During the past 10 days that shook the world, two fault lines have appeared in international politics—principally, the regime change project of the US President Donald Trump in Venezuela and, two, a potential break-up of the Western alliance.
If only the celebrated Latin American literary giant Gabriel García Márquez were alive today, this would have been a fitting moment in his tumultuous career—marking the entry of magical realism, a literary genre blending the mundane with the fantastic, into the realm of geopolitics.
Herein lies a paradox. While Trump may have missed the Nobel Peace Prize, he can still claim a legacy of making magical realism a global phenomenon in politics—a potentially more enduring legacy for some. He has succeeded in situating us onlookers in a predominantly realistic setting while his fantasies are rolling out in an unreal world, with unreal characters. He brings alive García Márquez’s powerful metaphor of cows wandering through and eating the curtains inside a deposed dictator’s home.
The regime change in Venezuela had an easy explanation—it is a vivid display of the Trump administration’s prioritisation of the Western hemisphere in its foreign policy strategies, as outlined in the recent National Security Strategy released by the White House. This hypothesis was articulated, albeit somewhat crudely, by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the most experienced top diplomat in the entire Trump team, when he spoke to a TV network on Sunday, “This is the Western hemisphere. This is where we live—and we’re not going to allow it to be a base of operations for adversaries, competitors and rivals of the United States.”
All sorts of atavistic fears appear to be swirling in Rubio’s subconscious mind, vaguely hinting that the US, like an ageing lion losing its mane, is coming home for better cooling and hunting in a thorny terrain, but where it also has to contend with predators who appeared to settle old scores—Russia, China and Iran in particular.
Venezuela is synonymous with energy security. If China accounts for around 80 percent of Venezuela’s oil exports in recent years, Russia and Iran are Caracas’s team-mates in the Great Game over the petrodollar. If China has quietly ‘de-dollarised’ its oil trade with Venezuela, Russia and Iran are world champions in beating American sanctions. All this has been going on right under the nose of the Americans, who couldn’t do anything about it.
To be sure, there’s a long haul ahead for Trump. Mexico, for instance, is a challenge equivalent to Venezuela multiplied by at least five—with a 2,000-mile long land border with the US, its political economy rests firmly on a bizarre institutionalised bonding between its leftist ruling elite and the mafiosi (with collaborators in the US). President Claudia Sheinbaum is seeking a settlement with Trump, had a “good conversation” with him and even ruled out a US invasion.
On the other hand, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel remains defiant, unimpressed by the shock and awe of the US’s secret strategic weapon (sourced from microwave generators) generating ultra-high-frequency electromagnetic radiation.
Trump cannot emulate Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves by simply chanting the magical phrase ‘Open Sesame’ to lure the regional states to come over to his side. Ever since the US transitioned in the mid-20th century to a more proactive international strategy—with the state department officially declaring the end of the Monroe Doctrine era—the Western hemisphere has transformed beyond recognition. Trump himself admitted as much when, on January 3, he rechristened it as the ‘Donroe Doctrine’.
Simply put, it is impossible to make a chastity belt to lock the elected leaders of such a vast, uncontrollable continent teeming with poets and guerrillas, or neutralise Chinese and Russian influence in the region—and, all this is to be completed by 2028. What was done to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro will only increase anti-American sentiment, complicating the Donroe Doctrine. Presidential elections are coming up in Colombia and Brazil, where left-wing forces are predicted to win.
Russia is not the Soviet Union, and Moscow and Beijing have no misconceptions that Trump’s military operation in Venezuela aims to establish unlimited control over the country's natural resources and assert Washington’s hegemonic ambitions in Latin America. Over and above, it remains an ‘unknown unknown’ how Trump’s experimentation in creating a new oligarchy in Caracas will end up. What if a ‘new Maduro’ emerges at the top of the heap eventually?
Again, the plain truth is that the countries in the region that are committed to cooperation with Beijing are themselves reluctant to reorient themselves towards Washington. Trump’s abacus may tell him that the combined oil reserves of Venezuela, Guyana and the US will give him sway over almost 30 percent of the global total—and put him in a commanding position over international oil markets. But the oil market has hidden charms, too, as Russian President Vladimir Putin or Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman know only too well. Simply put, the oil market is such that while Saudi Arabia can pump crude at a cost of less than $10 a barrel, his kingdom needs prices above $100 to bring its fiscal deficit down to zero. Therein hangs a tale.
Big Oil cold-shouldered Trump when he graciously proposed that the industry should invest at least $100 billion to rebuild Venezuela’s energy sector with US security guarantees. It emerges from reportage that it was a stormy meeting, as most CEOs told Trump that Venezuela would need big changes to attract investment. ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods said point-blank that the country is “uninvestable” in the current state. ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance said Venezuela’s energy system needed to be restructured first. Chevron, the only US oil major operating in Venezuela through joint ventures with the State-owned Petróleos de Venezuela, responded that the company may be able to increase production “within our own disciplined investment schemes by about 50 percent just in the next 18 to 24 months”.
Trump has since threatened to punish ExxonMobil—historically, a veritable state within the US in its scale, global reach and immense economic power, which allows it to function like a sovereign entity and operate across jurisdictions and regulations due to its integrated operations.
M K Bhadrakumar | Former diplomat
(Views are personal)