Venezuela’s grey zone hybrid war

Jan 28, 2024 Letters

Dear Editor,

Among the agreements between Guyana and Venezuela contained in the Argyle Declaration was that they “directly or indirectly, will not threaten or use force against one another in any circumstances (1)” and a commitment to “peaceful coexistence (3).” This has been widely understood to mean that “war” between our countries has been averted and that the subsequent meetings of the Commission of the Foreign Ministers and their teams are meant to move relations towards cooperation in agreed on areas. This understanding, however, assumes a view of “force”, “war” and “peace” that has long been superseded among military establishments across the world – including Venezuela.

Rather than the old, “absolute, kinetic wars”, today, these establishments discuss, prepare for and engage in “hybrid wars”- the use of a range of different methods to attack an enemy. These include political, diplomatic, economic, financial initiatives and the spreading of propaganda, criminality, infiltration by fifth columnists or attacking important computer systems. Technology has opened up new ways to conduct hybrid warfare. Hybrid wars are conducted in what are called “grey zones” – where all instruments of national power are leveraged to achieve the aggressor’s aims. Venezuela’s use of PetroCaribe’s debt write-offs made some of our Caricom fellow members not only undermine our diplomatic strength but gave succor to Maduro in a very personalized manner that subverted decades-long institution building.

In a word, hybrid wars strive to avoid Clausewitz’ kinetic war as “politics by other means” to Sun Tzu’s Art of War where the enemy can be conquered without necessarily fighting. The strength of the adversary is gradually sapped in the grey zone as much energy is wasted to keep the war from getting kinetic. The premises of the hybrid war aggressor also become normalized over time as we saw with Russia’s moves against Ukraine and other neighbours including Georgia and now the Baltics.

I have been arguing that Maduro and Venezuela are conducting a hybrid war against us and for them to keep their agreement on peace, they have to retract their hybrid war salvoes to convert the grey zone into a zone of peace. Take, for instance, Venezuela’s refusal to accept the ICJ’s interpretation of the Geneva Agreement to assume jurisdiction over the border controversy. This cannot stand. We must expose this for what it is: an act of hybrid war by Venezuela that encouraged them to escalate their aggression to an announcement of their “annexation” of our entire Essequibo Region. If this was not an act of war, then what is? Maduro’s appointment of a Governor of the region with the “authority” to award or deny licenses continues the normalization of Essequibo as Venezuela’s so that the final physical occupation – as with Russia in Eastern Ukraine – becomes a fait accompli.

The Venezuelan people’s historic grievance of being taken advantage of by Britain was once again emotionally aroused after the Argyle Declaration by the exhumation of General Sifones’ body and his installation in the Venezuelan pantheon of heroes on par with Simon Bolivar for “expelling the British from the Cuyuni Basin. Maduro made it clear that this expulsion was to be extended in the present and he left no doubt about the means to accomplish this with his mobilization of one quarter of the conventional Venezuelan armed Forces to counter the visit of the 30-man HMS Trent.

Maduro’s actions illustrate how subversive war in the grey zone is to the international rules-based order. And our acceptance of the several acts of aggression against our national interests such as discouraging FDI into Essequibo because of the “dispute” as not “warfare” makes us complicit in their international brigandry. We can expect such actions to continue to be escalated until one day we will wake up as Ukraine did, to have enemy forces occupying our Essequibo.

In a positive development, however, our government has evidently accepted the need to buttress our security to possibly fight Venezuela’s grey zone war. This can be discerned in our acceptance of members of the US 1^st Security Forces Assistance Brigade (SFAB) working with our GDF. The SFAB’s are a US Army innovation to deal with the reality of hybrid wars in the grey zone that used to be handled by their Special Operations Forces. They organize, train, equip and advise foreign security forces like ours to face threats by wanna-be regional hegemons like Venezuela. We again reiterate the need to establish a base in our Essequibo Region to which our US ally can have access.

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