What Trump Wants in Venezuela

25:23And, you know, one thing that a number of officials have made the point to me about, and I think it's well taken, is part of the kind of general logic here, and as you say, it's visual, it's kind of atmospheric, is making military action a daily presence in American life in every sense. So this was all happening simultaneously. I think the strangeness to my mind about how Venezuela emerges as this particular target that serves all of these different political ends primarily is that there were different factions within the Trump administration that actually had different views on how the United States should engage with Venezuela.

26:00It's a genuinely complicated question. I mean, you have a repressive dictatorial president who does have ties to the drug trade, there's no question, who, you know, refused to recognize a democratic election, who's, you know, done all of these obviously, you know, horrific crimes. How do you engage with him? There are longstanding sanctions. Those sanctions seem to be immiserating the population but haven't really dislodged Maduro himself from power. Previous diplomatic efforts have all run up against just the bottom line that Maduro would never negotiate his own ouster. That's always been a kind of diplomatic catch in any broader design for the region.

26:36And so, you know, there was an element within the Trump administration early on that favored a more conciliatory approach. It was epitomized by Rick Grinnell, special envoy who flew down to Caracas, met with Maduro, achieved some small successes. For example, got the Venezuelan government to release Americans held in Venezuelan prisons. convinced the Venezuelan government to start accepting deportation flights from the United States. So there were these kind of incremental, I don't know what you would call them, achievements or gains made from that more conciliatory approach. But someone like Grinnell was quickly outgunned by the combination of Rubio and his ideological vision for the region and regime change, and then people like Miller, who brought to the issue these other concerns.

27:21And so it's kind of a weird confluence of the different interests of people at play, such that this becomes a kind of natural target. And the one through line, I would say, given the kind of differences among the various actors involved inside the administration, was the feeling that at the end of the day, what would the fallout actually be for the administration if it started to take increasingly aggressive action against Venezuela? You know, Maduro is an international pariah. It's not a country that's contiguous with the United States in the way that Mexico is. You know, there was a feeling of like, not to make this sound too simple, but I have to say I've been struck in some of my conversations with people on the inside describing what the thinking was, boiled down to this sense of, can this really hurt us that badly?

28:02Like, this is a kind of a perfect theater for us to experiment in these ways, because the blowback won't be as substantial as it would be elsewhere.

28:40So the Trump administration, I think, has described what they think could go right here, which is that you have a pliant government in Venezuela that does what we want them to do, which leads to more oil exports, which leads to fewer migrant outflows. Seems like a tall order, but what could go wrong here? If we're looking back in a couple of years, and this looks like a signal catastrophe, what happened? I would say there are two ways of grouping the categories of what could go wrong, because there's just a vast amount of things that could go wrong. The first would be, let's say that, you know, Maduro has been removed and now the administration has elevated a hardliner in Delcey Rodriguez to this new role as interim president.

29:30In this world where the U.S. now basically begs off or sort of drifts away, you have a regime in Venezuela that is even harder line that's been backed into a corner that's going to crack down in, I think, even new ways on the Venezuelan population that's there. And I think what you've effectively done is you've really neutered the political opposition in the country. I mean, after years of the Venezuelan opposition really trying to assert itself and trying to build a kind of popular mandate, it's always been a problem for the Venezuelan opposition. Finding a way of continuing to seem relevant to the Venezuelan people when even after they win elections, the government just refuses to recognize those results and everyone goes back to the status quo.

30:12The Venezuelan opposition leader just won the Nobel Peace Prize, dedicated it to Donald Trump. And Trump just dismissed her. Dismissed her. Saying, yeah, she doesn't have the juice around the country. Yeah. And the biggest concern for people who've been following the opposition in particular, that was always the concern for Moria Corina Machado, the Nobel laureate and leader of the Venezuelan opposition. An incredibly charismatic figure who, you know, wasn't the candidate who stood for election in 2024. she had been barred from running for office. Instead, it was someone she backed, a diplomat, a kind of older, statelier diplomat, who I think won in large part because of Machado's advocacy for him and her presence and her courage.

