Nicolás caged: what next for Venezuela?

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1:06The Economist

1:13Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

1:28As part of our World Ahead series, looking at what 2026 has in store for countries, trends, and industries, we take a look at the business of gaming. Having fairly well saturated the markets that it's in, new regions and demographics beckon.

1:55But first, to Venezuela.

2:03What a weekend it was for Venezuelans, and for one Venezuelan in particular. First, surprise airstrikes.

2:14Then, a daring nighttime raid by American special forces to seize President Nicolas Maduro. After a stint on an amphibious warship, a blindfolded plane trip to the U.S., Mr. Maduro was photographed expressionless during all of this. Then, when Perp walked through the halls of the Drug Enforcement Agency in New York, he had an incongruous holiday message for onlookers.

2:43For weeks, America had been assembling its largest force in the Caribbean in decades, sinking alleged drug boats, seizing Venezuelan oil tankers, and generally making dark threats against Mr. Maduro. Now having deposed him, the Trump administration claims it has unfettered control over the country. Going to stay until such time as the proper transition can take place. So we're going to stay until such time as, we're going to run it, essentially, until such time as a proper transition can take place. Easier said than done, Mr. Trump named Mr. Maduro's hand-picked vice president, Delcey Rodriguez, as the administration's partner in making Venezuela great again.

3:25There are a lot of questions about how that's going to go. America's recent history in brute force regime change is, let's call it spotty. In any case, this shock move has underlined how serious the Trump administration is about its dominance of the Western Hemisphere. Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, Mr. Trump has mentioned them all. Oh, and... Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place. We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security. After the dramatic way America went after Mr. Maduro, what were once muddled threats now seem very much worth taking seriously.

4:07Because putting aside what happens from now, what America did over the weekend was an absolutely clinical operation.

4:23Operation Absolute Resolve, America's mission to snatch Nicolas Maduro, was a textbook success in military terms. Shishang Joshi is our defense editor. President Trump described it as... An assault like people have not seen since World War II. Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted a bit more modestly. It's largely a law enforcement function. Remember, at the end of the day, at its core, this was an arrest of two indicted fugitives of American justice, and the Department of War supported the Department of Justice in that job. Now, there are broader policy implications here. The truth of America's nighttime raid is somewhere in between.

5:07This was probably one of the most complex military operations America has launched in many years alongside the bombing of Iran last summer. It was months of planning. America had used more than 150 aircraft, launching from 20 different bases across the Western Hemisphere, all of them coming together right at the same time over Venezuela. it involved stealthy helicopter flights flown by an elite american unit called the 160th special operations aviation regiment and they were flying just a hundred feet above the water and as they approached caracas they used the mountainous terrain around the capital to conceal their movements they arrived at nicolas maduro's compound at just after 2 a.m local time at least one helicopter was hit on arrival, but it was able to fly home.

6:02There were bullet and shrapnel wounds, so this really could have gone a lot worse. The troops who actually entered Mr. Maduro's compound were from America's Delta Force. This is an elite army special forces unit. They're the ones who captured Mr. Maduro and his wife, who had been sleeping. Donald Trump told us that Mr. Maduro sought to enter a safe room, but he was unable to close its steel doors before he was seized. There was a lot of gunfire. You saw some of it today. He was trying to get to a safe place, which wasn't safe because we would have had the door blown up.

6:41This raid very much evokes America's earlier assault on Panama back in 1989. And that was also to detain and whisk away another Latin American leader who was accused of drug-related charges. In that case, it was Manuel Noriega. It's still too early to predict the outcome of the fighting in Panama, and it's still not clear whether General Noriega will ever be brought to America to face drug charges. But that was actually quite a bit different. It was a full-fledged invasion. It had more than 27 ,000 troops involved. About half of those troops were already in Panama, and it was a much less effective operation.

7:22Noriega evaded capture initially, And one of the most abiding memories of that conflict is famously Noriega being blasted with rock music as he took refuge in the Vatican's mission in Panama. I think this is quite different. I think Trump is probably right that no other country could pull off a mission quite on this scale.

7:46This was an incredibly impressive operation in military terms. that doesn't mean it will fulfill America's political aims insofar as we know what they are. I think they're a little bit muddled. It has decapitated the regime by removing its leader, but actually all of those around Mr. Maduro, even if they sold him out, are still there. And in fact, one of the most striking things was hearing Donald Trump dismiss the Venezuelan opposition, suggesting he would instead prefer to work with the vice president, who is really a regime figure. And as America found in 2001 in Afghanistan, where it toppled the Taliban very fast, and in 2003 in Iraq, where it was able to effectively knock over Saddam Hussein's regime in pretty short order, military prowess in the first day or two of a campaign is impressive sometimes, but it's little guide to long-term success, which depends on much more complex political and diplomatic factors.

