Has US Geopolitics gone Caracas?

“We [US] owe it…to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those [European] powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their systems to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and security”.

President James Monroe, 2 December 1823

Monroe 2019?

Alphen, Netherlands. 8 May. On this day, the seventy-fourth anniversary of the end of World War Two it may seem strange to some that I am writing about Venezuela. To paraphrase a certain British prime minister, Venezuela is a small country far away about which we know little. However, what is happening in Venezuela also says a lot about the state of US geopolitics and why China and Russia are finding it so easy to export their particular coercive creed far beyond their respective borders.

In 1823 the US established the Monroe Doctrine. Until Secretary of State John Kerry publicly abrogated the Doctrine in November 2013 it pretty much represented two centuries of an American determination to keep other Great Powers out of the American continent, particularly the Latin American bit of it.  Not surprisingly, many Latin American countries long-regarded the Monroe Doctrine as unwarranted ‘gringo’ interference in their affairs. The origins of the Monroe Doctrine are worth recounting because it has little to do with America’s southern neighbours, even though implicit within it was a warning to a then fading imperial Spain not to interfere with American trade ambitions in the region.  Rather, the Monroe Doctrine was a consequence of Russia’s UKASE of 1821 which claimed territorial sovereignty over much of what is today Alaska, western Canada and the US Pacific North West. The message was clear: keep off the grass!

American power?

Contrast that with the Trump administration’s uncertain handling of the crisis in Venezuela and the influence both China and Russia are exerting over it. Last week, US National Security Adviser, John Bolton, called Latin America, “our hemisphere”.  For a moment it seemed ‘Operation Freedom’, as opposition leader, Juan Guaido called it, would prevail and the Chavista President Nicolas Maduro would be ousted.  He deserves to be. In the early 1980s the GDP per capita of Venezuela was some 40% of that of the US. Today, it is close to 4% with some 3.4 million people of a population of some 23 million having fled what should be one of Latin America’s oil-richest countries. And yet, the lamentable Maduro regime endures. What happened?

  

Last week several senior Venezuelan ministers, including the defence minister, and much of the military top brass, seemed willing to jump ship.  At one point, Guaido was even filmed with military officers at a base on what seemed to be the beginning of a coup that, if not formally sanctioned by the Americans and their European allies, would have at least been legitimised by them.  After all, both the US and EU had declared Guaido to be Venezuela’s legitimate president.

And yet, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told CNN that whilst Maduro “…had a plane on the tarmac” ready to flee to Cuba “…the Russians indicated he should stay”.  Interestingly, Pompeo is in London today ostensibly to mark forty years since the accession to power of Margaret Thatcher, but also to stiffen the dissolved backbone of the May administration and warn about the dangers of embracing Chinese 5G too closely.  Irony?

The geopolitics of Venezuela

The geopolitical precedent and its significance established by the events of the past week in Venezuela cannot be over-stated.  Indeed, as Pompeo speaks in London a strange spinning sound might well be audible from across that Atlantic. It is sound of American presidents past spinning in their respective graves across the twenty-three states in which they are interred must be deafening. 

First, the simple truth is that Latin America is in America’s strategic backyard and of vital interest to the US. Many Latin American leaders will have watched the uncertainty and flip-flopping of the Trump administration over the past week with some bafflement.  It suggests a President Trump all-too willing to talk tough but not act even in America’s own strategic backyard. The US Venezuela policy fiasco certainly goes some way to explaining the tough talk on China and trade that has emanated from the White House this past weekend.

Second, a precedent has been established that will embolden the world’s two great strategic autocracies, China and Russia.  In Venezuela, China is providing the money both to prop up the regime by buying its oil whilst Russia is exerting direct influence over the regime via security ‘co-operation’. Put simply, for the ‘investment’ of the dispatch of a few Russian military aircraft and a coterie of ‘advisers’ to Venezuela President Putin has achieved a strategic effect out of all proportion to the size of Russia’s presence. He has also built on his growing world-wide reputation as the confounder of the West. In such a context, whilst the crisis in Venezuela may not be the second coming of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the strategic challenge to America should not be under-estimated. 

