Is Donald Trump squeezing Nicolas Maduro to brink or to chaos?
The key question is at what point the US President will feel safe in ceasing his campaign of political and military pressure on Venezuela, confident that the world understands the meaning of his strategic enterprise in the Caribbean.
The longer the pressure builds, the more likely it is that regime change will occur – an event that comes freighted with massive uncertainty and risk. Conversely, the longer Nicolas Maduro digs in without the US decisively moving, the more Trump risks being humiliated by a small socialist, narco-autocracy.
The US President met with members of his National Security team at the White House on Monday evening, local time, to discuss next steps. What he decides to do will have long-lasting strategic and political consequences.
If Trump persists on his current course, it means the administration could end up forcing Maduro from power – perhaps the objective sought by the President – but how this is achieved deeply matters.
Michael Shifter, a former president of the Inter-American Dialogue – a leading western hemisphere policy forum – told The Australian that an attempt by Washington at regime change via US intervention could set off a “chain of events which results in real chaos and a complete breakdown in security”.
This would leave Washington with “no choice but to go in to try to stabilise the situation” and the commitment of boots on the ground for “at least months, but maybe years”.
Professor Shifter, a teacher at the Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, warned that a “bloodbath” could not be ruled out, noting that Venezuela was a “country of 30 million people” with an armed forces of 130,000 and a network of militias and criminal groups.
Reports were also emerging on Monday local time that Venezuela had been working on plans to wage a guerrilla-style resistance campaign in the event of a US ground invasion aimed at making it too hard and costly to replace Maduro.
Trump has already sought to close the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela, threatened land strikes around Caracas and is reported to have delivered an ultimatum to Maduro in a recent phone call telling him to flee the country.
The US has deployed 15,000 troops and 11 US war ships – including the nation’s largest carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford – to the region, while the campaign of US strikes on suspected drug ships is stoking political controversy at home.
Yet Shifter said the more likely scenario was that Trump would try to force Maduro out with the “very lowest risk possible” and was sending a message to the rest of the world that Washington was “prepared to use its superior military might”.
“I think that a lot of this is performative,” he said.
This meant the military build-up was aimed at fermenting “panic and fear within the high command that would result in Maduro’s ousting”, with the possibility of “some military strikes on land at certain strategic targets”.
So far, at least 83 people have been killed in attacks on 22 boats since early September, with the Trump administration now weathering accusations of war crimes and bipartisan investigations by both house and Senate armed services committees into a “double tap” strike against a drug ship on September 2.
The White House confirmed on Monday that a second strike was launched against a ship on September 2 after surveillance footage showed two survivors from the initial blast.
It made clear that this follow-up attack was not ordered by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the strike had been legal and that the US President and Mr Hegseth had made it clear that “narco terrorist groups are subject to lethal targeting in accordance with the laws of war”.
Republicans on the house armed services committee appear to have a different view, with both Mike Turner and Don Bacon expressing concerns that the strike appeared to be in violation of the laws of war.
Shifter warned that the strategic risks of the pressure campaign outweighed the benefits, telling The Australian that “I don’t see what the administration is going to gain from this”.
“There could be just a complete breakdown in the internal security situation,” he said.
“Maduro, however brutal and repressive he is, has been sort of holding things together for almost 13 years.
“You might even have an even more repressive regime, a more brutal regime. Is that a success story?”
He said the strikes on drug vessels had been “extremely damaging” to the US in Latin America and across the globe. As well, Washington’s flirtation with regime change also posed acute political risks within Trump’s MAGA base.
“The risk is that he’d be going down the path which he promised not to pursue … the end of forever wars, the end of foreign entanglements. And, you know, as (former secretary of state) Colin Powell used to say: you broke it, you own it.”
Macquarie’s monster port deal shaping up as bigger test
Donald Trump is making an example of Venezuela to uphold his own modern-day version of the Monroe Doctrine and show he means business about policing and exercising dominance in the western hemisphere.