Late on Friday evening, Donald Trump authorised Operation Absolute Resolve. American soldiers including special forces carried out a meticulously rehearsed raid on the safe house of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and seized him and his wife. Maduro is now in New York, where he faces charges of drug trafficking and “narco-terrorism conspiracy”.
From a purely military standpoint, it was an extraordinarily successful operation: sudden, swift, focused and carried out with overwhelming force. The removal of Maduro, widely believed to have rigged the 2024 presidential election to deny victory to opposition leader Edmundo González, is the closing of one chapter. But a much wider issue now presents itself: what next?
Trump’s announcements have been characteristically expansive and vague. He told a press conference “we will run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition” and that the task would be carried out by “the people standing right behind me”. These included Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
The priority is Venezuela’s oil industry. Trump continued: “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
It is not clear how this will be achieved. Maduro’s regime remains in place; Rubio has been in contact with the Vice President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, who has been sworn in as interim president, and Trump claimed she expressed her willingness to do “whatever the US asks”. Rodríguez, however, has described Maduro as the “only one president in Venezuela” and said that the country is ready to defend itself.
It seems inevitable that Trump will now deploy US forces to Venezuela, having already said “we’re not afraid of boots on the ground”. In an interview with The Atlantic he did not shy away from grand plans. “Rebuilding there and regime change, anything you want to call it, is better than what you have right now. Can’t get any worse.”
The looming collective folk memory is Iraq. The US-led coalition’s ground invasion in March 2003 was brilliantly successful, with combat operations lasting just 42 days. That, it would turn out, was the easy part. Running Iraq then became the responsibility of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) for 14 months before it handed over to the Iraqi interim government. Planning and preparation for the post-conflict phase was woefully inadequate and optimistic.
The CPA spent money liberally and carelessly – $8bn went unaccounted for from a reconstruction budget of around $60bn – but there was a pervasive optimism which ignored hard decisions. Major-General Tim Cross, the most senior British officer in the CPA, told the Iraq Inquiry that planning had been “woefully thin”. He later summed up the coalition’s failure: “We didn’t have a clear and coherent post-war plan for Iraq. Most people thought that we didn’t really need a plan: once we’ve got rid of Saddam Hussein, a wonderful new democracy would emerge, and they never considered a Plan B or C.”
I visited Iraq with the House of Commons Defence Committee in 2007 and 2008. Years after the invasion, and after president George W Bush had notoriously declared “Mission accomplished”, the situation was bleakly obvious. Coalition forces were deeply enmeshed in a barely functioning state where the pressing priority was simply maintaining the security situation against an increasingly powerful and deadly insurgency. In Basra, in southern Iraq, British units were for a while largely confined to their fortified base because of the insurgent threat.
American and British combat forces remained in Iraq until 2011; the US deployment peaked at 170,000 personnel in 2007, they suffered 4,492 deaths in total and the eventual cost is estimated at $3trn. (179 British service personnel were killed.) Despite that huge cost in blood and treasure, the United States walked away leaving a country still fragile and wracked by violence, and the “plan” to democratise Iraq and exploit its vast potential oil wealth remains unrealised.
The US track record on nation-building is not a proud one. In Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, hundreds of thousands of troops have been deployed to achieve results by sheer weight of numbers without clear and achievable goals. It has always ended in humiliating, bloody and expensive failure.
It may be that the Trump administration has a detailed and sustainable plan for the future of Venezuela, though appearances and the President’s track record suggest it is highly unlikely. There is a much greater danger that the United States will be sucked inexorably into the kind of “forever war” of which Trump was so critical in his first presidential campaign in 2016.
There will be no excuses. This is a conflict of Trump’s choosing in which the US has made the first move, part of what he cringingly calls “the Donroe doctrine” to secure domination of the Americas. He is almost carelessly open to increasing the US military commitment on the grounds that the situation “can’t get any worse”. That is a fundamental mistake – it can always get worse, and it frequently does.
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