Gunboat diplomacy as practiced by Britain, Germany and Italy in 1902 led to a prolonged naval blockade of Venezuela to force payment of contested debts.
Gunship diplomacy as practiced early Saturday morning by President Trump involved a two-hour raid by attack helicopters and special force operators who captured Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro.
But where the gunboats of 124 years ago just steamed away when the immediate dispute was settled, the gunships that carried off Maduro and his wife to face narcotic trafficking charges left behind the potential for disaster in a country twice the size of Iraq and almost three times the size of Vietnam.
The question now is how large Venezuela will come to figure in our history as measured by body bags. One is a devastating number if it contains a loved one.
Not that Trump seemed at all worried that his gunship diplomacy might lead to war such as he tried so strenuously to avoid in his youth. He had famously secured a draft deferment with a bone spurs diagnosis by a podiatrist who rented office space from his father.
In another of his many What the hell was he thinking? moments, Trump used Creedence Clearwater Revival’s anti-war anthem “Fortunate Son” as the soundtrack when he posted a clip of the raid video showing gunships in fiery action. His snippet included the lyrics, “Some folks are born silver spoon in hand. Lord, don’t they help themselves, Lord?”
If Trump sees nothing wrong with that song choice, how can he be expected to fully appreciate the ramifications of his actions? He must just like the feel of the rousing music, independent of the song’s significance. He similarly seems to have just liked the feel of the live video he saw of the raid, wherever it might eventually lead.
“Like I was watching a television show,” Trump enthused, as pumped up as President George W. Bush had been when he declared “Mission Accomplished” following the invasion of Iraq.
He was so pumped up that he hinted at doing it again if other countries dared to defy America’s will.
“Nothing can stop us,” he said.
At least in Trump’s mission, there was less ultimately false jargon about freedom and democracy. He made it clear that his aim is the military equivalent of a hostile takeover in business, only with 150 aircraft and the remarkably skilled Delta commandos.
“We are going to run the country,” Trump said in an echo of the long-ago gunboat days.
He had indicated last month what that meant. He was and is fixated on getting the oil; all of it that he believes is our due under what he has christened the Don-roe Doctrine.
“They took our oil rights,” he told the press on Dec. 17 . “We had a lot of oil there, as you know, they threw our companies out. And we want it back.”
Now the U.S. would be running Venezuela, Trump said on Saturday, ”We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela, and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela, and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.”
The official justification for Maduro’s arrest was an indictment for conspiring with his wife to import cocaine. The total amount was not immediately clear, but it was almost certainly less than the 400 tons that a Manhattan jury convicted former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez in 2024 of conspiring to distribute. Hernandez was sentenced to 45 years and the prosecutors recommended he should die in prison, but had served less than two years when Trump pardoned him on December 1.
When a reporter asked him about this on Saturday, Trump had an it’s all about me moment and muttered some nonsense about Hernandez being treated unfairly in the courts during the Biden administration, as he insists he himself was. One person who had been telling Trump this was political delusionist Roger Stone.
In a further indication that the present case was not really about “the wrath of American justice,” Trump suggested that Maduro could even now be in Turkey, enjoying his ill-gotten gains if he had simply agreed to relinquish his power. All that stuff about deadly rapist gangs and drugs that kill thousands of Americans would have just been forgotten.
“You got to surrender,” Trump recalled warning Maduro some months ago.
Maybe Maduro imagined that Trump had been placated when a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA) contributed $500,000 to his 2017 inaugural committee. The subsidiary, Citgo, which has more than 4,000 gas stations in the U.S., briefly hired Trump fixture Corey Lewandowski’s lobbying firm to help it negotiate the MAGAverse.
The Trump folks describe the Maduro operation as a law enforcement action, and the White House added to the raid reality show by releasing a video of the ousted Venezuelan president and his wife being led through the New York Drug Enforcement Administration office. A veteran agent told The Daily Beast such perp walks have always been prohibited inside that building.
“Wow,” the agent told The Daily Beast, “That was never allowed.”
A Hollywood version of the TV show would co-star Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who was in her second year of hiding out from Maduro’s thugs in October, when she was awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for keeping “the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness.”
She managed an action-packed escape from Venezuela in December with the help of a private foundation run by American special forces veterans. She rendezvoused with them in 10-foot seas with the hope that American aircraft would not confuse them with the drug boats that are being targeted. She made it to a Caribbean island and flew by private plane to Oslo, but just missed the ceremony. Her daughter accepted the prize for her.
Talk about real-life action!
In a plot twist, Machado subsequently dedicated the prize to Trump and said she was accepting it in his honor. She welcomed Saturday’s raid by posting, “Venezuelans, the HOUR OF FREEDOM has arrived!” And there could have been a real Hollywood ending if Trump had announced at the post-raid press conference that he was anointing Machado as Venezuela’s new leader. Machado herself seemed to be hoping for that finale.
“Today we are ready to enforce our mandate and take power,” she posted. “Let us remain vigilant, active and organized until the Democratic Transition is realized. A transition that needs ALL of us.”
But Trump has a serious case of Nobel envy. And Machado had received the peace prize he has repeatedly grumbled should have gone to him. He had proven himself to be truly shameless when he contrived to present himself a peace prize from the soccer organization FIFA at what he had renamed the Trump Kennedy Center.
Of Machado, he now said, “I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country,” Trump told the press conference, “I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.”
Trump condescendingly added, “She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.”
Instead, Trump had begun dealing with Venezuela’s Maduro-appointed vice president, Delcy Rodríguez. She also happens to be her country’s Minister of Petroleum, and has proven adept at keeping at least some oil flowing despite the U.S. sanctions. Trump seemed ready to forgive her for condemning the raid and voicing continued loyalty to Maduro.
“She’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Trump said.
But Trump did indicate to The Atlantic that Rodríguez risks dire consequences if she does not keep to his agenda.
“If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” Trump was quoted saying.
Meanwhile, it’s drill, baby, drill!
The first American combat death in Bush’s still unaccomplished mission was a 30-year-old Marine lieutenant who was shot in the stomach during a sweep of the Rumaila oil field in southern Iraq. The unfortunate son died under a sky blackened by burning petroleum.
However it goes it will not end in the way of most drug cases when the defendant is arraigned, in Maduro’s case on Monday, in the same federal courthouse as was the now pardoned Hernandez. The last document in the Hernandez case file was a handwritten court clerk’s note reading, “The pardon has been docketed. The passport and identification documents shall be returned.”
Hernandez, who facilitated the trafficking of $10 billion in cocaine, is now free to travel about, no doubt first class.
The New York Times is reporting that at least 40 people died in the raid. There have been no American military fatalities. But, if that changes in the days ahead while Trump’s gunship diplomacy has him running Venezuela, it will not have been to stop drugs from poisoning our youth. It will also not be for democracy.
Blood will have been shed for oil.
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