Terry Glavin: Foolish to think international law should protect Maduro or Iran

The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the Islamic Republic of Iran may seem an unlikely pairing in the effort to make sense of the world at the moment, but the dramatic events unfolding in these two decrepit kleptocracies aren’t just coinciding in an inconvenient competition for front-page headlines.

It’s all part of the same story. If you get it wrong you’ll end up badly misreading U.S. President Donald Trump’s theatrically brilliant exfiltration of the Venezuelan caudillo Nicolás Maduro over the weekend. You might even conclude that the United States is truly “locked and loaded and ready to go,” as U.S. President Donald Trump himself put it last Friday, to defend Iran’s protesters against the Khomeinist regime’s guns.

If you’re not careful you’ll end up believing that Trump is primarily intent upon regime change and the restoration of democracy in Venezuela. He isn’t. He’s sidelined and humiliated Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, referring to her only as a “nice lady” who doesn’t enjoy the respect of Venezuelans. Never mind that a recent ClearPath Strategies poll found that 72 per cent of Venezuelans quite admire Machado, who won the Nobel peace prize that Trump was angling for last year — which might go some way in explaining Trump’s churlishness towards her.

In his address to the nation on Saturday, Trump didn’t even mention the name of Venezuela’s legitimate president, Edmundo González Urrutia, who won the 2024 elections in a landslide. González was forced to hide in the Dutch embassy and ended up spirited out of the country after Maduro refused to surrender the presidency to him. In a break with the European Parliament and Canada and the several Latin American democracies that recognize Gonzalez as Venezuela’s president, the United States will recognize Maduro’s own vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, instead.

According to one of the few uncluttered concurrences between Trump’s remarks and the clearer articulations of his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Bolivarian regime will remain in place for the foreseeable future.

Just one way Iran figures into the Venezuelan picture: You’d be hard pressed to find any two governments on Earth bound together more tightly than these two.

It began with Hugo Chavez, the founder of Venezuela’s “Bolivarian revolution.” Chavez was narrowly elected president in 1999 after having spent time in prison for leading an attempted military coup during his time as a lieutenant-colonel in the Venezuelan military. Chavez styled himself as a populist, a socialist and an “anti-imperialist,” and quickly cultivated relationships with Tehran. In the formalized 2007 Caracas-Tehran “anti-imperialist alliance,” the Khomeinists and the Chavistas went on to partner in quite literally hundreds of diplomatic, economic, military, intelligence and infrastructure treaties, concordats and covenants.

The Iranian Lebanese proxy Hezbollah is believed to have conducted commando training on Margarita Island for recruits from throughout Latin America, and Venezuelan passports are routinely made available to Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Unclassified U.S. Department of Defense reports have noted the IRGC’s elite Quds Force in training exercises with the Venezuelan Armed Forces. U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency lists at least 200 “narcotics kingpins” associated with Hezbollah, which has established Venezuela as a kind of forward operating base in the western hemisphere for money-laundering and multi-tonne cocaine shipments to Europe. Venezuela’s Banco International de Desarollo is wholly owned by the Saderat Bank of Iran.

An especially crippling commonality between the two countries: Venezuela’s shrunken per-capita gross domestic product, roughly a quarter of what it was only a decade ago, is now on par with Iran’s, nominally about $4,000. In Iran, it’s Venezuelan-style runaway inflation and the collapse of the rial — 30,000 to the U.S. dollar a decade ago, now 1.42 million — that has brought thousands of protesters into the streets of cities and towns all across the country in recent days.

Over the past quarter of a century, Venezuelans and Iranians have routinely risen up in efforts to overthrow the parasitic elites that have been destroying their countries. In Iran, the 2009 “Green movement” protests erupted after a rigged election put Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the president’s office — but Iran’s elections are constitutionally rigged to start with, allowing only candidates and parties approved by the ayatollahs. Bloody crackdowns were commonplace in several uprisings from 2017 to 2020.