       

Whither American leadership?

What are the causes of Washington’s volte face on Venezuela and the geopolitical implications?  It could be that President Trump, who is already engaged in electioneering, does not want be mired in any entangling engagements. After all, much of his political base is instinctively isolationist. And, a new report by the Pentagon states that it would take six years at least and some $80bn to stabilise Venezuela.  Trump clearly fears the spectre of another entangling engagement similar to Iraq and Afghanistan, albeit this time in Spanish. It could be that he does not see Venezuela as that important to the US and is happy to live with Russian and Chinese interference therein.  After all, Washington learned to live with the Castro regime in Cuba following repeated failures to remove him and his regime from power. There could be another reason.  It is being reported that this past weekend Trump and Putin had a “good conversation” about the need to limit growing Chinese influence in the Arctic.  There was apparently an equally feel-good conversation between Pompeo and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the Arctic Council meeting in Finland.

Could it be that President Trump is willing to accept Chinese and Russian influence in Latin America in return for Russian support to limit Chinese influence in the Arctic?  If so, then US geopolitics really has gone Caracas. The Putin regime defines itself by its opposition to the US-led West. What Venezuela appears to reveal is an increasingly imperial president who sees geopolitics as simply a variant of the Art of the Deal. If so, it would be a profound mistake. Any ‘deal’ is simply a consequence of geopolitics and the applied and considered statecraft needed to enact it. Geopolitics is essentially the clear and consistent application of power over time and distance to generate strategic effect through the use of all tools, resources, partnerships and alliances available to a state in pursuit of its critical and vital interests. What is clear is that Putin is playing Trump.

The strategic implications of Venezuela for US geopolitics are equally concerning. The Trump administration’s capricious lack of strategic consistency and its abandonment of statecraft is encouraging the strategic autocracies to interfere, even in America’s strategic backyard. Indeed, there is something of the ‘European’ about Trump’s foreign and security policy at present – all talk and no trousers, as we say in Yorkshire. What makes this surprising, to say the least, is that there is real foreign and security policy experience in and around the White House, but it seems strangely neutered.  Rather, the impression, even to those of us who believe in American leadership, is of a White House that functions like some latter-day medieval court. A court in which the main effort of those charged with the high responsibilities of state seems more focused on keeping in favour with a Quixotic ‘king’, than establishing the firm principles upon which American power must stand in a highly-competitive twenty-first century world.

 

US geopolitics gone Caracas 

The geopolitical message to both Beijing, Moscow, and many of America’s allies the world-over is thus clear: if America can exert little or no decisive influence over a significant regional crisis in its own strategic backyard what hope elsewhere?  The United States is the hub of the global West – an idea rather than a place. However, if Washington is to balance the benefits and burdens that its power imposes upon it America’s leaders need the vision and consistent application to realise the opportunities that such a coalition of democracies affords it. Rather, America is fast becoming a superpower that acts like a much smaller power; opportunistic, obsessed with narrow, factional gain, rather than offering the kind of inspiration that assures allies and partners. As for adversaries, they do not have to like American power, but they do need to respect it. It is increasingly self-evident that both China and Russia are fast losing respect for American power in much the same way they long ago lost respect for European ‘power’. Whither the West? Without assured American leadership the ‘West’ is little more than a rhetorical chimera.

In awarding the President Medal of Freedom to golfer Tiger Woods on Monday, President Trump spoke of American excellence, devotion and drive as ‘qualities that embody the American spirit of pushing boundaries, defying limits and always striving for greatness”. Venezuela? Americans and Europeans together need to recognise that the geopolitics implicit in what is happening in Venezuela is about far more than strategic transactionalism – the Arctic for Venezuela for example. It is about world order and the West’s need to assure its vital interests through assured American leadership. 

Has US geopolitics gone Caracas?

Julian Lindley-French