America’s interventions in Venezuela and Iran show the difference between autocracy and ideology. Venezuela was ruled by an autocracy with Nicolas Maduro at the top. Iran is ruled by an ideology that is inculcated throughout its theocratic regime.
Venezuela’s current regime is the remnant of what Hugo Chavez personified and installed over a quarter of a century ago. In 1992, Hugo Chavez participated in a failed coup attempt. From defeat, he formed a political party, the “Movement of the Fifth Republic.” Consistently gaining popularity, he won his first of three presidential elections with 56 percent of the vote in 1998.
Imbued with socialist ideology from the theoretics of Marx to the applications of Castro, Chavez went about installing his own version in Venezuela. A booming oil market and Venezuela’s vast oil reserves helped: It is much easier to redistribute wealth when there is wealth to redistribute.
As Venezuela’s economic base eroded under his policies, Chavez’s popularity followed. When cancer cut him down in 2013, he left Nicolas Maduro to bear the brunt of socialism’s failure. However, Maduro could never fill Chavez’s shoes. Nor could he fill Venezuela’s government coffers: The decline in oil prices, Venezuela’s more expensive-to-refine oil, and years of an atrophying economy under socialism combined to pauperize the country—and eviscerate the promises of Chavez.
Maduro’s reign was not about redistributing wealth—you cannot redistribute what does not exist—as much as it was about not redistributing power. Merely an acolyte, Maduro was never the socialist evangelist Chavez had been. Instead, he spent twelve years trying to retain power despite a deteriorating economy and rising discontent.
Survival, not socialism, was the real belief system that held the ruling clique together. They pillaged the dwindling resources to keep themselves comfortable and in control.
The spoils system is what Venezuela’s autocracy has been about for some time. Decapitating it with Maduro’s capture did not alter its modus operandi. Sharing the resources with the U.S. and ideally generating more with foreign investment—something made possible by American intervention for the first time in a generation—merely offered the chance to make an unsustainable system better. In the regime’s mind: perhaps even sustainable.
Not so in Iran. After 47 years of chanting “Death to America,” it is now clear that the theocratic ruling regime means it. There is no compromise with “Death to America,” no “Serious Illness to America,” no “Feel Really Lousy America.”
In the war with America and Israel, which they ostensibly and vociferously sought, Iran’s ruling regime are what they have been for half a century. Only now they are exhibiting it directly—state to state—not pursuing it via their many proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and more. They are pursuing their terrorism directly; they are unleashing it through every means at their disposal—military (with missiles and drones) and economic (closing the Strait Hormuz and targeting foreign oil facilities)—and they are waging it against virtually every neighboring state in the Middle East.
In the process, they are willing to let their country be battered into prostration. Their leadership was decimated on Day One. It did not matter. Additional leaders have been killed. It does not matter. When replacements are named, they must be kept out of sight. It does not matter.
In Venezuela, had the same destruction of the autocracy’s leadership been meted out, there would have been no leadership left. But in Venezuela, it never needed to come to that.
In Iran, the theocratic regime has already inflicted more death and destruction to the Iranian people than the U.S. and Israel have. In the most recent mass protests, it is estimated that upwards of 30,000 Iranians died at the hands of the ruling theocracy. On Thursday, the regime publicly hanged more of its people to warn away any further thoughts of uprisings.
What rules Iran is not just an autocracy, as in Venezuela, but an ideology. An Ideology of hatred. Hatred for America. Hatred for Israel. Hatred for its neighbors. Hatred for the world. Hatred for anyone and everyone, including their own people, who stand in their path.
Even with Kharg Island, its economic lifeline, open to invasion and already open to destruction, the Iranian theocracy is willing to risk the economic destruction of Iran, not just now, but for an indefinite period in the future. They are willing for 30,000 more Iranians to die, they are willing to kill them themselves, because they too are willing to die.
Iran’s theocracy is willing to do all these things because they are a regime of ideologues, who, even with their top leaders gone and more routinely falling, continue following their ideology into oblivion. And taking Iran with them.
In Venezuela, the regime’s imperative was survival more than socialism. Socialism had become just a covering for the self-serving spoils system they oversaw. You cannot redistribute poverty, and there is no spoils system without spoils. They knew it; Venezuelans knew it. With Maduro gone, the regime could implicitly admit it and move on. Socialism was over. It had failed. Again.
In Iran, the regime’s imperative is their ideology. The theocracy believes it. Thoroughly. Seemingly, top to bottom and all points in between. The sooner that Iran can find someone to believe differently and act like Venezuela’s regime the better for it, America, Israel, the Middle East, and the world.
The difference between autocracy and ideology explains the dramatic difference in timelines between America’s interventions in Venezuela and Iran. It also explains the even greater necessity for success in Iran.
J.T. Young is the author of the recent book, Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left from RealClear Publishing. Follow him on Substack.
