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Trump in front of the White House on August 17, 2018.
By Mark Wilson / Getty Images.
About a year ago, Donald Trump said he was considering a "military option" in Venezuela. At the time, virtually no one in Washington thought it was a good idea. "It is an act of supreme extremism," said the Venezuelan Minister of Defense, Vladimir Padrino López, said at the time. "As a Minister of Defense and Venezuelan citizen, I say it's an act of madness." In fact, Trump's advisers, including the former national security advisor. H.R. McMaster and former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, would have spent at least five minutes "explaining to Trump how a military action could turn against him and risk losing the hard-won support of the Latin American governments." the United Nations, "it is a regime that, frankly, could be overthrown very quickly by the army if the military decided to do it".
What at What has changed, alarmingly, is that there are now people in Washington who have come to the idea. Last month, senator Marco Rubio He stated that, although his long-standing preference for finding a peaceful solution in Venezuela, there is now a "strong argument" that the situation poses a threat to security in both Latin America and the United States. may require US military intervention. Bloomberg notes that "security hawks with an interest in Latin America are taking positions in the administration, which adds to the feeling that Washington may be intervening." José Cárdenas, who would have written an editorial this summer, entitled "It's time for a coup in Venezuela", would be considered for a post at the State Department. Mauricio Claver-Carone, who is opposed to rapprochement with Cuba is likely to be appointed Director of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the National Security Council.
Of course, there is still a group of people in the United States who are strongly opposed to this idea. As Anthony Cordesman, The Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Washington Center for Strategic and International Studies told Bloomberg that the intervention "would raise a lot of concern about the revival of American interference in Latin America and that it is far from clear. any of your refugee and population problems. There is also the long record of US military intervention. . . Not so big, not to mention the fact that Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Chile all issued a statement earlier this month rejecting the use or even the threat of force in Venezuela.
But there is another reason why Trump could go anyway – one that is not entirely to free the Venezuelans from the horrors of Nicolás Maduro dictatorship:
David Smilde, a Venezuelan expert at Tulane University in New Orleans, opposes an intervention but says that if Trump believes that he needs a major victory in foreign policy with a future re-election, he might decide to "make things happen".
Francisco Rodriguez, A Venezuelan economist who quit his job on Wall Street Capital this year to help an opposition leader, agrees, saying that Trump has plenty of incentives to intervene in Venezuela because military actions tend to increase presidential approval ratings. Maduro's ties to drug trafficking and terrorist groups give him the excuse. Military intervention is still unlikely, but "the likelihood has increased," Rodriguez said.
