Venezuela’s Downward Spiral

05/04/17 • 27 min

Allison Fedirka and Xander Snyder discuss Venezuela’s political and economic crisis, its broader impacts and why it can't go on forever. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

Xander Snyder: Hi and welcome to the Geopolitical Futures podcast, my name is Xander Snyder and I am an analyst here at Geopolitical Futures and joining me today is Allison Fedirka, a senior analyst also at Geopolitical Futures. And we are going to be talking to you today about what is going on in Venezuela. How are you doing today Allison?

Allison Fedirka: I am doing pretty good Xander, how are you?

XS: I’m great. So people have probably heard about Venezuela in terms of there’s some sort of crisis going on. The Maduro government has been cracking down on protestors and things probably seem pretty chaotic. Where does this situation stand right now Allison?

AF: So people have probably been hearing about Venezuela being in crisis, I would wager since 2012-2013. So in order to understand where we’re at now, it’s important to appreciate from where the country has come over the past five years or so. There are multiple problems making today’s situation more complex and straining and volatile than it was five years ago. The government was always based on a populist policy and as long as the government had money that they could spend on the population, it had support, it would do just fine. They also had a charismatic leader back then which was Chávez.

In 2013, we started seeing financial strain in the country in terms of spending more than it was receiving, declining oil production and capabilities, infrastructure problems and basically seeing the populist government catching up with the Venezuelan government. We also saw Hugo Chávez and die and have his predecessor take his place, which is Nicolás Maduro. He was never popular as Chávez.

So fast forward to 2014, we have the drop in oil prices. Venezuela depends heavily on oil. Ninety-six percent of its U.S. dollars comes from oil sales. So it basically has a decreased source of foreign currency, which was vital for importing food. Everybody needs to eat, and Venezuela does not produce nearly enough food on its own to feed its population. And you continue with the situation of low oil prices, cutting imports, dwindling food supplies and you get to where we are today. So the crisis were seeing did not happen overnight. And what we’re seeing is a long time coming. It’s not necessarily thinking of it as a spark but just something that has been fostered for years and years and years and this was inevitable.

XS: Now Geopolitical Futures’ forecast on Venezuela, if you go on our website you can check out our full year forecast for this year, we say that the Maduro government in its present form won’t survive 2017. So we’ve talked a little bit about how the situation has developed post-Chávez under Maduro over the last several years. What’s going to change this year that’s gonna force Venezuela over the tipping point? Are there alternatives or is there just going to be anarchy for a while?

AF: So the forecast was carefully worded because it is difficult to be precise with exactly how we foresee the government changing. At the beginning of the year and December when we wrote this forecast, there was several possible routes that this could take. One was a very last minute decision to hold a referendum that would trigger new elections. One was dialogue between the parties, one was military coup, one was outside intervention, one was popular uprising.

Since the beginning of the year, several things have occurred in terms of breakdown of institutions and political processes such that a referendum with elections are no longer a viable option. Dialogue seems pretty much impossible, we haven’t seen any moves for foreign intervention. We’ve seen some divide among the military.

Right now, what we’re seeing on the ground is anarchy and that seems to be the dominant force for change in the government right now. Whether or not the opposition can sustain that and also to an extent increases that, because right now it’s becoming the status quo, they need to push it a little bit further in order to get the change that they’re looking for because they’ve been doing that for a month now and so far the government has been able to resist. So that’s where we’re at. The people’s force seems to be the leading cause right now and it will most likely be a combination of those factors of either outside pressure joining the opposition leaders or perhaps factions of the military or dialogue under extreme duress that will take the Maduro government out.

But the point is, we always talk about constraints and imperatives. And we don’t see an out for Venezuel...

TRANSCRIPT:

Allison Fedirka: I am doing pretty good Xander, how are you?

But the point is, we always talk about constraints and imperatives. And we don’t see an out for Venezuel...

Previous Episode

French Elections and the Future of Europe

Jacob L. Shapiro and Xander Snyder discuss what is and isn't important about the French elections and what is at stake for Europe. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone, and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. This week I am joined by one of our new analysts, Xander Snyder. We’re happy to have you Xander.

Xander Snyder: Thanks, this will be fun.

JLS: We’re hoping to just have a conversation today about what’s been going on in France, and I want to be conscious of not ascribing too much influence to Marine Le Pen and to the hysterics around the election itself because, as we often write at GPF, elections don’t matter that much and individuals matter even less. But I think that this election in particular does say some very important things about what’s going on in Europe right now.

So just to kind of rehash for those who need rehashing of it, the French election happens in two rounds. So the first round is sort of a wide group of different parties and people, and if somebody gets 50 percent in the first round, they win, but that almost never happens. So the first round is to whittle it down to two people, and then in the second round you get two people who face off against each other in a runoff, and you go from there.

So the first round this year was remarkable in the sense that none of the establishment candidates from establishment parties did particularly well. The two leading vote-getters were Emmanuel Macron who started his own new party, which is nominally progressive or centrist, it sort of depends on what day of the week it is how you want to describe it.

And then Marine Le Pen who is the head of the National Front, which is a party that has been around since the ’70s, which is considered a right-wing nationalist party. It’s not the greatest way of describing it if you actually look at their platform, some of the economic policies might be described as more left wing. What’s really “right wing” about them is their nationalism and what some people would call their racism, although I think that Marine Le Pen has tried very hard to purge the party of some of those more negative influences.

The two other leading vote-getters were Fillon, who was sort of the conservative candidate that everybody thought was going to win and was beset by scandal after scandal such that he just couldn’t get his momentum going, and Jean-Luc Melenchon, who was sort of the far-left Bernie Sanders of France who did much better than people thought. He got 19.6 percent of the vote but not enough to get to the second round.