30:55And I think there was always this concern that her particular gambit has been the only way to really meaningfully get rid of Maduro is to depend on the direct foreign intervention of the United States. If you put all of your stock in the idea that the Americans are going to come dislodge the regime and usher in some sort of democratic restoration. When Trump doesn't do that, you are discredited and you are marginalized, which seems to be what's happening. So the sort of first order of bad outcomes is exactly this, that the administration in some form or another persists. The hardliners continue to exert major influence in the country, relatively unchecked.

31:33There's further domestic crackdowns and the Venezuelan opposition, such as it is, is now kind of completely at sea. The other universe of possibilities is that there is a power vacuum, that, you know, there's a careful kind of precarious balance to how the current situation is persisting, where you have a group of armed vigilante groups known as colectivos who have essentially operated at the behest of the regime, but are in some ways free agents. You have elements of the military who are very paranoid about their standing, who have access, obviously, to weapons, to drugs, to money. You have a contingent of Colombian rebels operating along the border.

32:14You have the potential for an immense amount of uncontrolled violence and intense ongoing factionalism that if you kind of remove one piece from this equation, all hell will break loose. So these are just sort of tamer summaries of some of the possibilities, but the potential outcomes could be quite grave. I have to say, frankly, I don't know what's coming. I mean, I don't know what it means for the current administration to say, as it has in explicit terms, that if the now acting president, Delcey Rodriguez, doesn't do what we want her to do, she'll suffer a fate worse than Maduro. I mean, it's hard to imagine any government, least of all a government full of Chavistas that have, you know, consolidated all of this power for now decades, just exceeding to that idea that they're just puppets of an American administration.

33:00Certainly, you know, when it comes to American intervention in the region, there are, you know, a thousand cautionary tales of what it means for the United States to have this kind of prolonged involvement in the country. And what's more, to take this kind of aggressive military action. I mean, needless to say, we haven't talked about the fact that there wasn't congressional authorization for this. I mean, the credible violation of international law. I mean, you take your pick. Maduro's a bad guy, right? He's a genuinely bad guy. Yes. There are a lot of bad guys leading countries. Yes. As Donald Trump said before, he's exchanged love letters with Kim Jong-un.

33:32Yeah, yeah. And so there is something very, I feel like when you get into these kinds of debates, I mean, I don't want to defend Nicholas Maduro. Yeah. On the other hand, he is bad is clearly not a standard that we are applying across the world. And if we did start applying that, I mean, America truly as a world's policeman going in, I mean, should we go arrest the leader of Saudi Arabia for killing a journalist who was writing for the Washington Post and hacking him up with a bone saw, at least allegedly? Well, and this is your point, too, about the history of American involvement in the wider region of Latin America.

34:06I mean, the United States government propped up some of the worst actors for decades. We're negotiating with Putin right now. I want to get at a bigger picture point that reflects the oil, the drugs, the socialist leader of Venezuela and the sort of Marco Rubio domino theory about Cuba. And this feels like a war or an operation, whatever you want to call it, out of the 80s, out of a time when the big drug is cocaine, out of a time when the global economy is dependent on oil, as opposed to moving to renewable energy supply chains, which China is racing ahead of us on. and Trump is devastating in America, when there's more fear that socialism might be on the rise and be in a track of ideology to people, nobody's looking at Venezuela as a successful country that might inspire a lot of imitators.

35:02I can run through the constellation of arguments being made in favor of this. but they all have this quality of being adjacent to reality as it now like there's an energy argument but the energy argument is the one that would have made sense in the 80s not the one nobody thinks that first we are a huge energy exporter at this point america is not you know dependent on others we do not have an energy independence problem and to the extent we do have a problem with the future, it is that China is wrecking us right now on things like the solar supply chain. You know, and the expectation is not that, you know, the future will be won by whoever has access to the deepest oil reserves.

