Rubio’s strategy: the tail wags the dog?

US President Donald Trump has ordered “a total and complete” blockade of all ‘sanctioned’ oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuelan ports, which is technically an act of war. How seriously should we take this?

Trump has certainly threatened war with Venezuela in the past. Former US National Security advisor John Bolton reports that Trump said during his first presidential term (2017-2020) that invading Venezuela would be “cool” because it is “really part of the United States.”

Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Director of the FBI, says that Trump told him in 2019 that Venezuela was “the country we should be going to war with. They have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.”

Gustavo Petro, the current president of Colombia, says that his predecessor Iván Duque was approached by Trump in 2020 with a plan to invade Venezuela via Colombia. (No need for an amphibious landing operation. Just disembark the US troops in Santa Marta and march them across the border.) Trump’s advisors talked him out of that one.

He was still at it two years ago, when he said at a press conference in North Carolina: “When I left [the presidency in 2020] Venezuela was about to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have kept all that oil.”

It sounds pretty damning, until you recall that Trump is a blowhard who almost never acts on his threats (‘Taco’ – ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’). Or just count the numbers and realise that there are not enough American troops in the Caribbean region at the moment to make a full-scale invasion of Venezuela a viable military option.

And if you are still in doubt, remember that Trump is politically allergic to wars. His promise to his own Maga base was ‘no more forever wars’ in exotic places. He is famous for echoing the views of the last person who spoke to him, but it would take some truly masterful manipulation to persuade him to go against his own gut instincts.

On the other hand, blockade alone is unlikely to bring down the Maduro regime. Losing the oil income will hurt the regime, but Venezuela has already seen its oil production collapse (now less than one million barrels/day) for purely domestic reasons. They did it to themselves through incompetence and corruption, and they are already sort of used to being poor.

Moreover, the Venezuelan regime is not so foolish that it will give the war hawks in the US administration a pretext for invasion by trying to break the blockade by force. The frustration will build up on both sides, but it is unlikely to explode into major violence unless some senior figure in the Trump administration goes rogue….

“In my opinion, the three regimes that exist in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba are enemies of humanity,” said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Costa Rica early this year.

He was making a special point of saying it there because Nicaragua is Costa Rica’s next-door neighbour, but he actually says it almost everywhere he goes. That is the bee in his bonnet.

Marco Rubio is a second-generation Cuban-American whose parents immigrated to Miami in the mid-1950, several years before Fidel Castro’s Communist regime took power, but like many other Cuban-Americans his politics have been defined by that event. Reversing it has been his life’s goal.

For a long time there seemed no clear path to that goal, although all three of those regimes are unpopular and all three countries are impoverished. (John Bolton calls them the ‘Troika of Tyranny’).

But Rubio had lots of access to Donald Trump as one of Florida’s two senators, and he was sharp enough to see that Trump might be his instrument to end those regimes.

His plan of campaign (if that’s what it was) ended triumphantly with his elevation to Secretary of State last January, in charge of America’s foreign policy. That clearly is a large part of the reason why the focus of US foreign policy has shifted to the Western hemisphere this year.

Is it also the reason why there has been a strong and particular focus on Venezuela, a country that rarely features at the top of anybody’s priority list?

Possibly so, because there is a pseudo-strategic analysis which holds that the road to Havana and the overthrow of Cuba’s Communist regime runs through Venezuela.

It is complete nonsense, of course. If the Cuban revolution managed to survive even when the Soviet Union collapsed, it is unlikely to fall just because Venezuela suffers violent regime change. If and when it goes under, it will fall of its own weight.

But Rubio’s fantasy could lead the United States into a forever war in Venezuela if Trump doesn’t keep him on a short leash.