The good news is that Turkey didn't manage to get itself elected to the UN Security Council. The bad news is that Venezuela did, as was expected. So come January, the chavista regime will have an unprecedented say in world affairs for a two-year term as one of the Security Council's non-permanent members.
This marks the fifth time in the UN's brief history that Venezuela will serve on the Council. The last occasion was in 1992-93, when its representative was Ambassador Diego Arria, who distinguished himself by highlighting the genocide then raging in Bosnia, and by speaking out on behalf of human rights more generally. Two decades later, the situation has flipped entirely–the current crop of genocidaires, rogue states, and terrorists, particularly in the Middle East, will discover to their satisfaction that there are few friends more loyal than Venezuela's present rulers.
As Arria himself pointed out in a recent Miami Herald op-ed, Venezuela's presence on the Security Council couldn't come at a worse time. The country retains close links with terrorist groups both in the neighborhood, such as the Colombian FARC, which receives logistical support and cooperation in its illicit narcotics trading, as well as those further abroad, like Hezbollah, which has benefited from banking facilities and Venezuelan passports. And there are few tyrants who haven't been embraced by President Nicolas Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, among them various Iranian mullahs, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, and the Syrian leader, Bashar al Assad.
Along with other Venezuelan democrats, Arria is scathing about the indifference and cowardice among the other Latin American states, none of whom voiced opposition to Venezuela's nomination, thus allowing it to be the sole Security Council candidate from the Latin American and Caribbean region. Two points underlie this: First, many of these same countries, like Brazil, Argentina and Chile, themselves have recent experience of living under dictatorial regimes and should therefore be more sensitive to Venezuela's predicament; second, the chavista state has been penetrated by the Cubans to such an extent that Venezuela is virtually a vassal of the communists in Havana. Consequently, it is as if Cuba itself had been elected to the Security Council.
Notably–though not surprisingly, given the overall thrust of the Obama administration's foreign policy–the U.S. has not voiced any disquiet over the prospect of a close ally of Iran and Russia gaining a voice on the Council. Last week, a bipartisan group of six senators–Marco Rubio, Robert Menendez, Bill Nelson, Richard Durbin, John McCain, and Mark Kirk–urged Secretary of State John Kerry to actively lobby against Venezuela's nomination. In addition to Venezuela's global antics, such as its alliance with states like Belarus and Iran to block condemnation of Assad at the UN, the letter to Kerry cited critical considerations for the American hemisphere. It specifically noted Maduro's undermining of "the democratic commitments of the Organization of American States" and his abuse of opposition figures at home. Yet, as AP reported, after the Venezuelan success was announced, the U.S. would not even disclose how it voted.
Still, anyone looking for a silver lining in all this might reflect that Venezuela's participation in the Security Council will provide a much-needed reminder that its burning desire to confront the United States, Israel, and the West in general has not ebbed since the death of Chavez in March 2013. As NBC noted earlier:
One of the people representing the fervently anti-American administration of President Nicolas Maduro in the 15-member body will be Maria Gabriela Chavez, the daughter of the late Hugo Chavez, who, in a 2006 UN speech, famously referred to George W. Bush as "the devil."
Despite no prior known work experience of any kind — unless you count maintaining a popular Instagram account featuring her father, her pet Pomeranian, and the occasional manicure shot — the 33-year-old socialite was recently appointed Venezuela's deputy ambassador to the UN.
However fiery Ms. Chavez's speeches at the UN may turn out to be, they will be voiced from a position of grave weakness. Venezuela is not like Qatar, an ultra-wealthy Gulf emirate that enjoys full American support while backing terrorist groups like Hamas. Indeed, in economic terms alone, Venezuela is rapidly developing the characteristics of a failed state. With oil prices now tumbling to their lowest point in four years, and OPEC ignoring Venezuelan pleas for an emergency meeting to tackle the slump, the Maduro regime is going to find itself woefully short of the dollars it needs to pay off its external debt; its foreign currency reserves are at an 11-year low of $19.8 billion. As Alberto Ramos of Goldman Sachs pithily told Bloomberg: "They have to either adjust spending or print more money, and if they print more money that means their hyper-inflation gets even more hyper. Inflation is already running at a very high level and completely unanchored, so this is like a wildfire."
Venezuela also faces a political crisis. The country is as radically polarized now as it was in April 2013, when Maduro defeated opposition candidate Henrique Capriles by a wafer-thin margin, during a presidential election widely regarded as flawed and corrupt. Seizing on the opposition's reluctance to escalate post-election protests, Maduro arrested senior opposition figures Leopoldo Lopez, Enzo Scarano, and Daniel Ceballos earlier this year; all of them remain incarcerated.
Maduro also faces unrest within his ruling Socialist Party over the brutal murder of a young and popular Socialist deputy, Robert Serra, whose bound, beaten, and stabbed body was discovered at his residence in Caracas on October 1. Given his famous accusation that the CIA was behind the death of Chavez, it was predictable that Maduro would blame Serra's murder on "hired killers" working for the opposition. Yet in a nation with one of the highest homicide rates in the world, such rhetoric falls on skeptical ears. Evidence continues to mount suggesting that Serra was killed by members of the colectivos, criminal gangs who work as enforcers for the government.
Over the next two years, we can expect the Venezuelan regime to leverage its new-found status at the UN as camouflage for its offenses at home. But the export of chavista propaganda will do nothing to prop up an economy that stands a 75 percent chance of defaulting on its external debt within five years. And with the possibility of conflict between the government and the colectivos looming as a result of Serra's murder, it's not fanciful to imagine that by the time Venezuela's Security Council term ends, Maduro will have left the scene.