No. of Recommendations: 7
The primary objective is to reduce or eliminate China’s presence in the western hemisphere.
Now. What kind of government is required in Caracas to make that happen?
A different one than exists today. Not the same government as last week, with just a different person serving as President. A different government. Because with the current regime, it is to their advantage to have a strong relationship with China and an adversarial posture towards the United States. Nothing that happened with Maduro really changes that, and it actually strengthens some of the factors pushing Venezuela towards China. The U.S. is still a very hostile adversary to Venezuela and the government remains committed to its perverse Bolivarian socialism, which are the things that have kept them firmly in the China-Russia-Cuba camp for the last two decades.
Removing Maduro is the obvious first step.
But it doesn't accomplish anything. If I walk out my front door, it's the "first step" on a trip to New York - but walking down to my sidewalk doesn't materially get me any closer to being in New York.
Again, the only way this makes sense - or advances our objectives in any material way - is if Rodriguez were to switch sides and move closer towards the U.S. and away from China. From Trump's and Rubio's statements yesterday, discussing the U.S. "running" Venezuela, the most likely explanation is that the Administration had very high expectations that Rodriguez would in fact be willing to do that. They've walked that back, which leaves us no closer to achieving any of our objectives than we were a few days ago.
The goal is China. That’s it. That’s the 4D chess: shove the Chinese into their own regional box.
But this doesn't do that. It doesn't get us anywhere closer to that. If we were actually going to run things in Venezuela, we could take steps to reduce Chinese influence there. But apparently Trump was wrong, and we're not going to be running things there. So all we've done is remove a particular individual from the Presidency, without making any other material changes in the country - in all likelihood strengthening the regime's narrative of being persecuted by the U.S. and weakening the opposition movement by publicly undercutting their leadership as weak and ineffective and not worth our support.
