The US Department of Energy announced on Friday that it had removed 13.5kg — about thirty pounds — of highly enriched uranium from a legacy research reactor in Caracas, crediting “President Trump’s decisive leadership.” The fuel had sat in Venezuela’s small Soviet-era research reactor for decades, periodically flagged by the International Atomic Energy Agency but never repatriated. The administration framed the operation as a demonstration of resolve on proliferation — and, less subtly, as a contrast with the continuing standoff over Iran, where Tehran is believed to hold something on the order of 408kg of similarly enriched material and where US Navy vessels and Iranian forces have just exchanged fire in the Strait of Hormuz. One stash was lifted; the larger stash is still where it was.
The received wisdom
The mainstream foreign-policy reaction has been a kind of half-shrug. Yes, removing thirty pounds of HEU from a Caribbean basket case is good — the same way taking unguarded plutonium out of post-Soviet Kazakhstan in the 1990s was good. But, the reasoning continues, it is also a stunt: the Caracas reactor was not a serious proliferation risk, the Maduro regime had no realistic weapons programme, the IAEA could have been the more grown-up vehicle, and dressing the whole thing up as “decisive leadership” while a real war is being fought over Iranian centrifuges is a category error. On this reading, the Venezuela announcement is theatre to distract from what the same administration cannot do — talk Tehran out of the bomb while it shoots at American ships. The complaint is not unfair. The Caracas operation is the easy case, and easy cases do not test a doctrine.
A different read
But the case is more interesting than the half-shrug allows, and more interesting in ways that should give conservatives a moment of clarity about the limits and uses of American power. Start with the obvious: 13.5kg of HEU, while a fraction of Iran’s stockpile, is still enough material to be of more than academic concern in a region where Cuban intelligence officers, Russian advisors, and Iranian Quds Force operatives have all maintained a footprint in Caracas under fresh US sanctions for “energy starvation”. Anyone who lived through the 1990s remembers that the unglamorous work of nuclear housekeeping — Nunn-Lugar, the removal of Kazakh and Ukrainian warheads, the Belgrade research reactor airlift in 2002 — was precisely the sort of thing that prevented the lurid scenarios of loose-nuke fiction. The unflashy operation is not the alternative to seriousness; it usually is the seriousness, and the people who sneered at George H. W. Bush’s quiet diplomacy on Soviet stockpiles ended up grateful when the warheads stayed counted.
The harder lesson concerns Iran. The Trump administration’s pitch is that the Caracas operation shows what willingness can do; the obvious counter is that Caracas was willing because Caracas had no choice. The Maduro regime is sanctioned to the bone, its oil rents disappearing, its currency long since junked; it is in no position to refuse a uranium pickup that the IAEA has been politely requesting for fifteen years. Iran, by contrast, has nine times the material, an actual weapons-relevant programme, partners in Moscow and Beijing, and — as a trade court has just reminded the White House — a US executive whose unilateral economic coercion is itself under legal challenge. The comparison is therefore double-edged. It vindicates the proposition that pressure plus diplomacy can produce hard counter-proliferation results. It also vindicates the suspicion, going back at least to Ferguson’s writing on Wilsonian overreach a decade ago, that American power works best when its objects are weak, isolated and inarguably outmatched. Tehran is none of those.
There is a third, conservative lesson worth saying clearly. The right has spent two decades making fun of arms-control liberals for their fixation on multilateral verification regimes. The Caracas operation, with its IAEA paperwork and decade-long quiet preparation, is exactly the sort of thing those regimes were built to enable. It worked. The bigger Iran problem — where US ships are taking fire in international waterways and Gulf states are urging UN action over Strait of Hormuz mines — is what happens when the same regimes are absent or have been deliberately walked out of. Ross Douthat once warned that the great American conservative temptation is to confuse the willingness to use force with the willingness to think hard. Pulling fuel rods out of Caracas was thinking hard. The next move on Tehran will require more of it.
What to watch
First, whether the administration follows the Venezuela operation with a public proposal — even a face-saving one — for an IAEA pathway on the Iranian stockpile, or whether the line hardens further. Second, whether the Maduro regime retaliates symbolically against Cuban or Russian assets in country, which would tell us how much of the operation was negotiated and how much imposed. Third, whether oil markets, already jumpy from renewed exchanges in the Strait, read the Caracas move as escalation, de-escalation, or noise. Conservatives who have spent the year complaining about the price of jet fuel may find the answer to that one matters more than the symbolism.
— J