Where Trump thinks his semi-warpath leads

An aggressive President Donald Trump is moving to cripple and remove adversarial governments in Venezuela and Iran, a campaign that is also aimed at damaging efforts by China and Russia to build and maintain anti-Western alliances globally.

In a meticulously planned military operation on January 3, US troops abducted Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro from Caracas, spirited him across the Caribbean Sea and delivered him to a jail in New York.

A few days later, Trump threw his support behind protesters trying to topple Iran’s Islamic leadership, saying “help is on the way” for demonstrators being shot down in the streets of Tehran and other cities. He didn’t say when or in what form the “help” would arrive.

Rapid regime change is in the air, if still in embryonic form. “Down with America” Venezuela and “Death to America” Iran have been prominent partners within a grouping Western analysts call the “Axis of Upheaval.” China, Russia, Iran and North Korea were formal partners. Venezuela was a kind of honorary member.

In the view of the American administration, the basic role of both countries is to provide so-called “gray zone” actions short of open warfare against US interests, including terrorism,

The pro-Trump American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, declared that so-far unopposed US interference in Venezuela and Iran was “confirmation … that China and Russia can’t protect their friends from the superpower’s wrath.”

Beyond ideological affinity, years of US-led economic sanctions imposed on Venezuela and Iran made joining up with China and Moscow attractive. Both countries needed help to evade trade restrictions and also obtain international diplomatic backing and military equipment.

In return, geopolitical benefits seemed to accrue for both China and Russia: Venezuela became a friendly outpost in the Western Hemisphere and Iran the same in the Near and Middle East.

In return, Venezuela offered China cut rate prices for purchases of petroleum products, at least until production slumped in the South American nation. Afterward, China began to purchase raw materials used to fashion computer chips, even as it ramped up its own mining of rare earth minerals.

Meanwhile, Iran offered China massive supplies of petroleums at a 12% discount below global prices.

Russia likely faces economic losses in Venezuela, though they are probably minor. Rather, prestige and influence are at stake. “The political and symbolic costs could be much more damaging,” wrote the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).

Venezuela hurried to strengthen relations with Russia in 2014, a year many countries shied away in the wake of Moscow’s first invasion of Ukraine. Maduro visited Russia to sign dozens of business deals. Most of them failed to produce economic benefits. A running joke in Caracas was that Venezuela’s only booming export to Russia consisted of ripe avocados in return for importing Russia tourists – who also ripened in the tropical sun.

Russia did sell weapons, which Maduro was eager to buy. But the arms trade dissipated when Russia decided it needed to hoard its own production for use against Ukraine’s stubborn military resistance. The purchases were financed by loans from Moscow. Due to Venezuela’s depressed economy, “There was little chance of loans being repaid even before Maduro’s fall,” CEPA reported.

Iran did supply loads of one valuable military commodity: weaponized drones, which although wildly inaccurate, are nonetheless an important tool of Moscow’s daily bombardment of Ukraine.

Trump appears bent on reducing the advantages of China’s geopolitical romance in Latin America. American troops forced a Venezuelan oil tanker heading for China to detour to an American Atlantic port where the petroleum was confiscated. Trump demanded that Venezuela expel agents from China as well as those from Russia and Iran, as well as Cuba, which has been under US sanctions since the 1960s.

Trump then threatened to place 25 percent tariffs on imports from countries that do business with Iran. China is the world’s biggest buyer of Iranian oil.

“Judging from US actions against Venezuela, there is a clear element of targeting China,” suggested ThinkChina, an online journal published in Singapore.

China also faces two possibly negative scenarios resulting if the Islamist government in Iran falls. One is the potential end to its sweetheart oil purchasing deal, which gives China a 12% discount from world market prices. Two, a change in government could endanger traffic along China’s Belt and Road project inside Iran linking China to the Persian Gulf, a gateway to the Middle East and Europe. The land route cuts transit time from China to the Persian Gulf by two-thirds.

The US had already ramped up restrictions on Russian oil sales abroad. Europe moved to replace American suspended weapons sales to Ukraine, guaranteeing the war there will continue at least for a year or two.

The responses of Beijing and the Kremlin to Trump’s activities have been muted at best. China’s formal answer to the seizure of Maduro and the blockade of Venezuela’s ports was couched in legalistic terms. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said Maduro’s ouster was a “violation of international law, basic norms in international relations, and the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter.” It didn’t mention any action to contest it.

China did react testily to Trump’s 25 percent tariff threat against doing business with Iran. The Chinese embassy in Washington warned that Beijng would “take all necessary measures to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests.” So far, it has done nothing.

Russia was mum on Trump’s actions. The silence may reflect Moscow’s singular focus on its war on Ukraine, an event that was predicted to be over a few days after it started but instead has gone on for almost four years.

Silence also avoids adding the crisis to the string of negative outcomes related to the war:

• the expansion of NATO into Finland and Sweden;
• the willingness of Europe to increase weapons supplies to Ukraine and expand its own defensive capabilities;
• the introduction of new American sanctions on two of Russia’s top oil exporters, squeezing Russian war financing.

Moscow was also in no position to rescue Bashar al-Assad, its longtime ally in Syria, who was overthrow by a rebel insurgency that had once been suppressed by Russian jet bombing.

The question now is whether Trump, having decided that no US troops will be involved to pacify either Venezuela or a possible post-Islamist Republic Iran, will succeed in turning each into agreeable foreign partners.