35:47Again, fentanyl, not cocaine, is the drug problem. There just isn't a huge problem with socialist strongmen taking power all over Latin America. I mean, it's a disaster for the Venezuelan people, but that's a somewhat different issue from at least the American perspective. There just seems to be something slightly out of time about it. No, it's a great observation. I mean, the 80s overlay is particularly striking to me, too, when you think about also immigration policies coming out of this administration. I mean, the hostility to immigrants in general, in many ways, is an attempt to rewrite some of the policies written in the 1980s.

36:25You know, the 1980 Refugee Act, that's been all but gutted. I mean, the idea of asylum refugee practice, gone. One of the great ironies to me in Trump's sort of new view of alliances in the region is his alliance with Najib Bukele, the authoritarian president of El Salvador. I'm thinking particularly, among other things, about how when the administration first invoked the Alien Enemies Act, it sent a group of some 250 Venezuelans accused, really in almost every case without basis or evidence, of belonging to this Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, to a notoriously brutal Salvadoran prison. The Salvadoran government got, you know,$5 million to hold them for an indefinite period of time.

37:02They were brutally tortured. They were held incommunicado. So to someone like me, you know, who spends a lot of time thinking about kind of the long sweep of American foreign policy and immigration policy and kind of how they're intertwined over time. It was incredibly striking to see, you know, after years, particularly during the first Trump term, of villainizing immigrants on the basis that, you know, many of the Central American immigrants who had arrived in the United States in recent years were somehow members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13, which never mind that it began in the United States, was a kind of scourge that defined the region in the, you know, the early 2000s and led to large numbers of people showing up at the border during the first Trump administration.

37:39Now you had Venezuelans being accused by the government of belonging to a Venezuelan gang. The target had just changed. And now the ally in prosecuting that case, just as it had been in the 80s, was a hardline Salvadoran regime in the region that I think in some ways Trump really wants to emulate. I mean, in some senses, it's ridiculous to suggest that the president of El Salvador right now is a model for Trump, given just his kind of unrivaled power on the world stage. But one of the things that the Salvadoran government has done in recent years has been to basically suspend the Constitution and run the country from month to month in what's been called a state of exception.

38:16That is almost exactly what the Trump administration fantasizes about in ways both literal and figurative. So I think, you know, in terms of why that kind of mode of thinking still seems to appeal to Trump and to some of his hardline ideologues, I can kind of see it as a throwback to an era of American interventionalism, unbridled demonstrations of force and power. You know, there's been reporting about the fact that Maduro, as a kind of attempt to placate the administration, basically offered his country's oil up to the administration. The administration refused it, which, again, raises the question of this being more about a show of force.

38:54It's a very strange thing. But I think you're right. I think kind of a lot of the ideological thinking around this has a kind of hoary 80s era element. And if you kind of poke it a little bit further, particularly in the context of Venezuela and this sort of domino theory, almost in reverse of if you topple a socialist regime in the region, then others will fall. You really start to see the radicalism of this old hardline Rubio position on Cuba, which he has not really budged on in his time in public office. He has always been utterly hardline and stubborn on the question of needing to overthrow the Cuban government.

39:29And again, that's a very old world backwards looking. I mean, this is not to defend the abuses of the Cuban government, which are obscene really in every sense. But again, it is a mode of thinking that is, as you say, it's very dated. How do you understand who is now running Venezuela? And to the degree that we have been perfectly clear, I mean, what at least Trump and Rubio agree on in their somewhat different statements. is it the acting president of Venezuela has to do what we want her to do? What do we want her to do? I don't exactly know what the U.S. expectation is for, you know, Delcy Rodriguez, the interim president.

40:10Have we done a lot of planning about, I mean, about how to run Venezuela? Yeah, it does not seem to me to be the case. Delcy Rodriguez, the acting president of Venezuela, is a strange person for the U.S. to elevate. Right. Delcey Rodriguez is someone who, before Maduro was in power, was basically a middling government bureaucrat during the regime of Chavez. Her fortunes changed when Maduro came to office. Her brother became the chief political strategist for Maduro. And she, with him, started to have an increasingly active role in overseeing his government. So at a certain point, she was in charge of the foreign ministry.

