In Sea Exercises, A Sign for Obama

Chavez to Remain a Challenge for U.S.

CARACAS, Venezuela — The arrival of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and a naval squadron in Venezuela this week is an unequivocal message to President-elect Barack Obama that his most nettlesome challenge in the Americas will be Venezuela’s populist government and its oil-fueled crusade against U.S. influence, political analysts say.

President Hugo Chavez, who once called President Bush “the devil,” has held out his hand to Obama and expressed a willingness to reengage Washington after expelling the U.S. ambassador in September. Chavez also describes his scheduled meeting with Medvedev on Wednesday and the joint naval maneuvers with the Russian flotilla as friendly exchanges that are not designed to provoke the United States.

But despite Chavez’s conciliatory words, Obama faces the task of blunting the pretensions of a country intent on building alliances with American adversaries, including Iran and, critics say, Marxist guerrillas in neighboring Colombia. Obama also faces more immediate worries, including two wars, looming questions about Iran’s nuclear ambitions and a resurgent Russia.

Venezuela poses no strategic risk. Chavez, though, has worked energetically this decade to fill the vacuum created by declining U.S. influence in Latin America, a product of Bush administration policies that were unpopular here. In the process, Chavez has become perhaps the world’s most vocal anti-American leader and structured an alliance with figures unfriendly to Washington in countries as divergent as Nicaragua and Belarus.

“Obama’s dealing with a country that in the past eight or nine years has been taking a very strongly anti-U.S. position that puts the United States in a central negative role,” said Peter DeShazo, a former U.S. diplomat who oversees the Latin American program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Chavez’s whole revolution is based on supplanting the influence of the U.S. in the region.”

Washington Post