Unfortunately, there is no shortage of misguided ideas when it comes to Venezuela. Tony Blinken, for instance, deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration, told Kate Bolduan on her CNN show on January 28 that Washington should bring China and Russia into discussions about the crisis.
Why, you may ask, is this a less-than-brilliant idea?
First, there is a crisis in Venezuela because there are two figures claiming to be the legitimate leader of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro Moros and Juan Gerardo Guaidó Márquez.
Maduro's re-election in May of last year was marred by charges of widespread vote-rigging, vote-buying, and other irregularities, but more fundamentally it failed to meet constitutional requirements. As such, Guaidó, due to his role as head of the National Assembly, appears to be the legitimate president.
The 35-year-old Guaidó has been recognized by the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and a slew of European countries.
He is not, however, recognized by either China or Russia. They back Maduro to the hilt because they have much to lose if his leftist government falls. Both maintain crucial military facilities in the country, such as China's satellite-tracking facility inside the Capitan Manuel Rios Air Base in Guarico, and have substantial investments and financial ties.
China, for example, has lent Maduro and his predecessor, the infamous Hugo Chávez, over $62 billion, perhaps as much as $70 billion. Of that amount, somewhere between $10-$25 billion remains outstanding. In recent months, China, the regime's largest creditor, has been digging itself in deeper. In September, Beijing extended Venezuela another $5 billion in credit. Russia has also loaned the country billions.
Second, the partnership of Beijing and Moscow is certainly up to no good. As an initial matter, the duo, powers from the other side of the world, are in Venezuela to take on the United States, not help it.
As Joseph Humire of the Center for a Secure Free Society told Fox News, "Russia and China are using Venezuela as a proxy conflict to challenge the U.S." Venezuela, like, Cuba, is a base. Moscow and Beijing, he notes, are providing "economic support to establish a military-industrial presence in Venezuela."
"We can try to negotiate with Moscow and Beijing," Humire told Gatestone Institute, "but for them to help the U.S. resolve the Venezuela crisis they would have to leave Latin America alone, something that almost two decades of regional escalation by Russia and China tells us is unlikely to happen." Their projects in Venezuela are an extension of a continent-wide effort. They want, he points out, to turn Latin America "into a contested theater for military and intelligence operations."
China and Russia make no global problem better. The only sensible approach, therefore, is to remove them from our hemisphere, and the place to begin to do that is Venezuela.
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