Off the coast of Venezuela is exactly the distraction Trump needs

A naval skirmish in the Caribbean could, writes Kim Sengupta, helpfully distract from the president's mishandling of coronavirus

President Donald Trump addresses the daily coronavirus response briefing at the White House on 1 April 2020. (Reuters)

It was the first decisive naval skirmish in the Caribbean for 75 years, a furious salvo from guns, then a violent ramming of hulls, leaving one of the duelling vessels sinking into the seabed.

The exchange took place between the Naiguata, a Venezuelan Navy patrol boat, and the Resolute, a Portuguese-flagged cruiseliner near the island of Tortuga. The patrol boat had opened fire with its 76mm gun, but then came off worse in the collision with the liner which has been strengthened to act as an ice-breaker for adventure tourism.

The crew of the Naiguta were rescued. The Venezuelan government claimed that the Resolute had to be intercepted because it was intent on carrying out “acts of aggression and piracy” – preparing to land armed mercenaries on the coast. The evidence produced for this were photographs of six black each capable of carrying seven commandos, enough to carry out sabotage attacks.

Was that really the case? The website of One Ocean Expeditions, the owners of the Resolute, describes that the ship recently took 162 passengers on an Antarctic cruise. It also shows the inflatables being used to take the visitors to get closer views of landscape and of whales, seals and penguins.

The Tortuga encounter a fortnight ago, however, took place as tensions between Venezuela and the US was reaching a sparking point with threats and counter-threats. Two days later, the Trump administration used a briefing on coronavirus – hijacked it, according to critics – to announce the deployment of a naval task force to the Venezuelan coastline. General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later added that “thousands of sailors, coast guardsmen, soldiers, airmen, marines are involved in this operation.”

The previous week, the US Justice Department had indicted Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s President and Washington’s bête noir, and 13 others in the country’s leadership on charges of narcoterrorism. There were immediate accusations that the move was politically motivated and designed to scupper internal dialogue between the government and opposition in the country.

This, said critics, was an attempt at distraction at a time when Donald Trump was beginning to feel the backlash over his chaotic handling of the pandemic. A day earlier, the administration had admitted that the death toll from the virus could reach up to 240,000, a grim landmark for a disease the president had dismissed as a “Democrat hoax.”

Trump declared: “We must not let the drug cartels exploit the pandemic to threaten American lives.” Defence secretary Mark Esper added, “As nations around the world shift their focus inward to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, many criminal organisations are attempting to capitalise on the crisis.” But while it is true that fraudsters are trying to use the pandemic to carry out scams, there is little evidence that the drug cartels are profiting much from it.

They are, if anything, facing problems. Keith Ditcham, director of Organised Crime and Policing at the Royal United Services Institute pointed out that Mexican gangs are struggling to purchase precursor chemicals needed to make fentanyl – a recreational drug often mixed with heroin and cocaine – because of border closures.

The White House then changed its tune from the deployment being necessarily to counter drug gangs to countering people traffickers who are “seeking to take advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic by increasing their illicit trade activity which can contribute to the spread of the virus among diverse groups of people and across vast distances.”

But all the information available suggests that people traffickers are finding it difficult to transport their cargo due to extra security at frontiers and internal roadblock in countries. In fact, gangs in Central American countries like Honduras have raised their fees because of the greater risks involved.

US military officials have privately raised their concern about the way the naval mission was being spun. Newsweek, for instance, reported a senior Pentagon official saying that it “has nothing to do with the virus...POTUS is using the operation to attempt to redirect attention.”

Trump has boasted that what he has sent is doubling the US military presence off Venezuela. Esper listed the deployment consisting of destroyers, littoral combat ships, helicopters, P-8 patrol aircraft, along with E-3 AWACS and E-8 JSTARS to carry out airborne surveillance, control and communications.

Comparisons have been made with the run-up to the US invasions of Panama and Grenada. The force gathered is not enough to invade Venezuela – but it is enough to carry out an action with far-reaching consequences.

The Maduro government is concerned that vital supplies including oil could be intercepted by the Americans. The Trump administration has already claimed -- without offering evidence – that narcotics are being trafficked “using naval vessels from Venezuela” and announced that it is targeting ships that transport oil from Cuba to Venezuela in order to enforce US sanctions.

In the film Wag the Dog, a spin doctor and Hollywood producer orchestrates a war in Albania to distract voters from a presidential sex scandal. The obvious analogy was made when the Clinton administration bombed the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan at the outbreak of the Lewinsky scandal, and then again when there was a brief bombing spree of Iraq during Bill Clinton’s impeachment.

Allegations of serious sexual misconduct do not stick to Trump, but he is taking a pounding in the polls over mismanagement of Covid-19.

An incident off the coast of Venezuela could, if Trump's polling figures continue to fall, provide a useful distraction. It is also likely to be a vote-winner in places like Florida, where there is a largeCuban population hostile to left-wing governments. If he can somehow tie the Venezuelan regimes to the spread of coronavirus, however spurious it is in reality, it will be a real added bonus.

The US military is under pressure over the coronavirus outbreak. The aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, whose captain was sacked after calling for help over an outbreak of the virus, is in-dock in Guam with around 4,000 of its 4,865 sailors on board in quarantine. The US Navy is trying to quarantine the crew of another carrier, the USS Nimitz, while a third, the USS Harry S Truman, is being held off-shore at the end of a seven-month mission to ensure that at least one is ready for a short-notice deployment if required.

There is believed to be increasing frustration among Pentagon officials that needed assets are tied up off Venezuela while they have to cope with the problems. But the White House is apparently adamant that they should stay in place.

Is there a possibility of another Tonkin Incident, the faked confrontation with North Vietnam that allowed hawks in the US to take the country deeper into the Vietnam War? There may not actually be a need to stage such an incident. A build-up of forces in an arena always brings with it the risk of the law of unintended consequences: the prospect of misinterpretation and misjudgement in a tense situation, resulting in a military clash.

That has already happened once in this case with the Venezuelan Navy and the Portuguese ship. The next such encounter could turn out to be a more lethal affair with widespread consequences. And, if that does happen, we wait to see whether it gives Trump a much-needed popularity boost at such a dire time in his extraordinary presidency.