It came belatedly, but it came in style.
Nicolas Maduro, the man who impoverished Venezuela, terrorized its people, and helped unsettle the world, was seized from his presidential palace at 2 a.m. and whisked north to face a judge in a US court.
Autocracy, after a 25-year march from China through Turkey to Hungary, has finally been humbled, suffering its first dramatic setback since Russia retreated from its democratic future to its despotic past.
The flawless raid brought multiple rewards.
A display of American power
Militarily, it serves as a much-needed reminder that the US is not only mightier than any other superpower but also far more sophisticated. The swiftness of Operation Absolute Resolve (who gives these names?) stands in stark contrast to the Russian failure to do the same thing in Ukraine. Four years after it tried to remove the Ukrainian leader, the Russian army has yet to accomplish what the American military did in one night.
Morally, it is heartening to see the humiliating ouster of the man who has killed and jailed thousands of Venezuelans while stealing an election and abusing the economy so severely that the average gross domestic product plunged from $13,000 to less than $4,000.
This doesn’t mean that what happened this week in Venezuela is a celebration of freedom and justice. It isn’t.
The most alarming side of the American attack is its lack of a democratic compass and a moral engine.
The problem with Maduro, as far as Donald Trump is concerned, is not his despotic record. In that regard, the man he abducted could well be as tyrannical as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and still remain a Trump ally. The problem was that Maduro disobeyed Trump’s commands on immigration, drugs, and oil.
Now, as America marks the fifth anniversary of the attack on Capitol Hill, it should come as no surprise that Donald Trump is in no rush to transfer Maduro’s estate to the people’s democratic choice. The American president cannot be expected to respect another country’s democratic choice more than he respected his own country’s electoral results.
Finally, Maduro’s removal effectively gives China the license to invade Taiwan. When the D-Day invasion it is planning arrives, Beijing will be able to say: Unlike what Venezuela is for the US, this island is on our doorstep, its people are our children, and its land is part of our historic realm. If you could do Venezuela, we can certainly do Taiwan.
So yes, the picture is far from rosy, and in many ways grim. Even so, in the Middle East, Trump’s bullying is better than what it replaced.
Between Donald Trump and Barack Obama
The inversion of Trump’s power-without-morality formula is morality without power. First introduced by Jimmy Carter, this formula was later perfected by Barack Obama.
In Carter’s case, it led to his mishandling of the hostage crisis that cost him the presidency. It happened in 1979, when Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Tehran and captured 66 Americans, most of whom would spend 444 days in captivity.
It was an act of war, and it should have made America go to war. America had the power to win such a war quickly and decisively, but Carter couldn’t bring himself to wage it. The moral statesman who had rebuked the shah for his human rights record, and thus helped his downfall, failed to realize that if America wants to moralize effectively, it must use its power decisively.
Obama’s Middle Eastern failure came under different circumstances, but it was in the same vein and happened repeatedly, with similar results.
First, in spring 2009, in a well-attended speech in Cairo, Obama apologized to the Iranian people for America’s involvement in a coup that happened in 1953, eight years before he was born.
It was no way to behave in the Middle East, a display of ignorance, arrogance, and impotence, as was made plain days later when the Iranian regime stole an election. Having bet on morality at the expense of power, Obama failed to intervene on behalf of the rioters who confronted the ayatollahs, and in fact, didn’t even lend them rhetorical support.
The ayatollahs understood they had business with a non-fighter, and thus lured him into the nuclear talks that to him were a step toward peace, but to them were an instrument of war.
And then came 2012, when Obama warned the Syrian government that if it attacked its people with chemical weapons, he would intervene. Rhetorically, it was a projection of power, but the Syrians knew it was just rhetoric, so the following year they showered sarin gas on the town of Ghouta and killed an estimated 1,400 civilians.
True to the formula of morality without power, Obama failed to deliver on his threat, striking instead a deal that effectively saved Bashar Assad’s regime from America’s wrath. With American weakness on full display, Syria was soon snatched by Russia, and Assad’s regime won another decade in power, free of charge.
Such, in brief, is the inversion of Donald Trump’s power-without-morality motto.
There is, to be sure, a middle way.
The middle road was the one pursued by a host of presidents, from Harry Truman to George W. Bush, all of whom preached freedom and projected power.
No, it’s not like there is a binary choice between the attitudes of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. However, if a choice is to be made between the two, the latter is preferable.
That certainly goes for today’s Iran.
The riots gathering across Iran reflect an economic failure much like Maduro’s. The ayatollahs, too, squandered vast oil deposits on political featherbedding and foreign misadventures, generating shortages, inflation, emigration, and despair.
Unfortunately, the Iranian people face a desperate regime’s violence, treachery, and folly. Fortunately, they do not face an American leader who will throw them under the bus.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.