No. of Recommendations: 8
We will revisit this, in six months or so. See how things are shaping up.
We can certainly revisit it, but I don't think it will have any bearing on that specific question. We disagree on what the Administration thought would happen with their invasion, and what they intended to happen. But I think we both would agree that the Administration (any Administration) can have things turn out very differently from what they expected or intended do happen.
I believe the architects of the Iraq war thought that they would be able to establish a stable client state - and the fact that their efforts failed spectacularly and devolved into chaos doesn't mean they intended that chaos, just that they weren't able to achieve their goals and expectations.
I think that Venezuela is a little less clear. We don't know all that much yet. But given the way both Trump and Rubio got a little over their skis in their same-day press conferences, it's pretty clear that they both vastly overestimated Rodriguez' willingness to play along with Washington. She's supposedly far more pragmatic than Maduro and far more cognizant of the importance of redeveloping the oil industry, and was probably the "good cop" in the Maduro regime in diplomatic discussions with the U.S. I think this led Rubio to overestimate, and then oversell, how compliant she would be. But at the end of the day, she holds office at the pleasure of the military - and being pragmatic isn't limited to being clear-eyed about the problems with the Bolivarian Revolution, but also includes being a realist about how far she can bend the knee to Washington without facing a real chance of being up against a wall by domestic forces that are very much opposed to such cooperation. I think Rubio and Trump were both caught a little off guard that she chose to set up a little distance very early on.
That said, unlike Iraq, I think that the expectations of Rubio and Stephen Miller (perhaps not Trump's) are less binary. They may have overestimated the chances that they would get a compliant partner in Rodriguez, but I think they also felt that it's a win for U.S. policy just to get Maduro out and send a clear message that the U.S. is going to act without restraint in the Western Hemisphere. It's a clear win for the foreign policy hawks against the anti-interventionists (like JD Vance) in the internal conflicts within Administration and opens up opportunities for Miller's efforts to fight immigration and Rubio's longstanding desire to effect change in Cuba regardless of whether Rodriguez is a friend or just wary adversary.
So I think that it's wrong to think that the architects of either Iraq or Venezuela intended or expected the countries to result in chaos. I think both wanted and expected they would result in docile and stable client states. The difference, IMHO, is that I think that the Iraq architects were far more certain that everything was going to work out as they had planned and placed much more importance on that determining a successful outcome. I think ex ante, they would have regarded what actually ended up happening in Iraq as a bad outcome. For Venezuela, at least in these early days, I think that the Administration was very confident that it was going to work out but regarded the possibility that the "client state" thing might go pear-shaped as still being a successful and acceptable outcome as a worst-case result.
