COMMENTARY How can you persuade an adversary country like Venezuela to act more like your country — when your country's politics are looking more like Venezuela's?
Question: How can you persuade adversary countries to act more like your country when your country’s acting more and more like adversary countries?
Answer: You probably can’t. And that’s a big conundrum awaiting Daniel Erikson when he takes over as President Biden’s top Latin America adviser next month.
When Erikson’s appointment was reported this week, I plucked his insightful 2008 book The Cuba Wars off my shelf and flipped to a rather sobering passage I’d marked.
In it, a prominent Cuban dissident warns Erikson that negotiating with totalitarian regimes like communist Cuba’s can feel like a fool’s errand.
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“The regime lives on confrontation,” the dissident tells Erikson, who is currently the Pentagon’s western hemisphere chief.
“It needs the confrontation — this sense of crisis,” he adds, “in order to justify its survival. Because of that, it sees dialogue as a threat, and it has no use for trying to reach common ground with its opponents.”
Erikson himself might want to glance at that page before he moves over to the White House — for two important reasons.
First: it’s a reminder of what Biden’s outgoing LatAm point man, Juan Gonzalez, has already learned about the U.S.’s most maddening hemispheric headache today — Venezuela’s authoritarian socialist regime.
Right now, Venezuelan President/Dictator Nicolás Maduro and the rest of his Caracas Cranks are holding their own orgy of confrontation:
Threatening a military invasion of neighboring Guyana. Jailing a host of opposition leaders — including, last Friday, eminent human rights activist Rocío San Miguel — on bogus charges of plotting to assassinate Maduro. Refusing to accept deportation flights of hordes of Venezuelan migrants from the U.S. And sending in goons to break up campaign rallies for opposition candidate María Corina Machado.
If regimes like Venezuela's crave gratuitous confrontation the way the rest of us need oxygen — so does today's Trumpian Republican Party.
It's the Machado issue, in fact, that’s brought the Biden Administration and the Maduro regime to loggerheads.
In exchange for an easing of U.S. economic sanctions, Maduro agreed to hold a free and fair presidential election this year — and let the opposition put forward the candidate of its choice to challenge him. That means Machado, who won last fall’s opposition primary election by a landslide.
But now the Caracas Coward is welching: he’s barring Machado from running, because most polls show she’d spank the despot who’s responsible for the worst humanitarian crisis in modern South American history. So the U.S. has little if any choice but to re-turn the screws, promising to bring the full sanctions weight down on Maduro again if he doesn’t reverse his Machado ban by April.
Maduro in turn is lashing out — or, as the Cuban would say, justifying his survival.
Perpetual crisis loop
By April, Erikson will be Biden’s LatAm point man; and he’ll have to find a way, if there is one, to convince Maduro’s unhinged regime that it does have use for trying to reach common ground with its opponents.
But that brings us to the second big stumbling block Erikson faces — which resides not in Caracas but in Washington D.C. It’s lurking inside the U.S. House of Representatives and, more broadly, the Trumpian Abduction, formerly known as the Republican Party.
Go back to that Cuban dissident’s observation in Erikson’s book — that regimes like Cuba’s and Venezuela’s crave confrontation the way the rest of us need oxygen, that they consider dialogue, common ground and compromise with political rivals something sinister. You could slap that quote on the GOP right now and it would, chillingly, be every bit as accurate.
As we’ve seen over and over in recent weeks — especially in its spitefully infantile resolve to kill its own immigration reform agenda and Ukraine aid — gratuitous confrontation is the only raison d’être you can find today inside the party that controls the U.S. House and which, in the person of former President Trump, may well re-occupy the White House next January.
It has just one plank in its platform: that perpetual loop of apocalyptic crisis and grievance, a zero-sum, blow-it-all-up belief that negotiating policy means selling your soul.
So maybe we should forget about the U.S. influencing Venezuela to be more like us. Why would Maduro and his ilk even listen now, when they can see they’ve influenced the U.S. to be more like them?
To quote Pogo, Erikson will soon meet his enemy — and he is us.