40:47Then she became in charge of the economy and eventually took on the oil portfolio. was widely regarded as someone who was politically ruthless, someone who was a true believer and one of the most loyal and ideological members of the regime. Her father had been tortured and killed at the hands of a pro-US Venezuelan administration, and it's been said that she's always harbored a sense of aggrievement and victimhood as a result of that. And she is, for all of her ruthlessness, also known to have managed somewhat competently under the circumstances in trying, given this terrible hand the country has been dealt economically to, you know, stabilize, you know, inflation, try to increase oil production.

41:26But she's someone who, you know, is deeply implicated in all of the gravest misdeeds of the administration, of the regime. And so, for example, her brother was the person responsible basically for forcing through the fraudulent election of 2024. So she is basically at the center of all of the most controversial elements of the Maduro regime and its actions. and, naturally, during Trump's first term, was actually sanctioned for this by the Trump administration. Amazing how things were captured. Yeah, yeah. You know, as one former Trump administration official told me, you know, if your whole logic has been that Maduro is an illegitimate president and that his regime is illegitimate, what does it mean to remove him and then replace him with his number two, someone who is implicated in every misdeed of the Maduro regime?

42:15I know that there is a complicated problem the administration has to solve. And this has always been on the table and was always one of the reasons why the United States shouldn't have gotten involved as precipitously as it has. And that is, it's not clear the best way forward without Maduro. I mean, the Venezuelan opposition won national elections in 2024, but the country is still in the stranglehold of the regime and the military. And the opposition figures who won that 2024 election and who now have kind of this prominent role in the international stage make very uncomfortable the existing powers in the country.

42:51And so there's always going to be this question of whether or not the Venezuelan opposition can coexist with the hardline elements of the military that remain acting in the country and don't want any of their interests touched. So that was always going to be a conundrum under any circumstance if the current leadership was removed. And so the logic seems to be that in picking someone like Delcey Rodriguez to be the kind of interim figure, that calms the nerves of the key players in the military and the government, the interior minister, the head of the armed forces. But those guys aren't naive.

43:26I mean, those guys certainly see what course this puts them on. And particularly when you have the administration now being explicit about the fact that if Rodriguez does anything that the administration doesn't like, they'll remove her. I mean, I guess the thinking seems to be that that will spook people maybe into agreeing to leave the country, but that's never really been the case. very, very unclear what the broader calculus is here.

44:12It all just reminds me a lot of Iraq. And in this particular way, and I'm not saying these countries are not the same, they do not have the same internal divisions, I'm not saying it will go the same way. I have read over the past however many years, a number of books trying to reconstruct how we ended up, how America ended up on this completely optional chosen war in Iraq. And one of the things you see when you begin to try to answer that question, like, just why? Why did we end up doing that? is there was no single answer. What there was were a bunch of factions that each had their own reason for wanting this done that as an accumulation, it was enough to push the decision-making over the finish line.

45:02You know, the people who hated Saddam Hussein for humanitarian reasons, the people who really did believe in WMDs, the people who wanted the oil, the people who wanted to export democracy, the people who wanted to show the world that America was back and you couldn't mess with us. And you sort of like kept stacking these up, you know, George W. Bush is like, you know, this guy tried to kill my dad. And no one of them was good enough. But all of them together just created enough pressure that it ended up happening. And this has that strange emergent quality to me where invading Venezuela for the oil is stupid.

45:43because we don't need oil at the moment, and oil prices are low, and we shouldn't invade countries for oil anyway, and the global energy system is moving over, and just like nobody would have said that makes sense. Invading Venezuela because Maduro is bad, well, there are a lot of bad leaders around the world, and that's against international law anyway. We can go to the UN and try to, you know, get a Security Council resolution, but invading Venezuela because we have a drug problem, our drug problem just isn't cocaine. It just isn't. invading Venezuela because we're trying to destabilize a supporter of Cuba.

