The Problem with Analogies

Why Libya does NOT seem like a good comparison for Venezuela

With all the saber rattling by the Trump administration over a possible military intervention in Venezuela, something that comes up a lot is Libya. Specifically, the 2011 Revolution that overthrew longtime Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, with air support from NATO, and eventually left the country in the grips of civil war and the collapse of the state to the point that slavery has become resurgent. The constant comparisons made me feel the need to actually read something about Libya, since the comparison seemed weak on its face, but I also felt like I didn’t know enough about Libya to say anything about it. So, I picked up a book, The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 2018) by Frederic Wehrey in the hopes of seeing if there was something I was missing. This post is the result of reading it and reflecting on the comparison.

Let me preface what I am about to say with two key points. First, I am not a Libya expert. I study Latin America and speak 4 (soon to be 5) languages, but none are Arabic. I have never been to Northern Africa and have read fairly little about the Maghreb. I have read a few books on the history of Islam or on the history of the overall region that touch on Libya, but never a book just on this. This is my good faith response to comparisons to Libya as someone who studies Latin America and is not intended as a definitive refutation or anything of the sort. Got it? Good.

Second, the fact that I am not convinced by the comparison is not the same as me trying to veto anyone else using it or insulting those who find it compelling. I am writing this to explain why I feel unconvinced by the comparison, but is not me saying ‘it is totally unacceptable’. In fact, I can see a specific reason for people to use it: as a rhetorical device in shaping policy and public opinion. I don’t mean this in a negative way, at least in this case. Libya’s aftermath following the overthrow of Qaddafi, a brutal dictator who I am glad faced some justice for his crimes, was pretty catastrophic. It is also a well known case where the US played a role, albeit one via air support for local rebels and to prevent massacres of civilians rather than boots on the ground or targeted airstrikes to decapitate the Libyan regime. Given all this, I can totally get why (outside of an academic context) someone would invoke Libya in all seriousness. The idea of accidentally creating another Libya would reasonably cause anyone in a position of power to think twice. This post is more a response to earnest comparisons to Libya made as if it is actually analogous to Venezuela; that I find less convincing.

Let’s start with similarities between the two countries. Both have significant amounts of oil wealth, both are ruled by undemocratic regimes, both are in the crosshairs of the US more for their lack of fealty to Washington than for being undemocratic per se, and both have a surprising number of defenders/apologists because they are seen as part of the anti-Western camp. So far so good, but here is where things start to break down.

For one thing, while Venezuela is quite unstable, Libya was already in the grips of an outright civil war when the intervention happened. The Qaddafi regime was collapsing already, with NATO air support serving more to speed the process up and protect civilians from being massacred by his cronies than anything else. Maduro, in contrast, is clinging to power like a tick and despite multiple crises has had no mass defections from his military, which since 2002 has become significantly politicized. This is an important factor because if in Libya the state and military control was collapsing already, in Venezuela the opposite is true. US airstrikes against Caracas would create a new crisis rather than respond to an already unfolding one.

For another, the political context in Libya and Venezuela are totally different. Libya had suffered under one-man rule since the late 1960s, longer than most Libyans had been alive, and even before that the country lacked a deeply rooted and institutionalized democratic tradition. Venezuela, in contrast, has only been ruled by Maduro for a decade and for much of that decade the authoritarianism of his regime was incomplete, only slowly consolidating the democratic erosion already underway under his predecessor Hugo Chávez. Libya’s dictatorial system prevented the growth of an organized in-country opposition, resulting in unwieldly outbreaks of unrest with no clear leader. In contrast, Venezuela has had an election just last year there the organized opposition movement won a clear mandate, which Maduro overruled, creating a consensus and claim to legitimacy to a specific candidate.

You also do not have the same ethnic divisions in Libya as in Venezuela. Don’t get me wrong, Venezuela absolutely has ethnically based prejudices; part of what was so historic about Hugo Chávez’s rise was the fact that he was of mixed heritage rather than mostly or entirely white. But this seems qualitatively different from Libya, where you not only have differences between Arabs and Berbers but also smaller communities of emigres from what was once the Ottoman Empire, who are still seen as distinct groups from the mass of the population. The ethnic fault lines in Libya would prove explosive after 2011, and why they’d play a role in Venezuela this seems like an apples to oranges comparison of the depths of ethnic difference and anger.

