams directing President Trump’s policy toward Venezuela, and now Iran, which is functionally another regime-change target, that reality is unlikely to be recognized in U.S. strategy. Abrams said in the Senate hearing that he hasn’t “thought about the Iraq war in years because [he’s] in this job.”
For the sake of his job in Venezuela and Iran alike, perhaps he should give it some thought.
Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities and contributing editor at the Week.