8:46If you look at American special forces, whether Delta Force operatives who did this raid or navy seals or others this raid in some ways is an opportunity for them to show the trump administration just how useful they can be to its foreign policy goals and that's particularly appealing to this administration because they are really averse to what they see as america's mistake of the 2000s big footprint heavy troop intensive interventions in a country on a large scale. And the question for me is, does this sort of whet his appetite for whether this could be a model for other places in the region?

9:28On the same day as the raid, we saw the wife of a senior White House official issue a social media statement in which she suggested that Greenland, which is a territory of Denmark, a NATO ally, could be next. We also saw Trump talk about Colombia being on notice, and he said explicitly Cuba was on his list. And I think Cuba is going to be something we'll end up talking about because Cuba is a failing nation right now, very badly failing nation. And I think if you're a Latin American leader sitting in America's back garden, you would be looking at these military capabilities. You would be looking at America's sense of triumph after this.

10:09And I think you'd feel a little bit nervous.

10:15I think there's enough nerves to go around, in particular for Venezuelans who have suffered under the illegitimate rule of Mr. Maduro for years. How will the country now be run? What of its opposition? How much of that military build-up and then precision strike is about what the Trump administration has been saying it's about? To talk about that, this morning I spoke with Hal Hodson, our America's editor. In his press conference after seizing Maduro, Trump said that Maduro's VP, Delcey Rodriguez, was going to be America's woman in Venezuela, essentially, that America was going to run Venezuela through her was the implication.

10:53And over the weekend, there was some kind of back and forth. She said some pretty spicy things about America, called America barbaric, said that Nicolas Maduro was still the president. But then late last night, she softened that. Perhaps after Mr. Trump, while on Air Force One, threatened to do far worse to her than had been done to Maduro. So the back and forth between the leftovers of the regime, which is most of it, let's be clear, Maduro is just one guy, and the Trump administration is still very live, still very open, and that's going to define the next few weeks and months of this. So let's wind back and talk again about why America is suddenly so interested in Venezuela in the first place.

11:30Well, it's not that sudden. It's been months and months. How long has the Gerald Ford, the world's most powerful aircraft carrier, been in the Caribbean off the Venezuelan coast since October? and we've been talking about this buildup and internally talking about when the Americans were going to do something and what they were going to do for a very long time. Now, the scale of what they've done, just snatching him with helicopters in the middle of the night and then announcing that they run the country, that surprised us. I think it surprised most people. The baseline analyst's case was they're going to drone a shed in the middle of the jungle and call it a win.

12:05But they didn't do that. They did something much, much more dramatic. Why is Trump interested? He wants to project power across America's backyard, across the Western Hemisphere. This much is very clear now. He's also obviously very interested in Venezuela's largest oil deposits in the world. I think he's also just interested in looking like the big strongman who can just whisk away the leader of a country by clicking his fingers and deploying the world's most powerful military. And also, Maduro was a really nasty piece of work. He oversaw torture, repression, jailing people. Venezuelans have been miserable for years under him as they were miserable for years under Chavez, but particularly under him.

12:45He was an adir in Venezuelan social life. What's interesting is in talking about the reasons you don't mention the one which is the notional big one, certainly for the buildup for the shooting of the boats in the Caribbean was drug running. I didn't mention it because that's not what Donald Trump is talking about. When he gave his press conference after seizing Maduro, the main thing he talked about was oil. It always came back to oil. But he even talked about how he'd put boots on the ground if he had to. He talked very little, if at all, about drug running. And is it a motivation for what the administration has been doing in Venezuela over recent months?

13:20Absolutely. But is it the primary thing, moving Trump to do things like this and then to threaten Greenland and threaten the Mexicans and threaten Colombia? No, it's about power for him. And so what do you make of the suggestion that America will now, quote, run Venezuela? Every time we have used that word, we have put it in big quote marks because we don't think that America's running Venezuela because that word means something. What Marco Rubio says is probably the fairest way of approaching this. He says when we say run, what we mean is we've got coercive leverage over the regime now. And if they don't do what we say policy wise, then we're going to smack them.

13:56If that counts as running the country, then sure. The problem with that is that the regime is a squirming, amorphous thing that's hard to pin down with lots of its own interests, factions fighting each other within it. The idea that one lever of force can direct that regime to do what the Americans want or what the Americans want is even reasonable in the first place or practical is a whole different question. And there's a huge amount of road to run on that question. Well, let's pick that apart a little bit. as Shashank mentioned, Mr. Trump did not vest power or any interest indeed in Venezuela's opposition leader.

