If there is something that can save Nicolás Maduro from ending up like the dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega is the enormous division that exists right now within the Republican Party itself when it comes to deciding what should be done with Venezuela.
While the very influential senator Lindsey Graham insisted this Sunday on the parallelism between the current situation and the regime changes in Panama and Grenada during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush, Other GOP leaders have shown their horror at such a possibility.
For example, Rand Paul, Senator from Kentucky and member of a family with long Republican ancestry, stated over the weekend that, if President Trump was going to send troops to Venezuela, what he had to do was declare war and, consequently, ask Congress for authorization. Paul assured that neither he nor the other senators had enough information about it, that it would be a very dangerous and very expensive mission and that, when the time came, he would oppose it.
In similar terms, it was stated Todd Young, Senator from Indiana: “If this were happening, with this level of information, under the Biden Administration, I would be furious.”
They are part of the most protectionist wing of the Republican Party, the one that believes the most in America First and he who sees with dislike any intervention abroad that could endanger American lives and require economic spending that could be used to reactivate local industries.
They are, furthermore, those who refuse to allow the United States to continue seeing itself abroad as a kind of universal police that takes care of everything and to which, consequently, everyone ends up passing the toast. Exactly what Trump and the MAGA movement were supposed to end.
There are several leaders of said movement who have spoken out in recent days against a military intervention in Venezuela, among them, the omnipresente Steve Bannon. They consider that there is no sufficient reason to take military action and that bombing the suspicious ships is enough.
Objectives: Venezuela, Colombia and Cuba
However, there is another part of the Republican Party that believes that, to defend the interests of the United States in Latin America, a more active approach must be taken. Among them, the aforementioned Graham, a close friend of Donald Trump and faithful ally of the Ukrainian cause.
Graham combines a message of self-interest – Maduro must be stopped because he controls the drug trade that then kills American youth – with a certain sense of what is internationally fair: The United States must oppose Putin and Maduro because Putin and Maduro are abject leaders.
The senator from Arizona was more forceful, Rick Scott, who assured that Nicolás Maduro’s days at the head of Venezuela “are numbered” and advised him to retreat to China or Russia as soon as possible. Scott also stated that the United States was going to be in charge of bringing order to Latin America, an extreme position that is linked to the most conservative and old-fashioned republicanism, but that is difficult to reconcile with the populist and nationalist party into which it has derived.
In fact, although everyone may agree on the need to expel Maduro from power – already during his first term, Trump put a price on his head, a price that has increased to fifty million dollars in this second term – what no one knows how to explain is how to do it and that is where the main divergence is. Listening to Scott or Graham, even Marco Rubio’s past speeches regarding Cuba, one might think that it is about sending marines in a special operation or directly trying to occupy Venezuela by force.
A CIA operation?
It is not lost on anyone that this second option is extremely complex and the Trump Administration has failed to properly explain it. It could be framed within an “anti-terrorist operation” once the Poster of the Suns has entered the list of criminal organizations and it has been established that Nicolás Maduro is its leader, but getting rid of a leader armored by his armed forces and the different guerrillas that Chavismo has been organizing over the years… and who also has the support of Russia, China and even Iran, is complex.
It seems that this conservative wing of the GOP wants to send a message and that this message is not limited to Venezuela. “It would be the end of Cuba,”signed Scott, who advocated a surgical operation against Maduro and not a full-scale invasion. Graham, for his part, repeatedly pointed to Colombia, with whose president, Gustavo Petro, Trump just had a tense exchange of words. Now, he said nothing about acting against Petro or changing the Colombian regime.
The decision, in the end, will obviously fall to Donald Trump, who has already authorized the CIA to carry out “covert actions” inside Venezuela and who has deployed numerous B1 bombers throughout the Caribbean Sea not only to attack suspicious ships, but to, in general, deter drug traffickers. The risk is enormous and it is advisable to have everything well planned. The problem is that Trump is more about acting and then seeing. In this case, it could be a huge mistake.