Getty Images Washington And The World Trump Is Right About Venezuela The president’s critics on the left are replaying the Cold War. But that’s not what’s happening in Caracas.

Frida Ghitis writes about world affairs. She is a contributing columnist for the Washington Post and a weekly columnist at World Politics Review.

Last Wednesday, when hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans took the streets to back the opposition’s risky bid to return the country to democracy, the Trump administration was first in line to offer support. Just moments after opposition leader Juan Guaidó, the head of Venezuela’s Legislature, declared himself interim president, urging strongman Nicolás Maduro to step down, the Trump administration recognized Guaidó as the country’s legitimate leader.

For many Americans with more knowledge of Donald Trump than of Venezuela, the initial reaction, understandably, was to doubt the wisdom of Washington’s position. But very quickly other democracies in Latin America and elsewhere in the world joined in backing Guaidó, suggesting that perhaps this time Trump got it right. In the U.S., top Democratic leaders generally supported Trump’s approach, calling for a restoration of democracy in a country where the Maduro regime has steadily been dismantled, creating unspeakable hardship for the population through corruption and mismanagement and turning one of the wealthiest countries in Latin America into a wasteland of hunger, scarcity and crime.


Democracy is dead there and Venezuela is now a land of despair, with most people going hungry and nearly 90 percent of the population living in poverty even though the country has the world’s largest oil reserves,. Most salaries there are worthless, with inflation exploding to an incredible 10 million percent.

For some, however, particularly among America’s leftists, the reaction was a categorical rejection of Trump’s support for the Venezuelan opposition.

Leftist academic Noam Chomsky and three like-minded allies published an open letter within 24 hours of Trump’s announcement denouncing the president’s “reckless course” in Venezuela while ignoring Maduro’s transgressions. The Nation urged America’s social democrats to take a more forceful stand against the policy. Ilhan Omar, a freshman member of Congress, tweeted against “Trump’s efforts to install a far-right opposition,” revealing her profound misunderstanding of the basic facts of Venezuela’s situation. Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), more circumspect, retweeted a call by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) urging the U.S. to “not anoint the leader of the opposition” and instead support negotiations.

There are two main reasons why, blinded by its opposition to Trump, the left is getting the Venezuelan crisis all wrong.

First, American leftists clearly see Venezuela as a Cold War-style, left vs. right struggle in which they must support the left. But this is very much a 21st-century contest between populist authoritarianism and liberal democracy—and Maduro’s the authoritarian. Sure, he leads a “socialist” party, but his regime has obliterated Venezuela’s democracy since he came to power in 2013. The opposition overwhelmingly won legislative elections in 2015, taking control of the Assembly, Venezuela’s top legislative body. In response, Maduro’s acolytes in the Supreme Court first stripped the Assembly of all its powers , and then Maduro crafted a rubber-stamp constituent assembly of his backers to take over legislative duties. Maduro imprisoned opposition leaders and held a sham election in 2018 to give himself a second term. After Maduro took the oath of office, the opposition said it considered him an illegitimate president and launched the current campaign.

Second, the left wrongly assumes Trump is supporting his usual authoritarian allies on the right, and therefore is drawing the wrong conclusions about what’s at stake in Venezuela and whom the opposition there really represents. To call the opposition, as Omar did, “far right,” is absurd. True, American presidents in the past have supported rightist autocrats in Latin America, from Augusto Pinochet in Chile to the military regime in Brazil. But Guaidó is a socialist, and the opposition encompasses every part of Venezuelan society except the narrow base that still supports Maduro. History is not repeating itself in Caracas.

As for Trump, it’s true that he has a record of buttering up authoritarian leaders, from Russia’s Vladimir Putin to China’s Xi Jinping to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. But in this case, the president is siding with those advocating liberal democracy.

Don’t believe it? Just look at who’s supporting Maduro: China, Russia, Turkey, Cuba, Syria, Nicaragua—a rogue’s gallery of dictators and autocrats across the ideological spectrum. They don’t want to see democratic uprisings succeed, and in the case of China and Russia, they don’t want to lose the billions Venezuela owes them. The Kremlin also aims to preserve its strong ties with Venezuela, which may allow Russia to set up military bases on its territory , barely 1,200 miles from U.S. shores.

Or look at who’s supporting the opposition: Venezuela’s neighbors, Australia, Canada, Israel, the European Union and others. Spain’s socialist prime minister, Germany, France and the U.K., have given Maduro a one-week deadline to call new elections before they recognize Guaidó as the country’s legitimate president.

To be sure, there’s a very real risk that Trump will overplay his hand. His repeated comments about military intervention raise the prospect that he could make matters worse in Venezuela. But, so far, the administration is rightly emphasizing multilateral diplomacy, bringing the matter to the United Nations last weekend and enlisting international support for Guaidó.

Not every Trump move justifies knee-jerk opposition. In this case, the president has it right. So far. That’s why Speaker Nancy Pelosi lent her support to the Venezuelan uprising, as did Eliot Engel , the Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. And it's why other Democratic leaders, like Dick Durbin and Adam Schiff, have endorsed the Trump administration’s approach with the proviso that a transition to democracy should be peaceful and the administration “ continue to work with other nations in the region towards a diplomatic solution.” Have these Democrats all been brainwashed by Trump?

And here’s another point to consider: America’s leftists undercut their own criticism of Trump’s autocratic transgressions when they fail to call them out in Venezuela. If Trump rightly deserves criticism for his violations of democratic norms in the United States, surely Maduro’s imposition of dictatorship in Venezuela means he does not qualify for support from those who claim to revere democracy.