14:31No, not at all. And it was one of the most dramatic moments of the press conference gave after they seized Maduro. So Maria Corina Machado is the leading light of the Venezuelan opposition. She is the Nobel Peace Prize winner, allegedly upsetting Mr. Trump in accepting it, reports the Washington Post. She and the opposition legitimately won the Venezuelan election in 2024. And they pulled off this amazing operation of collecting tally sheets from every polling booth in the country to prove that they had won. And even though they proved that they had won by a landslide, something like 65 to 35, the Maduro regime just said, that's not the result.

15:05The result is we won 55 to 45. That's the end of it. So the opposition is squashed first by the Maduro regime, then by Donald Trump. But the Trump administration has said that instead, said Delce Rodriguez is America's woman in Venezuela. I guess my question is, what does she think of that? Well, initially, it seemed like what she thought of that was that America was a barbaric aggressor. Barbaric was her word. She maintained that they were just waiting for Nicolas Maduro to be returned to them and that he was the rightful president of Venezuela. But in the last few hours, really, overnight last night, her stance softened a bit and she talked about being willing to work with the Americans and have a dialogue and negotiate and all that kind of stuff.

15:47The fact the Americans do have overwhelming force against the Venezuelans, there's nothing the Venezuelans can do about that, is having some kind of an impact. But there's a lot of things to shake out within the regime yet. Within the regime and within the country, I mean, what's your sense of what Venezuelans themselves want? Venezuelans themselves want the person that they democratically elected, or at least the party that they democratically elected, the group of people that they chose. To be fair to the Trump administration, it's quite hard to see how you would just throw throw Maria Carina Machado into Venezuela, make her the president by American fiat, and not deal with the fact that the regime is propped up by the military.

16:26And the military has been groomed and essentially brainwashed for decades that this is their job. So they're not just going to be like, oh, great, here's Machado, we back her now. It's a subtler process than that. And that's what Marco Rubio says, is that this is a process of stabilization and starting to make the country a bit more prosperous under Rodriguez and at American direction, and that in good time, there will be elections and presumably Machado or the opposition will be eligible to run in those elections. But we don't know anything about that yet. And Donald Trump, when asked on Air Force One last night, was totally vague about that.

17:00He said it's too early for that. The thing we care about right now is the oil. So you say as of this moment that Mr. Trump, the administration, does have the leverage that it wants over Dulce Rodriguez. Is that just in this moment, do you think? Or is that lasting? Do you think he's got real lasting leverage over the country and things will go as America plans at this moment? Well, America is going to outmatch Venezuela militarily for the foreseeable future. But I think one difficulty for Trump is that what he's doing and saying he will do in Venezuela, he's saying he's willing to put boots on the ground in order to keep control of the situation in Venezuela, is incredibly unpopular in America and particularly unpopular with his base.

17:40And so I think if you're Delce Rodriguez sitting in Caracas, one thing you're probably thinking is, let's play this out. Let's get a little bit closer to the American midterms. And it's going to become harder and harder for Trump to actually do anything to us. And the longer we wait, the easier it is for us to run this country the way we want. And so we can say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're going to talk to the Americans. We're happy to negotiate, et cetera, and just play for time. But this is, in its way, in keeping with what we saw in the national security strategy published late last year, which basically said hemispheric dominance, that's our game.

18:13This was telegraphed. Not only is it in keeping with that, it is an incredibly dramatic demonstration of that. Like nobody who read that thought this was what it was going to be. We're going to basically start running this country as a pseudo corporate state and everyone's going to profit from the oil. That was not in the cards. I think it tells us so much about what they really mean by that strategy. That's why the wind is up. Greenland and Canada and Mexico and Colombia and every country in the Western Hemisphere is now to quote Mr. Trump, who said that this is what Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia, should be doing, watching their asses.

18:49Hal, thanks very much for your time. Thanks for having me, Jason. Later today, Shishank and Hal will join The Economist's editor-in-chief, Zenni Minton-Beddos, deputy editor Ed Carr, and Latin America correspondent Kinley Salmon for a special bonus edition of our new video show, Insider. They'll consider what comes next in Venezuela and analyze Donald Trump's vision of power abroad. Find Insider in the Economist app or on economist.com from 6 p.m. UK time tonight.

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21:06Hey. Hey. Fans have been waiting 13 years for a new Grand Theft Auto game, and the next one, GTA 6, is due out towards the end of this year. Tom Wainwright is The Economist's media editor.

21:25Analysts reckon that it's going to sell more than$3 billion worth of copies in its first year alone, which could make it the most valuable launch of any kind in entertainment history. But this big, big hit arrives during what is otherwise a pretty bleak time for the gaming industry. What do you mean by that? Why are things bleak? It's just had a rough time. It's funny because it had a fantastic decade going up to about 2021. It was this era when smartphones were arriving all around the world. So suddenly everybody, even if they hadn't been into gaming before, suddenly had a games console in their pocket, really.