The most dramatic rebellion broke out in 2022, sparked by the murder of Mahsa Amini in the custody of the ayatollahs’ morality police. The regime was shaken to its core, but savage repression eventually worked its ugly magic. The current protests began in the bazaars — ordinarily a conservative locale in Iranian society — and they’ve spread to students and rural areas. But, as is common in police states, the protests are leaderless by necessity. The absence of an effective and disciplined leadership in the Iranian diaspora has not helped, with mainline liberal democrats stuck between the eccentric Maryam Rajavi at one end and at the other, the son of the former shah, Reza Pahlavi. Iran’s current rebellion, if that’s what it is, is an uprising of abject misery and despair.

Venezuela’s democratic opposition has survived against nearly insurmountable odds. After the death of Hugo Chavez, Maduro assumed the presidency after a hotly-disputed election in 2013. The following year, protest leader Leopold Lopez was imprisoned. In 2015, an anti-Maduro majority won a national assembly supermajority, but the legislature’s clout was neutered by Maduro’s stacked courts.

In 2019, the national assembly named Juan Guaido Venezuela’s legitimate president in a move backed by about 40 democracies in the so-called Lima Group — Canada played a leading role — but Guaido’s movement was violently suppressed. The UN High Commission for Human Rights found that nearly 7,000 Venezuelans had been killed in encounters with Maduro’s police in 2018 and 2019, and that political assassinations had become commonplace.

Maria Corina Machado went into hiding after she was barred from running in the 2024 presidential elections, and Edmundo Gonzalez ran in her stead, winning what independent observers like the Carter Centre reckoned was at least 67 per cent of the vote. Maduro still refused to relinquish power.

In the United States, the “liberal” party line is that the Trump administration’s high-seas murder of alleged drug-runners and its blockade of oil tanker traffic around Venezuela amount to acts of war prohibited by the American constitution, owing to the absence of Congressional assent. That may be so.

Roughly 50 civilians and 32 Cubans in Maduro’s praetorian guard were killed in Maduro’s apprehension — not quite a war, but an operation that clearly violates international law, as Trump’s adversaries will tell you. But Maduro’s savageries also violate international law, and international law allows him to get away with it, which only illustrates the useless irrelevance of international law in these matters.

A popular “hot take” that should be avoided at all costs is the one that runs along these lines: Trump has just given the “green light” to Russia to invade another European country, or a green light to China to invade Taiwan. No he hasn’t. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping did not require any American precedent to be the monstrous criminals they are. It is true enough that Trump should not be counted on to obey any rules of decency with respect to Canadian sovereignty in Alberta, or Danish sovereignty in Greenland, without having to bring the Maduro caper into it.

Another factor that forces Iran and Venezuela into the same story is that the cliché works: It really is all about oil. It’s what Trump zeroes in on when he’s asked about his intentions for Venezuela. The point is to force Venezuela to give back “all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “We had a lot of oil there. As you know they threw our companies out, and we want it back.”

Strictly speaking, no American companies owned any oil or land in Venezuela and oil concessions were nationalized long before the Bolivarians came along. American oil companies weren’t thrown out. It’s a complicated story. The U.S. oil giant Chevron still traffics in Venezuelan oil, but other companies had their interests expropriated and arbitration awards have been difficult to enforce. A paradox: The regime-owned CITGO oil subsidiary contributed $500,000 to Donald Trump’s first inauguration. To be perfectly parochial: It could be years before American access to Venezuelan oil cuts into the privileged place Albertan oil occupies in U.S. imports. But so long as Donald Trump is the American president, nobody knows what tomorrow may bring, so there’s no point in even guessing.

A final symmetry: Iran’s crude oil exports remain close to a seven-year high — 1.7 million barrels a day, more or less — and almost all of Iran’s production goes to China with the revenues funding the IRGC and the regime to no obvious benefit to Iran’s suffering people. Sanctions and gross incompetence have crippled Venezuela’s industry, but Caracas still manages to export about 921,000 barrels a day, almost all of it going to. . . China.

National Post