COMMENTARY President Trump all but confirmed this week he'll keep Venezuela's unpopular acting leader Delcy Rodríguez in place for good. But could he remove her now even if he wanted to?
Donald Trump has upgraded Delcy Rodríguez from loathed holdover to legitimized head of state.
This week’s U.N. General Assembly in New York has been a giddy debutante ball for Venezuela’s acting president — and its climax came Tuesday night when President Trump sat down for an official pow wow with her at a hotel soiree he hosted for foreign leaders.
That photo op kiss turned Rodríguez from a frog into a princess. Or at least from a despotic henchwoman who helped run Venezuela’s criminally brutal socialist regime, into a queen who's now been given the kingdom by her gringo fairy godfather.
And all Venezuelans themselves can do — despite their strong and unequivocal desire to see Trump push Rodríguez out and democracy back in — is live with it.
That’s not just because Trump likely won’t pressure Rodríguez to hold new democratic elections.
It’s because — at least now, anyway — he likely can’t.
READ MORE: Venezuelans: Trump's real crime isn't taking your oil — it's obstructing your democracy
He could have shortly after he had U.S. special forces back in January remove Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan dictator Rodríguez would replace.
He could have convinced Rodríguez that the same thing he’d done to her boss would happen to her if she didn’t accept a temporary caretaker role and let Venezuela’s political opposition conduct a democratic transition.
“There was a window early on when Trump could have held the threat of another U.S. military operation in Venezuela over her head,” Frank Mora, a former U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States, told me.
“But that window closed as soon as he decided — and as soon as Delcy understood — that he had other priorities besides democracy.”
Delcy's been turned from a frog into a princess, from a despotic henchwoman into a queen who's now been given the kingdom by her gringo fairy godfather.
Trump’s priority for ousting Maduro, of course, was oil. (And I hate to say I told you so, Venezuelans, but I warned of Trump's true Venezuela interests a year before Maduro's arrest.) Venezuela’s reserves, the world’s largest, were a much sexier conquest “spoil,” as Trump crassly (read characteristically) put it in his U.N. speech this week, than any restoration of democracy.
And because Rodríguez is willing to help Trump acquire that crude — à la the 65 billion-barrel deal they struck last month — Trump looks willing to keep her in the Miraflores presidential palace indefinitely.
Boots on the ground
That way no pesky opposition leader like Nobel Peace Prize-winner María Corina Machado can get elected and screw up all his arrangements.
In the meantime, though, Trump has allowed Rodríguez to secure her own authoritarian position inside Venezuela, to such an extent there may be only one way now to make her put a democratic transition in motion if he wanted it.
That would be another military strike — and probably U.S. boots on the ground. But the military leverage he had nine months ago is gone: he’s squandered it in his Iran war, whose deep unpopularity with U.S. voters all but precludes him from mustering new forces in the Caribbean.
I don’t object to any U.S. president engaging pariah leaders like Rodríguez — or Cuba’s Raúl Castro, Russia’s Vladimir Putin or even North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. As I’ve often written, it can help the U.S. get a firmer foothold to influence political change.
But Trump rarely figures that change into his engagement calculations. He’s only interested in what America’s (and his) coffers get out of it, so much so that he usually ends up exalting tyrants — whose tyrannical fiat he not so secretly admires — in the most cringeworthy ways possible.
Rodríguez — whom Trump praises as a “terrific person doing a great job” — is just the latest entry. But what makes her case more egregious is that Trump actually did have an opportunity to phase her out of power, one he’d never have with the likes of Putin or Kim.
Now, as Tuesday night’s creepy photos from New York all but confirm, it's a good bet she’ll outlast Trump and remain as entrenched in power as Castro was.
That, by the way, brings us to Cuba, which Trump in his U.N. address called an “absolutely failed state” whose communist dictatorship, he bragged, “will fall” under the economic sanction screws he’s tightening there.
In reality, dislodging Cuba’s regime probably will indeed require putting U.S. military boots on the ground.
And that’s not just something else Trump likely won’t do.
It’s now something else he likely can’t do.
