A Grand Bargain With Venezuela

President Donald Trump, it seems, has it out for Venezuela. Over the summer, his administration began massing naval power in the Caribbean, largely near the country’s coast, and striking ships soon after they exit its territorial waters. In October, he authorized the CIA to carry out operations within Venezuela’s borders. And Trump has repeatedly railed against President Nicolás Maduro, accusing him of emptying Venezuelan prisons into the United States and saying that his days in office are numbered. This week, Washington moved an aircraft carrier group to the Caribbean, and Trump was briefed on possible military options, including land strikes. Publicly, the White House maintains its operations are simply designed to stop narcotics—not to facilitate regime change. But the scale of the military deployment (it is the largest in the Caribbean since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis) and the accompanying rhetoric suggest Washington’s real objective is toppling the government.

If Trump does attack Venezuela, it is unlikely to end well. Short of an invasion—a move for which there is little domestic appetite and for which the current mobilization is inadequate—a show of force will probably not be enough to bring down Maduro’s regime. As the political scientists Alexander Downes and Lindsey O’Rourke wrote in Foreign Affairs, airstrikes alone have never driven a leader from office. Even if U.S. efforts somehow succeeded here, Venezuela’s military would almost certainly replace Maduro with an insider. And even if, against all odds, Venezuela’s opposition seized sudden control of the country, there is no guarantee that its ascendance would lead to a durable, democratic transition.

Trump, of course, could decide to attack anyway. But the White House probably knows that a simple show of force won’t topple Maduro, and for all of Trump’s fiery rhetoric, he has historically opposed large-scale military interventions involving prolonged deployments and nation building.

Instead, throughout his two administrations, Trump has consistently approached thorny domestic and foreign policy issues via a strategy he laid out in his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal: escalate to negotiate. Shortly after North Korea tested nuclear missiles capable of hitting the United States in 2018, Trump threatened it with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” He then held three summits on denuclearization with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Trump threatened to pull the United States out of NATO if other members did not raise their own levels of military spending. Most did, and so Washington has stayed put. And in April, Trump raised tariffs on almost every country in the world, only to pause many of the levies in order to negotiate with states for lower trade barriers.