COMMENTARY María Corina Machado deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for leading Venezuela's nonviolent democracy movement — but should that effort ultimately rely on a U.S. military incursion?
Last Thursday, President Donald Trump announced his Gaza peace deal. Then, hours later, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize.
That’s certainly a welcome combo of accomplishments, and we should certainly lionize them.
But it's also an uneasy combo, and we should also scrutinize them — especially when a U.S. military strike inside Venezuela looks increasingly likely.
On the one hand, Trump’s and Machado’s victories showcased the power of the peaceful path.
In Trump’s case: brokering a cease-fire that led this week to the release of Israeli hostages and relief for suffering Palestinians.
In Machado’s: engineering a democracy movement that humiliated Venezuela’s brutal dictatorship at the polls last year. (The regime stole that presidential election anyway, but the exercise exposed the depths of its sinister rot.)
On the other hand, though, the baleful saber-rattling we’re watching in the Caribbean is not the Biblical beating of swords into plowshares we hope we’re seeing in the Middle East.
And that dissonance should make us consider where we’re headed in the Americas when it comes to democracy and regime change.
READ MORE: Yes, everybody hates Maduro — but Trump should not turn drugs into Venezuela's WMD
On Tuesday, Trump announced the U.S. military assets he’s assembled off Venezuela’s coast destroyed another boat suspected of carrying drugs. This time, he said, six suspected traffickers were killed — bringing the number of dead in five such strikes since last month to 27.
Legal experts call those martial operations suspect at best, even if Trump insists the traffickers aren’t civilians but “terrorist” combatants invading American communities with deadly narcotics.
But the real focus of global attention is whether Trump will start pounding targets inside Venezuela, as he’s strongly suggesting, with the goal of dislodging its socialist dictator-president, Nicolás Maduro.
If he does — even though I too would love to see Maduro and his mafioso government tossed — I fear two things:
It risks sending us back down an ugly interventionist road we thought the U.S. had finally exited.
And it could ultimately serve to diminish Machado’s otherwise noble Nobel, which she partly dedicated to Trump and his “decisive support.”
Why bother with the bruising but redemptive democratic struggle when redemption’s coming anyway from the 5-inch guns of a U.S. navy destroyer?
When the U.S. invaded Latin American and Caribbean countries in the past, it at least packed some semi-plausible pretext.
President Ronald Reagan sent troops into Grenada in 1983 because, he claimed, hundreds of U.S. medical students were threatened by a volatile Marxist-Leninist revolution.
When his successor, George H.W. Bush, stormed Panama in 1989 to oust drug-trafficking dictator Manuel Noriega, he cited the killing of a U.S. Marine by hostile Panamanian security forces.
Gunboat diplomacy
Noriega’s stupidity fed Bush’s G.I. justification. And yes, Maduro is more than capable of committing his own Trump-triggering idiocy — like making the military move he keeps threatening against his next-door neighbor and U.S. ally, Guyana.
But unless that happens, Trump’s Venezuela volley will look to the world less like drug interdiction and more like dreary addiction — a relapse into the old gringo substance abuse called gunboat diplomacy.
It would revive the faulty Monroe Doctrine thinking that the bad domestic behavior of any government in this hemisphere is sufficient reason for the U.S. to send in men or missiles and set things right.
And that’s where a regime change-promoting incursion into Venezuela, even if it’s just surgical drone strikes on army or cartel targets — or covert CIA actions, as we’re learning this week — could overshadow Machado’s peace prize-winning example.
A mindset could take hold in Venezuela and throughout the democracy-challenged region that says: in the end, the nonviolent democracy effort matters less than the promise of yanqui military salvation.
Why bother with the bruising but redemptive struggle to breathe life into democratic processes and skills — as Machado and her movement did so remarkably last year with their ballot-monitoring comanditos crusade — when redemption’s going to come anyway from the 5-inch guns of a U.S. navy destroyer?
Some might argue a U.S. military rescue is actually a just reward for waging that righteous civic battle — especially when champions like Machado have to go into hiding to dodge arrest.
Maybe. But what happens when Trump refuses to save a pro-democracy campaign battling a right-wing dictatorship — when the U.S. declares the only democracy it considers worth the force is democracy that replaces left-wing despots?
Either way, it creates an uneasy drag on the value of democracy itself.
