Staging a coup in Venezuela - maybe not so easy

Jeff Bezos' Washington Post has decided It's time for them to hedge on their support for the Trump-Pence coup attempt in Venezuela. So, apparently, has pretty much every country that has played along with it so far.

The Post editorial's title sounds more decisive than the text itself. A peaceful ploy against Venezuela failed. That doesn’t make force the answer. 02/25/2019. The editorial reads like a classic committee-composed document:

The Trump administration has repeatedly hinted at military intervention. But Saturday showed the regime is ready to call that bluff. That means Mr. Guaidó and his international alliance must settle in for a potentially prolonged economic and diplomatic siege. The chances for success still look substantial, given the ability of the United States and its allies to choke off most of the regime’s revenue. But patience will be necessary — and, in the meantime, Venezuelans will continue to endure more violence and deprivation.

This reminds me of the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961. The CIA staged a hapless invasion attempt. The backers of the attempt assumed that if the initial landing went badly, the new Kennedy Administration would invervene militarily in support of them. The rest, as they say, is history. "The chances for success still look substantial, given the ability of the United States and its allies to choke off most of the regime’s revenue," says the Post editorial. That's pretty much what the US did with Cuba. Now we're in 2019, and the Communist government is still in power in Cuba. After decades of sanctions which themselves had negative blowback for the US in foreign affairs.

The Guardian reported back in September on this comment of Trump's about the Maduro government, “It’s a regime that, frankly, could be toppled very quickly by the military if the military decides to do that. It’s a truly bad place in the world today.” (Trump says Venezuela 'could be toppled very quickly' by military coup 09/28/2018)

This is probably what John Bolton and Mike Pence were telling him in meetings and with his famously deficient filter for such things, he probably just blurted this out.

Two of the most destructive problems for the US in foreign policy since the Second World War have been threat inflation and wishful thinking. Obama pursued a generally conservative policy on Latin America. And when he wanted to impose certain kinds of sanctions, to do so he had to officially designate Venezuela as a threat to the national security of the United States. Which it wasn't and isn't. But it was another example of Obama moving forward and conservative agenda, which the Trump-Pence Administration just tried to escalate into a military intervention. That's a classic case of threat inflation.

And this coup attempt that is transmuting into farce at this point - a farce with some very serious real-world effects - is shaping up to be a classic case of wishful thinking. Enough people apparently convinced themselves that all they had to do was find a pretty face like Juan Guaidó to declare a coup and because they were being applauded by Trump's administration in Washington that everything would just fall into place.

Not that the danger is over. There is a real humanitarian crisis in Venezuela and there are some serious democratic deficits in Maduro's regime. The best recent summary I've seen is Venezuela, esa herida absurda Anfibia Jan 2019 from José Natanson, an editorial director for Le Monde Diplomatique. I haven't found an English version of this piece yet, unfortunately.

US support for the Venezuelan opposition will continue, some of it legal and some not.

And Venezuela still has the largest oil reserves of any country in the world.