President Donald Trump’s deployment of warships and thousands of Marines and sailors off the coast of Venezuela has put a spotlight back on the United States’ relations with its own hemisphere – and revived for some in the region anxious memories of a militaristic Uncle Sam.
Like Mr. Trump’s earlier threats to take back the Panama Canal, the dispatching last week of forces near what the administration considers a terrorist narco-state has raised a raft of still-unanswered questions about a mercurial president’s intentions.
Is the show of force aimed at cowing Venezuela’s embattled President Nicolás Maduro into further cooperation with the U.S. on immigration matters and tackling the region’s drug cartels and Venezuela’s trafficking gangs?
Why We Wrote This
Whether or not sending a U.S. naval force off the coast of Venezuela is mere posturing, it has revived regional anxiety over U.S. militarism. Does the display of power advance U.S. interests, or give China a greater opening in the region?
Or is the buildup a prelude to a military operation into Venezuela – styled after the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama? That option remains far-fetched in the eyes of most observers, but it has gained some credence with word that the White House has directed the Pentagon to draw up contingency plans for an intervention – ostensibly aimed at drug cartels.
In response to the deployment, Mr. Maduro announced on Wednesday that he had sent warships and drones to protect Venezuela’s territorial waters from the forces of the “gringo empire” – a response that has raised concerns about an accidental confrontation.
“Way to look tough”
If nothing else, the deployment underscores President Trump’s attraction to the gunboat diplomacy of the early 20th century, when the U.S. under President Theodore Roosevelt used naval forces to project power and secure an expanding power’s interests in the Caribbean and the Pacific.
“For Trump, this is a way to look tough and to be a forceful presence in the hemisphere even when his focus and interests really are elsewhere,” says Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
“He thinks it looks cool. He wants to make a show of being tough on the cartels, but I think it doesn’t go beyond where we are now,” he says, adding, “although with Trump you never know and I could be proved wrong tomorrow.”
Venezuela has been in U.S. crosshairs for most of the last two decades, in the wake of former President Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution” of the late 1990s that turned what was once South America’s wealthiest country into a socialist authoritarian state with soaring poverty.
Initially, Washington emphasized Venezuela’s democratic slide and shrinking space for political freedoms in its regional diplomacy. But under the first Trump administration, the focus shifted to the alleged involvement of Mr. Chávez’s successor – Mr. Maduro – in drug trafficking.
Mr. Maduro was named in a 2020 U.S. Justice Department indictment alleging he led a conspiracy with other Venezuelan officials and drug cartels to traffic drugs into the U.S.
This month, the White House ramped up its anti-Maduro rhetoric while sidestepping any direct explanation of the Caribbean buildup.
“The Maduro regime is not the legitimate government of Venezuela, it is a narco-terror cartel,” said press secretary Karoline Leavitt in comments to the media on Aug. 19. Indeed, much of the international community, including the U.S., rejected as rigged last year’s presidential election in which Mr. Maduro claimed victory.
Mr. Trump, she added, is “prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country and to bring those responsible to justice.”
China now a regional player
Latin America retains a bitter memory of recurring bouts of “yanqui” intervention in the region. But one factor that is different from the original recourse to gunboat diplomacy more than a century ago is China’s presence as a significant economic (and increasingly, political) player across the region.
Beijing took the notable step of cautioning the U.S. on Aug. 21 against “any move that violates … a country’s sovereignty and security,” and urged the United States to “do more things conducive to peace and security in Latin America and the Caribbean region.”
“This administration is very worried about China,” says Rebecca Bill Chavez, president and CEO of Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. “But at the same time, it’s easy to see how not just this military flex but the talk of other unilateral military actions could revive the old anxieties about the U.S. and give China an even greater opening.”
Dr. Chavez says she finds particularly worrisome President Trump’s statements over recent months about potentially using the military to go after drug cartels in Mexico.
“If the U.S. were to undertake a unilateral strike into Mexico to go after cartels that are now officially labeled as foreign terrorist organizations, that would really make a difference,” she says, “for our relations with Mexico, which are so important for us in so many ways, for relations with the broader region, and for China’s role in Mexico, which the U.S. has been so worried about.”
Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/Reuters
Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued in comments this month that designating the drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations opens the door to using more components of American power, including the military, to counter them.
Experts such as Dr. Chavez note that Latin America is so polarized politically that there has been no unified regional response to the Caribbean buildup. One reason, Dr. Freeman of the Council on Foreign Relations says, is that anti-U.S. sentiment is at its weakest in decades.
Competing White House factions
But at the same time, both say that an actual military intervention – in Venezuela, or Mexico, or elsewhere – would almost certainly be met with a united regional condemnation.
In any case, most see an intervention into Venezuela as far from likely.
Dr. Freeman says he sees in the naval deployment a “balancing act” between two competing White House factions that have differing visions and priorities for what the show of force in the Caribbean should accomplish.
One group – led by President Trump’s “envoy for special missions,” Richard Grenell – is what Dr. Freeman describes as the “America First” contingent, which is focused on pressuring Mr. Maduro into additional deals to take back more Venezuelans deported from the U.S.
Also key for that group is action reducing the flow of illicit drugs (and other trafficking operations) into the United States.
The other group, Dr. Freeman says, is anchored by Secretary Rubio and others who “still generally care about a return of democracy to Venezuela.”
Still, he says, “I don’t think either group sees a military intervention as key to their goals, so I really think this [deployment] is and will remain a show.”
