If Venezuela slides towards war – it's down to more than Trump’s know-nothing approach to world politics

The president is guided by two arch-proponents of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, setting out US strategy towards Latin America

Is Donald Trump about to launch a war against Venezuela? Judging from the president and his supporters’ recent rhetoric it appears that they are laying the ground for such a possibility. In a CBS interview on Sunday Trump said that sending US troops to crisis-ridden Venezuela is “an option”. He also affirmed that he had rejected a request from Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro for talks.

Trump, his close supporters in the White House and now European leaders have recognised Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s interim president. This is despite the inauguration of Maduro for his second term as president on 10 January. The pretext is the grave crisis afflicting Venezuela, where around 3 million people have fled the country over the last four years, as a consequence of economic collapse and Maduro’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies.

The US might not intervene directly. It could foment a proxy war waged by the mini-Trumps of the region, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Colombia’s Iván Duque Márquez. Both have publicly stated their wish to bring down Maduro’s government.

A war in the region would be a humanitarian disaster. All parties directly involved – Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia and of course the US – have strong militaries, capable of inflicting massive civilian casualties and infrastructural damage.

It is tempting to interpret this slide towards conflict as another example of Trump’s know-nothing approach to world politics, backed by his “team of morons”. But such interpretations hide a two-centuries-long US project of carving out and maintaining Latin America as its backyard.

Trump certainly deployed anti-interventionist rhetoric during his 2016 election campaign. But his “America First” agenda is based on re-positioning the US internationally, which, by definition, requires a re-shaping global geopolitics.

Far from Trump being advised by “morons”, two of his closest allies, Vice president Mike Pence and Bolton are both guided by the principles of the Monroe Doctrine. The doctrine, articulated by President James Monroe in 1823, stated that the US would guarantee the new-found sovereignty of its Latin American neighbours. Its underlying objectives were to establish the region as its economic backyard.

Through a combination of gunboat and dollar diplomacy – real or threatened force combined with loans – the US facilitated the emergence of agro and mineral exporting ruling classes across the region. These supplied cheap raw materials, produced by impoverished labouring classes, to the industrialising north of the US and provided markets for manufactured goods.

Monroe doctrine principles informed US support for dictatorships and counter-insurgent movements up to the present day. From backing the Argentinian Junta’s dirty war in during the 1970s and early 1980s (30,000 dead) to direct intervention in El Salvador in the 1980s (75,000 dead), US intervention was explained as an essential counter to the threat of Communism and the protection of Latin American sovereignty.

Following the collapse of Communist Russia in 1991 it looked as if Latin America was now firmly under US influence, with free-market, export-orientated regimes in place across the continent. But from the early 2000s onwards, US authority in the region suffered death by a thousand cuts. One regime after another shifted leftwards, and embraced social democratic and even socialist principles.

Nowhere was this movement stronger than in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez. His socialist agenda was based on pumping receipts from oil revenues into the social economy – via the so-called Misiones social programmes dedicated to fighting poverty and increasing literacy through mass democratic participation. Minimum wages were increased and land redistributed to the rural poor.

Initially, these objectives were more successful than any other social programme in the country’s history. But this strategy offered diminishing returns before turning into a vicious downward spiral.

Chavez’s oil-financed socialism was beset by a dual contradiction. First, without a strategy for non oil-based wealth, the edifice was built on high world oil prices. In the late 1990s 67 per cent of Venezuela’s external income came from oil; by 2017 the figure was 95 per cent. And when oil prices fell, which they did precipitously in 2014, the strategy was undermined fatally.

The channelling of oil wealth through social programmes did initially serve to draw hundreds of thousands behind Chavez. But the Misiones’ dependence on state funds gradually transformed these potential hubs of social transformation into units competing for government money. When it dried up, not only did the objective of improving social conditions of the masses falter, but so too did its popular support base.

Without an upsurge in oil finances, Chavez’s successor Maduro has presided over a declining economy and a rising social crisis. Short of a mass democratic counter-movement from below, he has been able to use diminishing oil receipts to buy off elements of the state bureaucracy and military and to deploy increasingly authoritarian means to maintain control.

The attempts by Guaido, supported by the Trump administration, to proclaim himself interim president of Venezuela offers no hope to the country’s increasingly desperate masses. US intervention in Latin America over the last two centuries has been driven by its own perceived self-interest. It has occurred in collaboration with local elites who are happy to dip their beaks into the proceeds of US-orientated low-wage export economies.

The Achilles heel of the Monroe Doctrine, despite overwhelming US power, has always been its America First mentality at the expense of the Latin American masses. The attempt to install Guaido may or may not be successful but it will not solve the social crisis gripping Venezuela. That can only come from within the country, by a social and political force capable of putting the needs of its population first.

Benjamin Selwyn is Professor of International Development at the University of Sussex, and author of The Struggle for Development