January 6th Casts a Shadow Over Our Actions in Venezuela - Horowitz

January 6th Casts a Shadow Over Our Actions in Venezuela - Horowitz

Today marks the five-year anniversary of an unprecedented and violent attempt to block the peaceful transfer of power, incited by a president who was using the bully pulpit to repeatedly and falsely claim that the election was stolen as he attempted to cling to power by all and any means. As former special prosecutor Jack Smith told the House Judiciary Committee during closed-door testimony in mid-December, which only recently became public, January 6th “does not happen without Donald Trump.”  The special prosecutor, who was in charge of the two federal criminal cases against Mr. Trump, also spelled out that the president’s tweet while the insurrection was still in full roar, criticizing Mike Pence for failing to do his bidding that day put the vice-president’s life in danger and that he was the "most culpable and most responsible person" in the broader criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Mr. Trump’s behavior on January 6 itself, his work to overturn the election results in the days leading up to it, and his ramped-up authoritarianism in the nearly one year he has been back in power cast a shadow over our actions in Venezuela. Mr. Trump’s well-earned reputation here at home and around the world for being at best indifferent to democratic values and for blatant dishonesty has upped the skepticism and distrust of the administration’s motivations for its large-scale military action on Venezuelan soil, successfully extracting Nicolás Maduro for trial in the United States and its plans for the South American nation going forward. To put it simply, Mr. Trump’s willingness to do or say anything to stay in power or for his own self-interest broadly defined is the prism in which most of the world views our approach to Venezuela, making a move that would be controversial under any American president, more suspect.

The administration’s shifting explanations and questionable assertions in the month or so leading up to this past weekend’s bold action, along with its post-Maduro capture messaging has only made matters worse.   In a rambling, unfocused performance at his Saturday morning media conference, Mr. Trump inexplicably dismissed María Corina Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient, whose stand-in candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, garnered more than 2-in-3 votes in the 2024 election, as the potential future president, saying she is  a “very nice woman” but lacks the “support” and “respect” inside the country. He also failed to mention Gonzalez at all.  President Trump’s ill-considered words undermined Ms.Machado’s call for the Venezuelan military to recognize Gonzalez as president.  Independent ballot audits confirmed that the real winner of the 2024 presidential election.

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Even worse, Mr. Trump blithely declared that the United States would run Venezuela for the foreseeable future, emphasizing how we would gain control of the nation’s oil reserves, which he continued to implausibly argue were somehow stolen from us. In announcing that Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s vice president, had been sworn in as acting president, he asserted she would essentially be a figurehead, taking orders from his administration.

Predictably, Ms. Rodriguez vigorously objected to an assertion of seemingly limitless American control.  Flanked by the defense minister, Rodriguez remarked, “If there is something the Venezuelan people will never be again, it is slaves, or the colony of an empire.”

Instead of framing our approach to Venezuela in the wake of the capture of Maduro as removing a repressive dictator and putting the Venezuelan people back in charge, President Trump made it sound like little more than a naked grab for oil and power.  While he continued to give a nod to his wildly exaggerated claims about Maduro’s role in the illegal drug trade doing major harm to the United States, if one was serious about tackling our domestic drug problem, taking out Maduro when most of the illegal drugs produced in Venezuela go to Europe and they are neither producers or exporters of fentanyl, wouldn’t make the top 20 or so priorities.

Going forward, our policy in Venezuela will only be successful substantively and politically if we explicitly work to advance the democratic aspirations of the Venezuelan people.  Its Supreme Court has set a 90-day period for Ms. Rodriguez to serve as acting president.  Our role should be to push for a special presidential election to occur no more than 3 months or so after that 90- day period concludes, and to ensure that it will be free and fair, with all sides accepting the credibility of the results by insisting on international election monitors.  It is also important for the administration to recognize that any large, visible military footprint the United States establishes on Venezuelan soil will result in a fierce and possibly violent backlash, one that will not reflect well on us and that will be difficult to put down.

Overcoming the negative frame in which our actions in Venezuela are being viewed requires us to begin digging out of a hole that the predominant perceptions of President Trump in part forged by his behavior on January 6 and the initial post-Maduro ham-handed messaging and explanations have created.  Whether or not you think the decision to remove Maduro from power through American military force was advisable or not, there remains a potential positive way forward through capitalizing on the strong dislike most Venezuelans have for their former president.

This can only be done, however, if we work overtime to avoid being perceived as an oppressive occupying force or as a nation that is only interested in exploiting Venezuelan national resources.   In words that will at least sound familiar to our president, all of our actions in Venezuela must put the Venezuelan people first, starting today.