Juan Gonzalez, who led the Biden administration’s curious policy of embracing anti-U.S. Marxist leaders in Latin America while making enemies of their pro-Western counterparts, has resigned his post as the National Security Council’s top hemispheric adviser.
The resignation came a day after Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei, sent to the United States a seized Venezuelan cargo plane that has ties to Iran. The action underscored the folly of stiff-arming genuinely pro-American leaders while supporting those who may be leftist ideological allies of this White House but are archenemies of America’s national interests.
As the National Security Council’s senior director for the Western Hemisphere, Gonzalez personified that approach.
“Gonzalez is the architect of the administration’s failed Venezuela policy as well as most of the politicized aspects of our current regional engagement,” Andres Martinez-Fernandez, The Heritage Foundation’s top Latin American expert, emailed me Tuesday night, Feb. 13. “Friends of the U.S. in the region will be glad to see him go.”
Gonzalez has wooed Venezuela’s Marxist strongman, Nicolas Maduro; Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a former member of the M19 armed terrorist-guerrilla movement; and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, another Marxist leader with an anti-American animus.
On a trip just this month to South America, Gonzalez again tried to sell the baffling idea that Colombia’s Petro would not only be the ideal intermediary between Maduro and the opposition he regularly crushes but also between Maduro and Washington.
“Colombia can serve as an important bridge, not just at building dialogue between the opposition and Chavismo, but also frankly between us and Venezuela,” Gonzalez was quoted by Bloomberg as saying Feb. 5 from Bogota.
The idea isn’t just baffling but dangerous. Petro would not be a good-faith arbitrator, given that he is much closer ideologically to Maduro, a fellow Marxist. That would put Venezuela’s vulnerable opposition in an even more hazardous position than Gonzalez had already put them in.
It was Gonzalez, after all, who led the disastrous policy of ending the Trump administration’s sanctions on Maduro in exchange for empty promises by the Venezuelan dictator of “free and fair elections” this year.
On the other hand, the White House allowed associates of Gonzalez to work to prevent the election of Argentina’s Milei, a Trumpy libertarian who took office in December. Milei stands for conservative principles that the people around Mr. Biden despise. (He’s speaking at CPAC this week, for example.)
“The United States’ forfeiture of the Boeing 747 cargo plane culminates over 18 months of planning, coordination, and execution by the United States government and our Argentine counterparts,” the Justice Department’s written statement quotes Assistant Secretary of Export Enforcement Matthew Axelrod as saying.
But being pro-West is problematic for the Biden team, so it also opposed Argentina’s new president.
The answer, wrote the analyst, “is that the members of Biden’s foreign policy teams themselves oppose U.S. unilateral action.”
Gonzalez led this abject policy. Whether he is leaving Biden’s National Security Council to spend more time with his children or because the bankruptcy of this policy is all too obvious is immaterial. Good riddance.
