Venezuela’s humiliating retreat may be temporary

I don’t think Delcy is a traitor, an idiot or a coward

Since January 3, when the U.S. bombed Caracas, killed over 100 people, and kidnapped President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, acting President Delcy Rodríguez has cordially hosted numerous U.S. officials in Caracas, and now fully restored diplomatic relations with Washington.

At gunpoint, the U.S. now decides who can receive Venezuelan oil and how much oil revenue Venezuela can receive. On Truth Social the other day, Trump essentially patted the acting president of Venezuela on the head telling her she was doing a fine job. Delcy (as everyone calls her) replied on X by thanking the genocidal monster, rapist and probable pedophile. It seems likely that Delcy will soon host Trump himself in the city where he very recently spilled Venezuelan and Cuban blood - perhaps without Trump even bothering to release Maduro and his wife from prison beforehand.

Delcy’s foreign minister, Ivan Gil, made a disgraceful statement after the U.S. initiated a war of aggression against Iran on February 28. The statement - which was promptly deleted - failed to name the U.S. and “Israel” as aggressors, but criticized Iran for how it defended itself. The statement was essentially rebuked by elements of the Chavista movement (named after former President Hugo Chavez) that was President Maduro’s, and now Delcy’s, support base.

Iran’s government has been a courageous ally of Venezuela’s for many years. It has played a significant role in helping Venezuela survive the murderous sanctions the U.S. has imposed since 2017. In 2015, Obama imposed illegal economic sanctions that were damaging, but Trump made them truly lethal.

In spite of how stomach-turning and infuriating it has been to witness Delcy hand over so much of Venezuela’s sovereignty to the dictatorship in Washington, I don’t think she is a traitor, an idiot or a coward.

Examining Delcy’s options

I can’t say people are crazy for believing that Maduro was sold out by Delcy, or that she and others are simply saving their own skin. But I don’t think that is what happened. Trump threatened that Delcy would suffer a fate worse than Maduro’s if she didn’t follow his orders. But it isn’t merely Chavista leaders who are threatened more than ever in the post-Gaza genocide world: it’s all of Venezuela.

Delcy could have boldly refused to make any concessions. Trump would then have imposed a total Naziesque blockade on Venezuela like he has done to Cuba - except that in Venezuela’s case it would have been to prevent all oil from leaving Venezuela. Trump could also have continued to periodically bomb Venezuela - perhaps assassinating or kidnapping more Chavista leaders. Again, these would have been horrific outcomes for all of Venezuela, not just Delcy and her top people.

Trump’s spurning of his fellow fascist Maria Corina Machado, who would have relished the task of murdering millions of Chavistas with US support, suggests that Trump would not have risked entangling the US in a Vietnam-like quagmire in Venezuela. But even if full scale US invasion and direct occupation were off the table, that would not have spared Venezuela from other military attacks. Who was going to stop Trump from doing that? It’s a key question to which I’ll return.

Comparing Venezuela to Cuba.

Despite being subjected to a savage oil blockade by Washington, Cuba’s response to the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran was very courageous. It gave full solidarity to Iran and condolences over the murder of Ayatollah Khamenei. Cuba’s government seems to calculate that it has only two options: fight and die, or surrender and die. So it appears that as of now Cuba is willing to go down fighting for its sovereignty.

But Cuba doesn’t have anything like Venezuela’s vast oil and mineral wealth with which to entice Trump into a deal that buys it time to wait for better conditions to develop. Egomaniac Trump, who is notoriously susceptible to flattery, will ignore that under Hugo Chavez the U.S. was Venezuela’s largest customer for oil.

Historical Analogies, past humiliations

In a very thoughtful piece Manolo de Los Santos compares the concessions Delcy has made to the humiliating Brest-Litovsk Treaty that the USSR signed with Germany in 1918. Another good historical analogy might be when former Haitian President Aristide agreed to absurd concessions in 1994 so that the U.S. would order a military junta to step down. But the analogy that works best for me is the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (known as the Nazi-Soviet pact).

Stalin had failed for several years to form a united front against the Nazis with the western imperial states, so he cut a side deal with Hitler that bought the USSR more time to prepare for an inevitable Nazi invasion. It also forced the European powers to shoulder some of the burden of fighting Germany.

Unlike Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s, Venezuela does not have a powerful ally willing to make US aggression against it a very dangerous red line for the U.S. to cross. Of course, help from Russia and China was essential to Venezuela defeating U.S. economic sanctions. But that kind of help simply isn’t enough after October 7, 2023 when the U.S./Israeli-led West discovered that it could carry out a live streamed genocide and get away with it.

The U.S. and “Israel” (they’re interchangeable) are the Nazi menace of today. It must be defeated militarily and that burden has fallen disproportionately on the people of West Asia. Russia has taken on NATO in Ukraine but its effectiveness as an anti-imperial force is significantly weakened by its ties to “Israel”. China has not even cut commercial ties with the Israelis. And both Russia and China did not veto a UN Security Council resolution that put the perpetrators of genocide in Gaza in charge of their victims.

Oil-rich Russia has yet to try to break the oil blockade on Cuba. Other oil-rich states in the Americas: Brazil, Mexico and Canada haven’t either. Such a spectacle of cowardice (in Canada’s case complicity) reveals how lacking Venezuela is in the kind of allies it needs - and everyone needs - against the U.S. today. We should not blame Stalin for failing to get other governments into a powerful military alliance against the Nazis. We should not blame Delcy for not having sufficiently powerful and committed allies against the U.S.

Dangers ahead

Venezuela has released a great many people who were arrested for being involved with US-backed subversion. Delcy’s government is also seeking a replacement for Attorney General Tarek William Saab, who since 2017 has been key to Venezuela defeating riots aimed at overthrowing the government. Will riots flare up again, and will Delcy deal with them effectively if they do?

Recall that Saab replaced the traitorous Luisa Ortega Diaz whose permissiveness might have led Maduro to be overthrown had she not been ousted.

Another danger is that Delcy’s concessions to the U.S. lose her popular support and allow an allegedly “moderate” opposition candidate to be elected President. To be relaxed about so-called moderate anti-Chavistas in power would be extremely foolish. Some of the most vicious rightwing tyrants in Venezuelan and Latin American history took power after campaigning as moderates or even as leftists.

If a kidnapper places a gun to our head, if we believed we had any non-suicidal options, we would choose them. We’d choose to cooperate with the kidnapper and hope to find a chance to eventually escape his control. That’s what I think Delcy is trying to do.