Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020 and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
Take a deep breath and consider the following proposition. Just because Donald Trump does something, that doesn’t make it a bad thing.
I wonder how many pundits would have reacted differently to the removal of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s dim and venal dictator, had it been ordered by Joe Biden.
The idea that Trump’s action constitutes a sudden abandonment of the international legal order is hard to sustain.
For a start, it is far from clear that it was the breach of sovereignty that Third Worldists claim.
Yes, to intervene in another country without its approval is a hostile act. But the key words here are “without its approval”. Almost no state other than the usual delinquents (Russia, Belarus, China, North Korea, Iran, Nicaragua, Cuba) recognised Maduro’s election last year. The poll was so blatantly and comically fraudulent that even the populist-Left governments in Latin America would not endorse it.
Legally, for most of the world, Maduro was not a head of state but a wanted criminal. The recognised Venezuelan government – that of the exiled Edmundo González, a retired diplomat nominated by the Opposition as a unifying figure when their leader, the Nobel laureate and all-round heroine María Corina Machado, was disqualified – has not raised any objection to the intervention, quite the contrary.
Far from being a radical departure, a US President intervening in the Americas is a return to established foreign policy. The laissez-faire of Obama, Trump I and Biden was the departure.
Trump’s hemispheric intervention is firmly in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt (Panama, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Venezuela); William Taft (Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras); Woodrow Wilson (Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras); Warren Harding (Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua); Calvin Coolidge (Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Honduras); Herbert Hoover (Haiti, Nicaragua); Franklin D Roosevelt (Haiti, Nicaragua); Dwight D Eisenhower (Guatemala); John F Kennedy (Cuba); Lyndon B Johnson (Dominican Republic); Ronald Reagan (Grenada); George HW Bush (Panama); Bill Clinton (Haiti, Colombia); and George W Bush (Haiti, Colombia).
Ah, say critics, but most of those interventions were at least notionally about restoring democracy. Trump, by contrast, talks of “running” Venezuela as if it were some kind of American proconsulate.
Well, Trump often talks in a stream-of-consciousness, Joyceian style. But think about it. Suppose your goal were to restore democracy to Venezuela, to manage a peaceful transition to a government led by Machado, whose candidates won 67 per cent of the vote at July’s election (we know this because, anticipating that the fraud would happen centrally, they recorded the tallies at every local polling station). How would you go about it?
The opposition may have won two thirds of the vote, but it commands no military units, controls no police and holds no territory. The only way to oust a dictator without a civil war is to get others within the regime to turn him in, which is precisely what seems to have happened.
The pitch to the figures around Maduro would have been, roughly speaking: “This guy is going down, but you don’t have to go down with him. Work with us on an orderly transition, and we’ll look after you. You won’t be expropriated or exiled or hounded through the courts. You’ll get to lecture at think tanks about democratisation. Or, if you prefer, you can work against us and end up in a cell next to Maduro.”
I have been suggesting since October that the US was turning regime figures. I was struck by the confidence of my friends in the democratic opposition. They have always been realistic about what would be possible and when.
Might Trump, in a Caligulan spasm, renege on whatever assurances the opposition think they have, and do a deal with the rump Bolivarian regime provided it makes restitution to US oil companies? Anything is possible when you’re dealing with a megalomaniac. But it would make little sense.
If your goal is regional stability, a reduction in the migratory pressures on your borders, the removal of a Chinese base of operations from your hemisphere and a government that is pro-American by temperament rather than from sulky compliance, you would follow through. This is what I understand Marco Rubio to mean when he says that elections are not feasible “in the next two or three months”.
The restoration of democracy would end what has until now been the chief source of instability in the Western Hemisphere. More than seven million Venezuelans have been exiled by the socialist dictatorship, generally the more enterprising part of the population. If even half of them went home, the weakest economy in Latin America would become one of the strongest and, as oil began to flow again, Russia and Iran would be discomfited.
None of what I have written is an endorsement of Trumpian foreign policy or of Trump. A decade ago, I described him on this site as “a self-absorbed, foul-mouthed, thin-skinned, bullying, mendacious, meretricious, mountainous berk,” and nothing has changed my mind. His abandonment of Ukraine is shameful, his threats against Canada are disgusting and his designs on Greenland might have been scripted by Vladimir Putin to destroy the Western alliance.
Still, he seems to have called Venezuela correctly and, in so doing, to have made the world a slightly better place.
