Venezuela is among the most urbanized countries in South America, with an estimated population of 31,568,179. Since it’s colonization in the early 1500s and independence in 1821, the country has fluctuated between prosperity and political turmoil. Oil was discovered in Venezuela in the early 1900s, and today the country has one of the largest known oil reserves in the world. Before the country began exporting oil, its underdeveloped economy was primarily supported by agricultural production of coffee and cocoa. However, oil very quickly came to dominate Venezuela’s export revenues and economy as demand in the US and Europe skyrocketed.
Since 2014, Venezuela has been plagued by hyperinflation, extremely high crime and poverty rates, food shortages, a collapsing healthcare system, and dropping oil output. In just five years the economy has shrunk by half and inflation is nearing 1 million percent – placing nine out of every 10 Venezuelans in poverty. Conditions have worsened in the past two years, prompting an outpouring of refugees into other South American countries. According to the United Nations, 2.3 million Venezuelans have fled the country over the last four years – about 7 percent of the population (Lederer, 2018). Many more remain displaced within the country.
On September 8 of this year, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration held secret meetings with Venezuelan rebel military officers over the last year to discuss their plans to overthrow Maduro (Londoño & Casey, 2018). While the White House has since backed away from these talks, the report ignited a debate among foreign policy experts about a potential US military intervention in Venezuela. Those in support are guided by a duty-based ethical framework, arguing that diplomatic efforts have failed and that the US is compelled to uphold democracy and human rights there, even if by force. Those against intervention utilize a utilitarian framework to argue that intervention is unwanted by both Venezuelans and Western democracies – the US should instead push harder for diplomatic, financial and humanitarian measures in the country.
Shannon K. O’Neil is a senior fellow for Latin American Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. As the debate over a potential US military intervention in Venezuela grows, she has emerged as a leading voice in the opposition. In an article for Bloomberg, she points out that, because Venezuela is twice the size of Iraq with only a slightly smaller population, intervention there would have to be much larger (over 100,000 soldiers) and more expensive than previous US Latin American interventions. What’s more, the history of violent US interventions in the region means that US troops would likely be unwelcome in Venezuela. Stabilizing the country’s government and repairing it’s failing economy and infrastructure would likely result in a prolonged intervention. She writes that “some one hundred thousand Venezuelans are armed, loosely organized into “colectivos” that are likely to go rogue if and when the government collapses.” In short, O’Neil finds that a US intervention in Venezuela would be expensive and unpopular for both the US and Venezuela when further sanctions and humanitarian aid would be substantially more efficient and “do the most good” by upholding human rights in the country – as opposed to forcefully replacing a government and potentially exacerbating Venezuela’s downturn.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank. He argues that US policymakers should never allow economic strategy to guide military response as it would during a potential intervention in Venezuela. He concedes that the regime in Venezuela “deserves to go,” but it is only one of many brutal dictatorships in the world – why shouldn’t the US intervene in those states as well? He continues, explaining that justifying war in Venezuela on the basis that fewer “might” be killed via military action than in its absence would be “grotesque.” An American intervention would also entirely undermine the legitimacy of whatever government came to replace Maduro’s.
While it is true that no actor can possibly know the full extent of the consequences of their actions, that should not justify ignorance of consequences in decision-making. Those arguing against intervention point out that intervening in Venezuela would be extremely unpopular among the US public. While the US utilized Cold War dynamics to justify intervention in the past, interventions since have been much more expensive and much less accepted. Intervening militarily would divert valuable resources from conflict elsewhere and risk American lives. What’s more, Donald Trump campaigned on a “pro-America,” inward-looking platform. To conduct a large Latin American military intervention would likely be politically very dangerous for his administration. The human toll in Venezuela of a US-led military intervention cannot be overlooked. There is no way to know that a military intervention would save more lives than it cost, much less to know if the result would be a stronger and more prosperous Venezuela.
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