Another major factor that differentiates the two is regional players meddling to extend the conflict. While Libya became a proxy conflict for various regional players to try to advance factions or movements amenable to their own interests, like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, Venezuela lacks similar actors capable of doing the same. Cuba is nigh bankrupt and is in no position to support Caracas militarily, not that it wants to try anyway, given the danger of giving the US an excuse to intervene in it as well. The Ortega-Murillo regime in Nicaragua is similarly in no position to somehow fund an organized military conflict in Venezuela against the US, which it also probably wouldn’t want to even if it had the resources and expertise. None of the leftist in rhetoric but social democratic in practice governments in the hemisphere seem interested or capable of playing the roles of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, or Iran either, and again wouldn’t want to. If anything, Maduro running the country into the ground is something that affects Brazil, Colombia, Chile, etc., negatively, and they’d benefit from a more stable and better administered Venezuela, whatever their public statements. The main players who could help would be China, Iran, or Russia, but the distance involved, the escalation of direct intervention in Latin America, and the lack of regional partners willing and able to turn a blind eye make this a much harder ask. I can see them helping Maduro consolidate his rule over Venezuela, but not them supporting a post-Maduro faction in a civil war, not in a substantial and sustained way that also leaves their fingerprints off the evidence.

You also don’t have the extremely powerful mobilizing force of Islamism, or an ideology capable of similar mobilizational power, in Venezuela as in Libya. Fundamentalist Islam was capable of both attracting foreign fighters, including ISIS, as well as recruit and mobilize Libyans themselves to join up. Leftist guerrilla movements have a long history in the region, no doubt, but a sustained and successful one fought in 21st century Venezuela seems far fetched, no less because the narrative that its advocates would have to advance (we are Chavista, but not Madurista, and dictatorship was not part of the plan, etc.) is much more complex than untested but untainted guerrilla fighters struggling for justice against a universally hated dictator. The main sustained guerrilla struggle in the hemisphere in the early decades of this century was essentially a guerrilla war turned drug cartel/self-defense force, not something that could hope to challenge the state. And, tellingly, in Colombia too the war ended, so why would Venezuela be different?

In short, Libya is really different from its supposed Latin American analogue. There are plenty of precedents right here in the Western Hemisphere that are far closer to the Venezuelan case than Libya. The most obvious is probably the US overthrow of General Noriega in 1989, which like the Venezuelan case has drugs as the main pretext for the intervention. The Panamanian case is also imperfect, of course, since it’s a far smaller country, its government was far less institutionally entrenched, and it lacked the extended heads up that Maduro has enjoyed so far. Still, it seems like it shares far more with Venezuela than Libya and would prove the better guide for hypotheticals.

With all this said, I still think US military intervention in Venezuela is a terrible idea for a host of reasons.

1. Trump is grossly incompetent at best and vicious and transactional at worst, so I can’t think of a worse person to wish to intervene in a country, especially one with significant natural resources.

2. Like with the ongoing trade war with China or his bungled policies towards Iran, Trump has a track record of taking on a very risky position in the most inept and chaotic way possible. We may get a scenario where Trump either tries and fails to oust Maduro, while maybe sending a face saving military salvo or two, and then loses interest. In this scenario, Maduro then retrenches himself while going after his opponents with even more sound and fury, with the threat of foreign intervention and precedent of opposition support for it as the perfect excuse to go to town on his foes.

3. A return to the bad old days of constant US interventionism in Latin America seems like a disastrous precedent we should avoid returning to at all costs. Coups and military interventions destabilize the region, they prevent the US from using its power to actually help on shared issues, they hurt the ability of the US to actually support countries like Ukraine since it opens Washington up to (accurate) ripostes of ‘hypocrisy‘, and it would likely result in a significant number of civilian casualties. A better precedent, Biden’s Latin America policy, is right there; we supported democratic candidates who legally won their office from being couped in Brazil and Guatemala. In the case of Brazil, the Biden admin’s opposition to the Bolsonarist plot appears to have even helped save Lula’s life, as part of the plot involved assassinating him.

I have no idea what comes next for Venezuela. I don’t know what the ‘right’ answer is here. I feel horrible for Venezuelans, both in the country and in the now massive diaspora, who see the country indefinitely trapped under autocracy and unable to escape from the gross mismanagement and corruption that has marked Chavista rule.

As to the Libya comparisons, I am not the argument police, so I can’t stop people from using it and am not trying to, not really. It is going to get used rhetorically to try to scare people in the Trump administration into thinking twice about invading Venezuela, which I agree would be bad, even if I disagree with the analogy. This post has just been my attempt to work through whether the Libya comparison is actually helpful for predicting what Venezuela would look like if Trump had intervened. We may, in short order, find out, and if so I may be wrong. All I can say for now is that I feel very unconvinced; there are better analogies out there.