A MAN WITH BIG IDEAS, A SMALL COUNTRY . . . AND OIL

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Hugo Chave Chavez spent his first 18 months as
president of Venezuela consolidating his power on the domestic front.
Now, with the price of oil nearing $40 a barrel and the Organization
of Petroleum Exporting Countries scheduled to gather here this week
for a conference of its heads of state, he is about to step out onto
the world stage in a big way.

For those unfamiliar with Venezuela's president, a 46-year-old former
paratrooper who in 1992 led an unsuccessful coup attempt, the
experience promises to be overwhelming. When it comes to international
relations, Mr. Chavez is a whirlwind of ideas, plans and visions (as
he is with every other subject that interests him), and many of these
are intended to reshape the world order. This leaves him often
critical of or even hostile to American positions.

"Venezuela is just too small for him," said Michael Shifter, senior
fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based policy
analysis group. "He fancies himself as a regional and hemispheric
leader, wants to play a major role on the global stage, and is testing
the limits of how far he can go in terms of pushing his ideas and
showing off his posture in global politics."

Such ambitions may seem messianic and way out of proportion in a
country of modest size and huge economic and social problems. But
Venezuela has twice as many people as Cuba, and Mr. Chavez has a pair
of arrows in his quiver that his friend and mentor Fidel Castro could
never claim: the largest oil reserves outside the Middle East and a
long history as a main supplier of gasoline and heating oil to the
United States.

That situation of mutual dependence gives Venezuela considerable
leverage in its dealings with the United States, and Mr. Chavez, by
arranging to have his energy minister named the president of OPEC, has
been skillful in using oil as an instrument of foreign policy. As
befits a former soldier, his own view of the world and how it should
be shaped is strongly colored by geopolitical and strategic
considerations.

"The 20th century was a bipolar century, but the 21st is not going to
be unipolar," he vowed in a speech here in August. "The 21st century
should be multipolar, and we all ought to push for the development of
such a world. So long live a united Asia, a united Africa, a united
Europe."

On this, as in several other areas, Mr. Chavez's views are similar to
those of one of his early advisers, a neo-fascist Argentine theorist
named Norberto Ceresole, who contends that Latin America must forge
alliances with the Middle East and Asia to counterbalance the power of
the United States and what he (but not Mr. Chavez) calls "the Jewish
financial mafia." In its opposition to American hegemony, this view
has something in common with those of countries like France and above
all China, with whom Mr. Chavez has sought closer ties.

"Soviet power has collapsed, but that does not mean that neoliberal
capitalism has to be the model followed by the peoples of the West,"
he said during a visit to Beijing last fall. "If only for that reason,
we invite China to keep its flag flying, because this world cannot be
run by a universal police force that seeks to control
everything."

In more concrete terms, Mr. Chavez believes that "his mission in the
world is to restore some sort of equilibrium that favors less
developed countries," said Janet Kelly, a professor at the Institute
of Higher Administrative Studies in Caracas who is working on a book
about Venezuelan-American relations. "When you combine that with his
liking of the center stage, it means he is going to be acting
constantly to promote any movement in the world that goes against what
he would perceive as the U.S.-dominated agenda."

One key to pursuing that goal is closer ties with what he calls "our
10 partners, friends and brothers in OPEC." In August, Mr. Chavez
visited all the OPEC countries to invite their leaders to the summit
meeting this week, raising hackles in Washington when he became the
first head of state to call on Saddam Hussein in Baghdad since the
gulf war and when, during a stop in Libya, he described Muammar
el-Qaddafi as his ally.

"In geopolitical terms, the OPEC tour was masterful," said Riordan
Roett, director of the Western Hemisphere Program at Johns Hopkins
University. "It demonstrated that Venezuela was not just a Latin
American backwater." He added that while the State Department may have
complained about the Iraq trip, "more people in the third world now
know about Chavez than they do about any other Latin American leader
except Fidel Castro."

Mr. Chavez's relationship with the Cuban leader is complex. While he
said last year that Venezuela and Cuba are swimming together "towards
the same sea of happiness and of real social justice and peace," he
also seems to realize that Mr. Castro's star has faded, leaving a
vacuum that he, with all his eloquence, exuberance and personal
warmth, can perhaps fill.

"There is admiration for Fidel, but it is linked not so much to Cuba's
domestic system, which I do not think Chavez is interested in trying
out, as it is adopting some of Fidel's style, such as the David
against Goliath stance and the sense of humor that galls the other
side," Dr. Kelly said. "He is more a student of Fidel the defiant than
Fidel the Communist." Like Mr. Castro, Mr. Chavez seems to enjoy
nothing more than tweaking the United States, which Washington, in a
reflection of Venezuela's importance as an oil supplier, thus far has
generally endured with patience.

But there are real policy differences, too. Mr. Chavez has withdrawn
the Venezuelan military from regional naval exercises in the Caribbean
and refused to allow United States planes monitoring drug trafficking
to fly in Venezuelan airspace. Washington's decision to use $1.3
billion to support Colombia's government in its war against guerrillas
and drug dealers promises to make the relationship even more difficult.

Some of Mr. Chavez's former associates accuse him of supplying guns to
leftist Colombian insurgents known as the FARC. He has denied that,
but has also made it clear that he dislikes the American-sponsored
Plan Colombia, warning that it may lead to "the Vietnamization of the
entire Amazon region" and describing the helicopters Washington is
sending to the Colombian government as "death machines."

"In reality, Hugo Chavez and his government are on the side of the FARC,"
Richard Gott writes in "The Shadow of the Liberator: The Impact of Hugo
Chavez on Venezuela and Latin America" (Verso), a new and flattering
biography. "Chavez wants the FARC to win, or at any rate to be so successful
in the peace negotiations that its incorporation into the government will
entirely change the political complexion of Colombia."

Mr. Chavez's principal intellectual hero is Simon Bolivar, the hero of
South American independence who dreamed of and fought for a united
continent. Mr. Chavez has argued for the formation of a South Atlantic
Treaty Organization, a Latin American counterpart to the International
Monetary Fund and a single currency for all of South America, but he
clearly wants more.

"The idea of a reunified America, of a Bolivarian America, has arisen
again," he said in a speech in July on the Liberator's birthday. And
to Hugo Chavez, there is a natural leader of that movement - himself.