There’s been a lot of hemispheric hand-wringing over Russia’s recent threat to move military assets into communist Cuba, socialist Venezuela and leftist Nicaragua — its loyal dictatorship bros in the Americas.
But while Moscow’s bluster has some pundits bloviating about the next Cuban Missile Crisis, they might want to focus on less sexy but more consequential intrusions on America’s doorstep.
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Like reports this week that an Iranian supertanker hauling 2 million barrels of condensate (a light oil used to dilute heavy crude) docked late last month at a port in Venezuela. The delivery essentially skirts U.S. and international sanctions designed to prevent Venezuela’s regime from acquiring the means to upgrade its heavy oil — and make it more globally exportable.
Or the decision by Nicaragua to ditch diplomatic relations with Taiwan and establish ties with China. The switch, which enlarges Beijing’s anti-democratic footprint in this hemisphere, promises to throw thug leader Daniel Ortega a new economic lifeline as the U.S., E.U. and Canada keep slapping economic fines on his thug fiefdom.
READ MORE: Biden wants to stand up to China. That will mean standing taller in Latin America.
Those are just two samples of what Latin America experts like Will Freeman of Princeton University call the “isolation-proofing” of regimes the U.S. and other democracies are trying to isolate. In a recent article for World Politics Review, Freeman lays out a three-pronged approach that Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua seem to have mastered to “foil international pressure.”
First is “forming a network of partner states” like Russia, China and Iran — which were among the few large nations to send representatives to Ortega’s sham inauguration last month after his sham re-election in November (a vote he won only because he’d arrested every opposition candidate on imaginary treason charges).
Despite their countries’ economic dumpster fires, and the fact that most of their citizens can’t mention their iron-fisted governments without feeling the urge to emigrate, the New World troika hangs on in large part thanks to the weaponry, financing and petro-assistance of the Old World troika.
If these regimes can “isolation-proof” themselves using partner states, the U.S. needs to do a more effective job of employing its own allies to help break down their Tyranny Teflon.
Second is “creating new sources of income for regime cronies” — like the drug cartel Venezuela’s military brass allegedly operates or the tourism industry that Cuba's controls.
Third is “driving a wedge between [the] democracies” trying to squeeze the regime. Even a clod like Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro has been able to exploit the differences the get-tough U.S. and the less-tough E.U. have on how to handle him and his Caracas mafia.
STUCK LEVERS
This sort of analysis may sound intolerably defeatist to Cuban, Venezuelan and Nicaraguan exiles here in South Florida, who are counting on the muscle of their adopted country to reclaim their native countries. But just because these regimes have found Tyranny Teflon, it doesn’t mean the U.S. and other powers shouldn’t keep cranking the diplomatic and economic heat — as long as that heat doesn’t bring people’s suffering to a boil, as the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba has long (and rightly) been accused of doing.
It does, however, mean this: if these dictatorships can “isolation-proof” themselves using partner states, the U.S. needs to do a more effective job of employing its own allies to help pierce that autocratic armor.
Case in point: the former Trump Administration’s astonishing refusal to capitalize on the global goodwill it spawned in 2019 by recognizing opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s constitutionally legitimate president — its disdain for forging a more potent multilateral approach to getting rid of Maduro.
Or more recently: thwarted efforts by the Washington-based Organization of American States, the hemisphere’s de facto U.N., to present a more united front among its heavier-hitter members and groups against Ortega. Last fall the O.A.S. passed a resolution condemning Nicaragua’s betrayal of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, and another calling Ortega’s re-election a despotic joke. But the gestures lacked real heft because either Argentina or Mexico abstained, as did much of the Caribbean bloc.
If the U.S. wants to oil those stuck levers, it might help to have a U.S. ambassador to the O.A.S. sitting at the table, instead of a nominee still waiting for Senate confirmation — like former Florida International University Latin America director and Pentagon official Frank Mora, whom President Biden picked last July.
It would seem a sure first step to breaking the isolation-proofing New World dictatorships are practicing — with Old World dictatorship aid.
