NEWT GINGRICH: Venezuela And A Warning To Avoid Quicksand

While watching President Donald J. Trump’s amazing briefing at Mar-a-Lago on the American capture and extradition of Venezuelan narco-terrorist Nicolás Maduro and his wife, I had two distinct emotions.

First, I felt great pride in the sheer technical ability of our military and the courage of President Trump. He acted decisively against a major drug trafficker who had corrupted his own country for years – and was deeply anti-American and allied with our most dangerous enemies.

Second, I had a deep concern about the next steps in Venezuela. Unless the Trump team is extremely careful, it is going to get mired down in a mess that will erode its political support and weaken its influence at home and abroad.

Phase one was brilliant. The United States clearly has the most advanced and powerful capacity for a single-targeted project of any country in history. We have proven that satellite intelligence and communications, massive air power, and joint forces are deeply effective. The doctrine of planning, training, planning, and retraining has clearly produced a system of incomparable lethality, accuracy, and reach. When the United States focuses its specialized forces and assets, it can achieve near-unbelievable things. Consider the capture of Manuel Noriega – to the elimination of Osama bin Ladin, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and Qasem Soleimani – and now the capture of Maduro.

The danger for the Trump administration is that America’s extraordinary doctrine and system for specified one-time operations doesn’t translate to the long term. We have never run a foreign country or rebuilt a governing system with reasonable speed and expense.

Consider the lessons of Vietnam, Haiti, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In each case, we sent in our extraordinarily powerful military, and it established absolute short-term dominance. But we were unable to then create a deep cultural-political-economic dominance necessary for practical (and perceived) victory.

The only exception to this was the 1989 liberation of Panama. Panamanian dictator Noriega’s indictment as a drug dealer is a reasonable precedent for the Trump administration to use (although, embarrassingly, Noriega had been paid by the Central Intelligence Agency and the drug cartels). However, Panama was a relatively small and healthy country at the time. Guillermo Endara had won the presidential election and been blocked from power by Noriega. He was sworn in immediately after the Americans took over. Returning Panama to the control of Panamanians took less than a month.