Not only Amercians have fallen prey to pursuing a seemingly simple answer to a complicated and complex problem and badly failed. Venezuela is the current poster child for this.
In 1605, Guy Fawkes and others were arrested in the Gunpowder Plot to kill the Protestant King James I and blow up the House of Lords. That of course did not happen. And November the 5th has since been celebrated as “bonfire night.”
H.L. Mencken famously described this symptom. He wrote that, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” Too bad that truism has been frequently ignored or forgotten by us.
Attempting to resolve a mutiny and in the case of Fawkes a regime change is neither simple nor easy. As the Trump administration tightens the noose around Venezuela and its President Nikolas Maduro, is it falling into the simplicity trap of trying to resolve a multifaceted crisis with a single policy? The first question is why is President Trump picking on Maduro? What could Maduro have done that was even more grievous than Vladimir Putin’s illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine?
From the White House view, Maduro combines a number of bete noirs and other reasons for this display of US military and if Trump is to be believed covert CIA force. Maduro encapsulates all the foreign policy devils taunting the president. Maduro has allegedly cleaned out all the prisons and lunatic asylums and sent these inmates north to the United States to plunder, rape and kill Americans.
Attempting to resolve a mutiny and in the case of Fawkes a regime change is neither simple nor easy
Maduro is also being assisted by Russia and China. To deny their presence, getting rid of Maduro makes sense. And of course Venezuela is the strategic center of gravity for the drug trade that kills thousands of Americans each year. The concussion is clear. Get rid of Maduro and the Chinese/Russian and drug problems are magically solved while ICE rounds up and deports the nefarious Venezuela criminals and others.
This simplicity has a familiar ring. In 1961, Jack Kennedy promised that the US would “pay any price and bear any burden” in the defense of liberty and freedom. Three and a half years later, President Lyndon Johnson took the opportunity to implement that in defense of South Vietnam. After an alleged second North Vietnamese PT boat attack against two US Navy destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf in early August 1964, Congress approved with only two dissenting votes The Tonkin Gulf Resolution that became a de facto declaration of war.
The Johnson administration believed that a series of air strikes would convince the North Vietnamese to cease and desist their activities in the south to overthrow the government. This followed the assassination of President Ngo Dien Dihn on November 2nd, 1963 in a coup that brought a series of military juntas to power. Air power with an increase of US ground forces to support and train the South Vietnamese Army and eventually undertake military operations were assumed sufficient to coerce Hanoi to capitulate: a simple strategy that imploded and failed.
President George W. Bush likewise devised a simple answer to resolving the complexities of the Middle East. As Maduro is Trump’s target, Saddam Hussein was Bush’s. Whether the attempts to kill Bush senior made a difference, the younger came to believe that a “freedom agenda” would transform “the geopolitics of the region.”
Invading and democratizing Iraq would have a number of benefits. It would lead to the spread of democracy even to Saudi Arabia. Israel would therefore be permanently protected. And an invasion would eliminate once and for all Iraq’s programs for nuclear and chemical weapons. While these Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) were the stated causes for the invasion-and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said that we do “not want to wake up under a mushroom shaped cloud,” WMD was a cover for the broader freedom agenda.
Trump will not invade. Using Tomahawk cruise missiles to attack land targets or Special and Covert Forces to kidnap Maduro and other leaders, while unlikely, cannot be entirely ruled out. As LBJ believed bombing would force North Vietnam to capitulate, Trump is using similar reasoning to drive Maduro from office.
But will that stop the drug trade from Colombia, Mexico and elsewhere prevent Chinese and Russian invasion? Most unlikely.
The writer is a senior advisor at Washington, DC’s Atlantic Council and a published author. He can be reached on Twitter @harlankullman.