Early Saturday morning, the Trump administration demonstrated that it could, with enough preparation, potentially kidnap or kill just about any leader that it wants. Turning that power into effective control over how foreign countries govern themselves is a much rougher test.
The raid on Caracas was an unsettling demonstration of the effectiveness of U.S. air and sea power. With no American casualties and no significant damage to equipment, U.S. air and special forces assets were able to crack open Venezuelan air defenses and abscond with President Nicolás Maduro.
While Venezuela’s Russian- and Chinese-made air defenses aren’t quite state-of-the-art, they are formidable enough that they were expected to present some meaningful obstacle to an air attack—yet the possibility alone of a nearly unprecedented kidnapping of a head of state worried Maduro enough to hire Cuban bodyguards.
The Trump administration has given a great number of heads of state across Latin America reason for concern about their own safety. We do not know to what extent the Trump administration smoothed the abduction and post-abduction environments by working with Venezuelan collaborators, but the United States can presumably also bribe authorities in Bogotá, Havana, or Mexico City. This is the power to destroy, and the power to destroy can be very intimidating under the right circumstances.
Trump has clearly stated his ambitions for controlling the future of Venezuela. Herein lies the problem; on Sunday morning, Trump obliquely threatened to kill Venezuela’s new leader if she did not comply with his wishes. The fact that Trump can almost certainly make good on that threat hardly means, though, that the United States has absolute power over Venezuela’s reconstruction.
During his first term, Trump could not control his own Defense Department or State Department; it was only when he installed loyalists in his second term that he was able to bring his government into even a semblance of obedience. Delcy Rodríguez, sworn in on Monday as Venezuela’s acting president, is not a Trump loyalist, and it is deeply unlikely that any future Venezuelan leadership will be, either.
This is, and has always been, the fundamental limitation of air and sea power. No matter how much destruction the United States can inflict, the power to destroy does not imply the power to control. This has little to do with the will or capacity to pinpoint the location of individual decision-makers. Lethal airpower does not solve the principal-agent problem, which stems from the fact that the agent knows a great deal more than the principal about the job that needs to be done.
It is not possible for anyone in the Trump administration to have as much grip on local conditions as Venezuelan leadership, and consequently, it will be extremely difficult to make Venezuelans do something that they do not want to do. Modernizing the oil industry, for example, will require careful negotiations between labor, capital, the Venezuelan army, and other local stakeholders—negotiations that airstrikes cannot helpfully push forward.
Trump has not quite ruled out sending ground troops to Venezuela, but it seems unlikely that he has much taste for an extended (and perhaps quite dangerous) deployment of soldiers and Marines. To be sure, as Americans discovered in Iraq, even a deployment of ground forces does not convey absolute power over events, as military leadership still needs to work with local populations and authorities.
And as the United States also discovered in Afghanistan, even a large deployment of U.S. troops cannot prevent drug cartels from operating virtually in the open. But without such a deployment, the United States is completely at the mercy of Venezuelans, who almost certainly will not share Washington’s priorities regarding the governance of Venezuela. This means that the United States cannot “run” Venezuela with air and sea power, no matter how easily it can arrest or kill Venezuelan leaders.
The United States has plenty of coercive options beyond airstrikes to shape outcomes in Venezuela. Evidently, the U.S. Navy will continue some aspects of its quarantine of Venezuelan oil tankers in order to place pressure on Caracas. That, along with an influx of capital and expertise from U.S. oil companies, might plausibly drive a reconstruction of Venezuela’s oil industry. But these are traditional tools of U.S. statecraft in Latin America, and they do not constitute “control” or even “regime change.”
And so, this is where we are. Trump has claimed (almost explicitly) that the United States owns Venezuela, and he has demonstrated the will and the capability for using extremely destructive tools to affect the country’s governance. Yet Trump has displayed no taste for taking the steps necessary to actually control the course of political and economic events in Venezuela.
Authorities within the administration who are tasked with handling Venezuela will quickly find that the fog of war is as much a part of the human cognitive and organizational bureaucratic process as it is with data. Unless the Trump administration believes that it has cards up its sleeve that will allow it to govern the country from afar, its policy preferences will be at the mercy of the same group of Venezuelan soldiers and bureaucrats that ran the country before the Maduro raid.