If there were mass protests against the government of Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. decided to recognize the opposition as the legitimate government of Saudi, I would expect disaster. Why? Because…
1. Supporters of the Saudi monarchy remain powerful and confident enough to aggressively fight back, plunging the country into hellish civil war.
2. If the monarchy loses, its most likely replacement will be a revolutionary Islamist dictatorship.
3. Even if the new Saudi government sticks to democracy, the median Saudi voter probably favors even worse policies than the Saudi monarchy now imposes. In particular, government enforcement of Islamic fundamentalism would tighten, and economic policies would move even further toward socialism and populism.
And now you know why I am optimistic about the constitutional crisis in Venezuela.
1. Supporters of Maduro are too weak and demoralized to aggressively fight back, so I put the risk of hellish civil war below 10%. (Indeed, since there’s a high base rate for civil wars in situations this dire, it’s quite possible that the risk of civil war has actually fallen due to the crisis).
2. If the Maduro regime loses, its most likely replacement will be a moderate pro-Western democracy.
3. If the new Venezuelan government sticks to democracy, the median Venezuelan almost certainly favors better policies than Maduro now imposes. In particular, government enforcement of socialist ideology will crumble, and economic policies will move sharply away from socialism and populism.
If you’re too young to remember the collapse of Communism, this is a tiny taste of the sweetness of 1988-1991. When’s the last time you had reasonable hope of dramatic peaceful pro-freedom change in the world?
READER COMMENTS
Spicer
Jan 24 2019 at 9:45am
Don’t you think that the influence of the American power behind this might be a more corrupting influence than not? I’m worried that power politics are taking a preference to the actual well-being of the Venezuelan people in this case.
Jared
Jan 24 2019 at 4:33pm
“Supporters of Maduro are too weak and demoralized to aggressively fight back, so I put the risk of hellish civil war below 10%.”
This seems reasonable to me, but only in the sense that I think that civil war is usually unlikely, and 10 percent is less than 90 percent. That is, I would have a hard time assigning a probability to this outcome (as opposed to a simple “I bet this won’t happen” or “I bet this will.”).
Could you describe, sometime, how you got to 10 percent specifically, since I suspect you didn’t just pull it out of a hat as “a small likelihood of civil war?”
Mark
Jan 24 2019 at 7:25pm
The collapse of the Soviet Union really only increased freedom in the Eastern European countries that joined the EU.
Ukraine and Russia saw very significant declines in living standards throughout the 90s, and a return to authoritarianism in Russia and authoritarianism and chaos in Ukraine.
Most of the Central Asian parts of the Soviet Union arguably became less free after the end of the Soviet Union. All of the former Soviet -stans except for Kyrzygstan are now rated lower on the Economist Democracy Index than Russia or China. Afghanistan is clearly worse off today than it was in the 80s.
As much as I dislike authoritarian regimes, their sudden collapse tends to, on average, lead to bad results, especially when you throw foreign intervention into the mix. History simply has many more Ukraines and Uzbekistans than Estonias. Reform-from-within tends to have a much better track record, as in China. I hope Venezuela does well, but am not so confident in what follows after the Maduro regime collapses.
David Henderson
Jan 25 2019 at 11:35am
Wow! Thanks for that comment. I had no idea how good he was. Civil libertarian and pro-economic freedom.
Fred in PA
Jan 26 2019 at 12:02am
Your six points are all correct. But your conclusion may be another of those “triumphs of hope over reason.” Particularly, I suspect that point #1 about Venezuela — “Supporters of Maduro are too weak and demoralized to aggressively fight back” — may be irrelevant.
The situation is not a democratic one, so Maduro doesn’t need a popular base; all he needs is a few thugs with guns. (Remember, Venezuela had good gun control laws. So the population has been disarmed and can be machine-gunned at will.) I very much fear for Jose Guaido’s life — I suspect Maduro’s thugs will kill him within the next week or two. It’s not for nothing that he (Guaido) is in hiding.
Daniel Klein
Jan 26 2019 at 6:57am
Interesting. I hope you’re right. Thanks.
E. Harding
Jan 27 2019 at 12:31am
I’m pretty pessimistic in regards to Venezuela, for the following reasons:
The fact the regime has not fallen at this late a stage (resorting to rigging elections and legally disempowering opposition rather than leaving), and the opposition’s blatant lack of credibility (supporting some guy holed up in the Colombian embassy as President rather than actually dealing with the situation on the ground) suggests the regime is unlikely to fall without civil war.
Due to the size of the country, as well as Russian backing for the regime, Panama-style US military intervention looks incredibly unlikely, eliminating one avenue for the regime leaving power.
The regime’s blatant stupidity in economic planning, crime control, and not cracking down on the opposition suggests the situation in Venezuela will only get worse. The points in 1. strongly suggest that without civil war, the regime is not likely to fall. The points in 3. increase the likelihood of civil war relative to a more competent regime.
All roads in Venezuela seem to lead to either a more bloody regime or to civil war.
If the regime does fall, the situation seems likely to improve. However, the extent of improvement is uncertain, given the tendency for corruption in Western-backed Latin American governments.
Also, it’s important to remember that prior to 2013, the regime had more popular support than not, and that Venezuelans are overwhelmingly leftwing (though certainly to the right of the current regime).
E. Harding
Jan 27 2019 at 12:35am
@Fred
The Venezuelan regime is not the kind to gun people down. All it needs to do is just do what it has done for the past two years; i.e., refuse to give up power and keep treating the National Assembly as the non-entity it is. And, yes, since Maduro has control of the army, supporters of Maduro cannot be “too weak and demoralized to aggressively fight back”, by definition.
“The situation is not a democratic one, so Maduro doesn’t need a popular base; all he needs is a few thugs with guns.”
-Very true.
Jason
Jan 27 2019 at 2:52am
Mark raises some good points, but I want to problematize (ha!) at least one of them, on China. It’s true that if we’re comparing China of 2019 to China of 1979, it’s dramatically better, particularly if we’re talking about economics. But under Xi, China has been moving steadily backwards. Most dramatically, it now has, by most estimates, 1-2 million Uyghurs in labor camps, something like 10-20% of all Uyghurs. It is committing cultural genocide at a level we haven’t seen in decades. So if it’s true that overthrowing an authoritarian regime may sometimes lead to a worse outcome, it’s also true that authoritarian regimes can revert to full totalitarianism. So China’s a poor example for your argument. On the other side of the ledger, we do have authoritarian regimes reforming from within and evolving toward liberal democracy: Chile, South Korea, Taiwan, and Spain are great examples of this. But in all these examples, we shouldn’t act as if this was something done from the top merely as a matter of leaders’ beneficence. There was certainly a sense of self-interest, in that many of them realized that their countries would be more prosperous with freedom, but there was also plenty of action on the ground level. If, say, Franco tried to designate a successor rather than restore the Spanish monarchy, or if the Spanish king had tried to maintain the Francoist regime, it probably couldn’t have worked politically, as the Spanish people had made it clear that they would not have accepted it.
Comments are closed.