Trump Is Not Playing Five-Dimensional Chess in Venezuela
After a strong first move, he’s eating all the pieces.
By Garry Kasparovk, The Atlantic
Venezuelans are celebrating—cautiously inside the country, wildly in safer places such as Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Miami, where hundreds of thousands made their homes as a brutal dictatorship impoverished their country, once the second-richest in the Western Hemisphere.
The Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has been removed from power—captured in the dead of night and arraigned before an American judge. That’s the good news. But as is so often the case with the actions of Donald Trump, it isn’t the only storyline. The United States president immediately threw cold water on the idea that the raid could pave the way for a rapid democratic transition under the leadership of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, María Corina Machado. At his first press conference, a few hours after Maduro’s surgical removal, Trump said that he ordered it to get control of Venezuela’s oil, and that Machado didn’t have the “respect” to lead Venezuela.
If anyone expected more from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had a long-standing personal passion for freedom in Cuba before he sold his soul to Trump at a steep discount, they would have been disappointed. During his TV appearances the day after the raid, Rubio, like Trump, emphasized oil over democracy as the operation’s “No. 1” priority.