So that’s where we are right now. The second round takes place on May 7 and really this is going to be a vote between in some ways a pro EU candidate and an anti-EU candidate. Le Pen has said she wants to renegotiate the relationship with the EU as soon as she gets in, and if there’s not a successful renegotiation, she wants to put it to a referendum and hopefully leave. Macron is really promising policies more of the same.

So one of the reasons this is so important to talk about, it’s less because of France, more because of what this says about the state of Europe. So that’s sort of where we are, right this second. Xander, I thought it might be a useful thing to start off by talking the tension between individuals and between geopolitics. I know that as somebody who has started recently with us and has been doing a lot of training on this, that it’s sometimes hard to see the boundary there. How do you see the relationship between Le Pen and the French elections.

XS: I think you wrote two pieces recently on what’s going on in France. One was a Reality Check and the other was a Deep Dive that placed this election in greater geopolitical context and they’re worth reading. I think an interesting distinction that you drew was whether or not Le Pen controls her constituency or her constituency controls her. And it’s an important distinction because you say this could be the difference between the National Front becoming a reanimation of some of the really bad things that happened in 20th century Europe versus it just becoming a 21th century political party that’s just trying to balance and find a way to essentially stay in power, which is why Le Pen has been exorcising some of the more radical elements of her party to try to get to where she is right now.

So, I’d actually be curious just to start off to know a little bit more about what you meant by that distinction. Who’s controlling who and why does that matter in a geopolitical sense? In a sense, that’s greater than just the election.

JLS: The reason that matters for me is because I am thinking about trying to define what was really bad a...

Next Episode

Russia-US Relations and the End of Syria

Jacob L. Shapiro and Xander Snyder discuss the future of Syria, the prospect of US-Russian cooperation in the Middle East, and whether ideology defines geopolitics or vice versa. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

Xander Snyder: Hi, and welcome to the Geopolitical Futures Podcast. I’m Xander Snyder. I’m an analyst here at Geopolitical Futures, and I’ll be chatting with Jacob Shapiro, the director of analysis here at Geopolitical Futures. How’s it going Jacob?

Jacob L. Shapiro: Nice to be back, we’ve been on hiatus it feels like for a couple weeks.

XS: Yeah, and today we’re going to dig into a subject that’s probably more on the forefront of people’s minds than many others in the world of international affairs. We’re going to be talking about the conflict in the Middle East and U.S. and Russian interests, and how they’re affected by what’s going on there now. So just for the sake of context, let’s lay out the current lay of the land for what’s going on in the Syrian civil war right now.

You can either just look at this as a single conflict, but really it’s more complicated than this and the nature of the fight is that there are multiple fronts or fights all built into one. How would you describe the nature of those different individual conflicts Jacob?

JLS: Yeah, it’s really difficult to talk about Syria and the conflict that’s going on there in the first place because Syria really doesn’t exist anymore, and we don’t really have the vocabulary for talking about what actually exists in its place because nothing has emerged. I don’t think that anything is really going to emerge.

I was looking into this for a research project lately, and I sort of knew this intuitively, but I think of Lebanon and Syria as together. I’ve always thought of them as part of the same sphere of influence and usually it was Syria always interfering in Lebanon, but you could also think of Lebanon as a model for what’s going to happen in Syria. And Lebanon is, it’s a much smaller country than Syria, and yet it fought a civil war for 15 years. So the idea that Syria is going to calm down and that Syria is going to remerge as a single country at some point in the near future seems to me to be mostly folly in the same way that thinking that Iraq is going to be able to pull itself back together is simply folly.

But in thinking about all the different sides that are in this fight – I mean, it started as an internal Syrian conflict and in some ways, it still is. It’s the Assad regime, which is the Syrian Alawites, and also a lot of Sunnis bought into the Assad regime and the Syrian Kurds and the more secular opposition and then all the opposition groups that are various flavors in terms of Islam, some of which are more moderate in the way they want Islam to govern daily life and some of whom are like Islamic State, who are sort of on the religious totalitarianism end of the spectrum.

So there’s the local fight, there is the sectarian fight in general between Sunnis and Shiites for which Syria and especially Iraq have become huge battlegrounds. There’s the problem with Syria now being really a way for different powers in the region to position themselves. The Turks have their interests in Syria, the Iranians have their interests in Syria, Saudis have their interests in Syria, the Israelis have their interests in Syria, and then you zoom an even bigger step out and it seems like almost every Western power in the world is somehow participating in bombing Syria or attacking ISIS in some way. I mean, when you read down the list of countries that have actually participated in military actions in Syria, it’s a pretty impressive list.

So it started as an internal Syrian conflict, but as most conflicts in the Middle East go, it quickly morphed into all these different levels, and I think that’s one of the things that’s going to keep it going for a long time.

XS: Yeah, and part of the reason why it’s difficult to imagine any sort of coherent Syria, in the way that we’ve come to know it, emerging out of this is in part due to what Syria was defined as most of the 20th century anyways, right? You had a number of countries in this region that were drawn basically specifically to allow outside ... powers to maintain some degree of influence over these countries. So just like it’s hard to imagine Syria with its borders before 2011 emerging again, it’s hard to imagine Iraq coming out of this with similar borders.

And what is it that has changed in the last 25 but also hundred years that has weakened the powers that existed in the 20th century that maintained these borders and has driven it to what it looks like today? I mean certainly, the rise of Islamism in the last 30, 40 years an...