President Donald Trump spent much of his first year in office focused on North Korea and Iran, seeking to counter the threats his administration believed…
President Donald Trump spent much of his first year in office focused on North Korea and Iran, seeking to counter the threats his administration believed they posed to the US.
Alongside those two states was Venezuela, where the government has cracked down on unrest and dissent and conditions made it one of Trump’s top three national-security priorities, even as the Pentagon cast the military powers, Russia and China, as the prime threats to the US.
That was “absolutely” the Trump administration’s view of the South American country, said Fernando Cutz, who was a member of the Obama and Trump administration National Security Council staff, in the latter case as South America director and senior adviser to former National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster.
The socialist-led and authoritarian Venezuela has been a foil for Trump to attack from the political right throughout his time in office.
His administration’s assessment of the country as a risk stems from its potential for collapse after years of political and economic turmoil — marked by crackdowns on protests and the political opposition by the government of President Nicolas Maduro and a mass exodus of Venezuelans.
During 2017, “Venezuela was one of three major priorities for [Trump] on topics of foreign policy. He came on board very early on, already asking about Venezuela, and… I think it was second workday in the office that I got pulled in [by him] to brief him on Venezuela,” Cutz told Business Insider this month. “It wasn’t an issue that I had to push. It was he wanted to know more about what we were doing.”
“Whatever prior experience or knowledge he had on the topic, which honestly I don’t know what it was, but it drove him to want to engage fairly quickly and strongly,” he added.
Cutz — who left the White House in spring 2018 and is a senior associate at business advisory the Cohen Group — said there was some continuity between Obama and Trump on Venezuela.
“I think what we saw under President Trump is an ability for us to do a little bit more than we were doing under President Obama, but it was following a very similar path that we had kind of set out for ourselves under President Obama,” Cutz said.
Trump’s focus on Venezuela contrasts with what appears to be indifference toward the region, characterized by the cancellation of bilateral meetings and early departure from the G20 summit in Argentina.
