One of the primary questions in the wake of Operation Absolute Resolve—the unilateral American raid to capture now former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores—is what the United States’ “running” of Venezuela will actually entail. The associated policy and implementation options exist on a spectrum. On one end, running Venezuela could mean occupation of the country by American armed forces and installation of an American civil administrator, adopting the model most recently seen with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. On the other end of the spectrum, running Venezuela could be more akin to a guardianship, wherein the United States advances its interests through a compliant Venezuelan government, with compliance assured through the threat of additional military action. Statements by the US secretary of state since the raid suggest that the United States will seek this latter option, at least initially.
Every option short of full occupation and direct US administration (like Iraq in 2003) contains a potential principal-agent problem. Such problems occur when a principal delegates tasks to an agent but there is a misalignment of interests, incentives, and information between the principal and agent. As a consequence of these misalignments, the agent’s task performance can be suboptimal, to the extent that the agent pursues goals that diverge from the principal’s intention. Given the agent’s informational and contextual advantage (by virtue of proximity to the task setting), these divergent goals can be achieved before the principal can do anything about it, thereby leading to strategic failure.
The United States’ ultimately futile partner capacity-building efforts in Afghanistan are a clear illustration of this dynamic. The Afghan government was the United States’ agent to achieve the strategic goal of defeating al-Qaeda and the Taliban by proxy. As the principal, the United States did not particularly care who was leading the Afghan government in service of this goal. The two Afghan presidents over the course of the American intervention in Afghanistan—Hamid Karzai, and subsequently Ashraf Ghani—cared very much about staying in position, however, and their political security became an agent-specific goal that they pursued independently. The goal divergence emerged when the material resources that the United States pushed into Afghanistan to improve security and governmental programs vis-à-vis the Taliban insurgency were managed by the Karzai and Ghani governments not toward program-optimal outcomes, but rather toward maintaining the corruption and patronage essential for their staying in power. Over time, the corresponding suboptimal program outcomes built up to provide a window of opportunity for the Taliban to resurge, and they exploited this window on the security and political legitimacy fronts to ultimately displace the US-backed Afghan government.
It is easy to project parallels between the US experience in Afghanistan and what is emerging in Venezuela. A compliant government (agent) will probably seek to thread the proverbial needle of satisfying American (principal) demands while simultaneously securing its leaders’ positions against the inevitable internal politicking (if not outright civil conflict) that will follow Maduro’s removal. This threading action is complicated by postcolonial resentment, nationalist sentiment that tends to get provoked by violations of state sovereignty irrespective of context and location, and the powerful array of illicit drug actors and other antigovernment criminal groups that may now see their own opportunity space to exploit in Venezuela. In light of these factors, even the most compliant Venezuelan government that acts in concert with the United States in a good-faith manner could still possibly only minimally satisfy American demands.
The United States does not have to accept this condition, of course, as there are ways to manage the principal-agent problem. Specifically, if the principal can bring the agent’s incentives and information back into alignment with its own, then better alignment of interests will follow and there will be less potential for goal divergence.
In the case of the Venezuelan government, officials could be incentivized to satisfy American demands to the degree that those demands are more compelling than the competing demands they face internally. In political parlance, compelling points to behavior, so the competing demands in question really reflect a competition between how the American principal wants the Venezuelan government agent to behave versus how the internal entities want the government to behave. Thus, the American strategy of compellence targeting the Venezuelan government needs to be stronger than those of its competitors.
Strategies of compellence are composed of demands, threats, and promises. In the context of the United States running Venezuela through a compliant government, the demand would be Do what I tell you to do, when I tell you to do it. The threat would be I will undertake more military action and get rid of you if you do not comply. And the promise would be I will let you remain in office and perhaps even protect you against internal threats if you do comply. The perceived strength of the American strategy is relative, and it pivots on whose threats and promises the Venezuelan government sees as more credible. If the ones being levied by the internal entities (i.e., those with competing demands) are seemingly more credible, then the Venezuelan government will be less compliant with American demands, thus reinforcing the conditions for goal divergence and strategic failure. As such, American policymakers need to be highly attuned to the underlying credibility of any threats and promises in the same relativistic fashion: They must know who their strategic competitors are, understand what threats and promises they are making, and objectively assess the credibility comparison. Nearly two decades of experience in Afghanistan shows that this is easier said than done.
The large US armada off the coast of Venezuela and President Donald Trump’s statements about not fearing boots on the ground certainly lend credibility to American threats. But it is important to recognize the limitations here. First, while the armada is significant, it is not enough to transition to the maximalist option of occupying a country that is twice the size of Iraq with geography characterized by dense tropical forests and numerous mountainous regions. Additionally, while the United States has significant strategic interests in Venezuela, the intensity of these interests is expectedly less than the existential ones carried by its strategic competitors that are internal to Venezuela. Thus, there is only so much blood and treasure the United States is willing to spend in Venezuela before American domestic audiences start exercising their own strategies of compellence on American policymakers. Furthermore, US policymakers must expect that strategic competitors in Venezuela will recognize this factor and seek to exploit it narratively, which can ultimately degrade the credibility of American threats and promises.
Recall that managing the principal-agent problem involves bringing incentives and information back into alignment. Fortunately, the same means that the United States can employ to overcome the information and contextual advantage enjoyed by its Venezuelan government agent are also useful toward resolving the above credibility challenges: information’s strategic correlate (i.e., intelligence gathering).
Unlike with Afghanistan, the United States has a long history of engagement in Venezuela and Latin America more broadly (and has gained significant cultural awareness in turn) and a large stable of native Spanish speakers that span all regional dialects. The advantages borne of this history have already paid dividends in Venezuela, given that Operation Absolute Resolve was almost assuredly assisted by American intelligence assets that had penetrated Maduro’s inner circle. The exploitation of well-placed sources on the ground must continue if the United States hopes to stay aligned informationally with its Venezuelan government agent. Extant collection capability across the various US intelligence agencies is not the only way to achieve this. Some of the Venezuelan diaspora in the United States will want to return to their home country, especially those that fled economic or political persecution under the Maduro regime. This is a potentially valuable recruitment pool for additional intelligence gatherers (but one with its own potential credibility and principal-agent problems that would have to be managed) that the US should consider employing. Regardless of which intelligence assets the United States chooses and where they come from, their placement will help American policymakers to see the strategic environment as their Venezuelan government agent sees it, thereby allowing the American strategy of compellence to be calibrated in near-real time to stay perceptually strong—to know who the strategic competitors are and understanding what threats and promises they are making. With this knowledge and understanding, the United States could nullify the strategic competitors through a variety of targeting strategies, thus ensuring that the credibility of American threats and promises stay at pace (at least) with those of the strategic competitors.
Principal-agent problems are not new; they have existed as long as policymaking has, and the United States has encountered them well before Venezuela or Afghanistan. Like with Afghanistan, however, the historical record on how well the United States has managed them is spotty, to include in Latin America going all the way back to the earliest days of the Monroe Doctrine.
Operation Absolute Resolve was a bold gesture that the United States confidently undertook in defiance of international norms and expectations. To achieve its long-term interests in Venezuela, the United States must now defy the intractability of principal-agent problems in the historical record.
Colonel Patrick Sullivan, PhD, is the director of the Modern War Institute at West Point.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Vicepresidencia de Venezuela
