Trump’s full-throttle threats suggest no backing down from aims to topple Maduro’s regime

Original article by Robert Tait in Washington

Weeks of saber-rattling, dark threats and a US military buildup not seen in Latin America since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis led on 21 November, somewhat anticlimactically, to a telephone call, when Donald Trump rang the man he has cast as his arch-adversary, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.

By Trump’s own account, it was less an attempt at opening dialogue en route to a mutually beneficial compromise than a bid to up the ante by imparting an ultimatum.

“You can save yourself and those closest to you, but you must leave the country now,” Trump is said to have told a leader who he has branded a narco-terrorist and baselessly accused of emptying his country’s prisons in order to send its most violent criminals to the US.

The revelation this week of that threat seemed to dispel thoughts that Trump is backing down from decisive action to topple Maduro’s regime.

Yet conflict with Venezuela has not always seemed inevitable.

Just months ago, Trump’s special missions envoy, Richard Grenell, seemed to have paved a path to compromise with Caracas – persuading Maduro to accept return flights of deported migrants from the US, while also agreeing to release to free 10 US nationals and legal residents held captive in the US.

Maduro has also floated the possibility of further agreement by offering the US access to Venezuela’s rich supply of oil and mineral resources.

Yet instead of more deals, a president whose electoral appeal was partly based on a vow to end the US’s supposed addiction to distant foreign war appears to be on the brink of igniting a conflict in its own hemisphere.

Grenell, who argued for pragmatism, found himself supplanted by the more hawkish advocacy of Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and acting national security adviser, who has long taken a hard line towards Maduro and his late predecessor, Hugo Chávez.

One widely held explanation for the shift is that Trump is prey to the influence of the last person he was briefed by – a role presumably played, in this instance, by the increasingly influential Rubio.

But some close observers of Trump’s Venezuela policy argue that the administration’s chief anti-Maduro hawk is Trump himself.

“I don’t deny that Rubio’s currency is currently very high with the president, who thinks he’s doing a good job. But Trump has been a pretty implacable opponent of Maduro for a long time. He has much different and more mixed feelings about other dictators and other parts of the world, but he has been more consistent on Maduro,” said Ryan Berg, head of the future of Venezuela initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“In many ways, Venezuela is unfinished business for Trump from his first presidency. [And] Venezuela really does touch all of the issues that are priority issues for Trump – drugs in the hemisphere, migration in the hemisphere, and China in the hemisphere.”

Trump’s ultimatum raises the possibility that the administration could launch a “decapitation strike” aimed at killing Maduro, Berg said. Despite the inevitable condemnation that would it would draw from killing a national leader, the administration believes it would be justified because it does not consider Maduro to be a legitimate head of state – pointing to two presidential elections, in 2018 and 2024, he is widely believed to have stolen.

“Maduro and those around him are betting that Trump is going to back down and on this, I think they could be very mistaken,” said Berg. “My sincere belief is that Trump is serious about this, and that we may well see strikes in Venezuela before Christmas.”

But he added: “There is an effort within the administration to do this an easier way, which is to offer Maduro a chance to leave on his own terms through some kind of negotiated exit. He could get safe passage to some other place.”

Yet if Trump is offering secure passage to Maduro to leave power – with Qatar, Cuba and even Turkey being touted as possible exile locations – there is still little guarantee that the Venezuelan leader will take it.

“Not everybody’s motivated by a few hundred million bucks and a plane ride,” said one US businessmen with longstanding ties to Venezuela and experience of dealing with Maduro. “There are not many examples of people leaving the country with that kind of money living very long, so it’s not a very appetizing prospect for Maduro.”

Steve Ellner, a former professor at Venezuela’s Universidad de Oriente and a veteran commentator on the country’s politics, argued that Trump’s resort to a threatening phone call may in itself be a response to the Venezuelan armed forces’ refusal to buckle before the overwhelming US military presence.

“One of the things that Maduro has demonstrated is that there’s going to be resistance,” Ellner said. “If the Venezuelan military was going to overthrow Maduro out of fear of a US invasion, it would have happened by now.”

He added: “Had Maduro not reacted the way he did with this [military] mobilization, had there not been pushback from Latin American leaders like [Colombia’s President Gustavo] Petro and [Brazil’s president] Lula and [Mexico’s President Claudia [Sheinbaum] … maybe there would have been boots on the ground or some kind of military action in Venezuela.”

Trump, argued Ellner, was using intimidation to extract the greatest possible concessions from Maduro while “playing it by ear” before deciding on military action.

“The way this played out was not a best-case scenario for the hawks, and that’s why, up until now, he hasn’t done anything on Venezuelan territory,” he said. “But that’s not to say that that might not happen. It very well might.”