46:17Again, like that's absurd, but is Marco Rubio's position in part. Like every single one of these is so far beneath the level, it seems to me, that would lead to America deposing the leader of another country with truly unpredictable results, with also no effort to manufacture consensus in the country, no significant post-war planning, or, you know, what if the whole thing just doesn't work? It just has that quality of, you can track back how we got here, but no thread is clear enough to also then explain what level of commitment or even what level, like what governing interest we are going to have in the aftermath in a way that just makes me very nervous.

47:03Again, I'm not saying it goes the way Iraq did, but it just reminds me of that in that respect. Well, and I think to come back to a point you made earlier, I think it's all very well taken. And I also think it's just so much the product of the personalities involved. And in some ways, that's the scariest prospect here is that it's sort of the happenstance confluence of just individual positions or predispositions of particular people. You know, none of whom I think it's fair to say are people of a high degree of integrity. And we're talking about someone like Pete Hegseth, whose primary concern, as I understand it in this configuration, is to get on Miller's good side.

47:38So, like, that conditions maybe his acquiescence to Miller's harder line in a way that a previous secretary of defense would draw a line and say no. You've got Rubio with this age-old ideological obsession. that aligns with a jaundiced view that Trump has of the world that harkens back to the 80s, but at the same time also represents a misunderstanding of recent developments. You know, one former Trump administration official, I asked this question to just the other day, this person had been involved in a lot of the decision-making around Venezuela in the first Trump term. And I sort of said, what's changed?

48:10I mean, Trump initially was reticent to get involved in this kind of direct, overt way. Now, obviously, he's delighting in it. How do you explain that shift. The only thing I see that's changed is that there was a rationale in the first Trump term that we need to establish democracy or support democracy in the region. Now that's not even on the table. There isn't even a gesture made in that direction. And the person went on to enumerate basically the fact that some recent developments that all occurred during the Biden years and that were obsessions for Trump in a certain sense can seem to be aligned with the Venezuela issue.

48:44The rise in overdose deaths. Again, to your point, that's fentanyl. That is not cocaine, but it doesn't sort of matter in the kind of rough, whatever it is, logic of the current administration. There's the idea of the immigration problem. Sure, there are a large number of Venezuelans who've arrived in the United States in recent years, but an intervention like this does not curb the immigration issue at all. In fact, if anything, it unleashes another dimension of it. And then, you know, the last thing was, I'm trying to remember what the last thing was, but you're hearing what I'm saying. I mean, there are all these kind of very notional ideas that Trump has kind of latched onto.

49:20And they're kind of, I do think, reflect a kind of warped vision of what's happening in the region. But there's always, there was also supposed to be an idea pushing the other direction. We keep talking about Trump and what Trump wants, but something that trump said in his often contradictory but but nevertheless repetitive way across the uh campaign something we were told about him yeah was that he doesn't want more wars doesn't want more foreign entanglements he ran in 2016 as an opponent of the iraq war we can argue about whether or not he actually was uh when that was happening but he certainly ran as a critic of it in 2016.

50:00And one thing we were endlessly told by MAGA-aligned figures in this period was that, well, the good thing about Donald Trump is that if he's in office, he's not going to waste American blood, treasure, uncertainty on going off on adventures in other countries where we don't know how they'll end up. And so the bulwark on this was supposed to be a kind of MAGA isolationism. What happened to that? I don't know that this is a meaningful response per se, but there is, to my mind, a kind of hermetic logic to the MAGA view of things and to Trump's view of things in particular. And it's a little bit the idea that, you know, action has to be taken to continue to prop up some of the lies and some of the talking points that have come to define, you know, Trump's most visible public positions.

50:58So if you're always talking about the fact that immigrants are criminals and that specifically Venezuelan immigrants are members of a violent gang and that violent gang is invading the country and it's invading the country at the hands of a foreign dictator who's trying to sow discord and instability through immigration, then if you follow that through to its logical conclusion, if we put the word logical in scare quotes, you have something like this kind of direct confrontation with Maduro and eventually his ouster. The fact that there were no lives lost among American soldiers in this operation, I think contributes to the sense inside the administration this was a resounding success.

51:35Because we know these things are judged. Simply. The moment you capture the... You know, I try to put myself in the position... The sovereign of the country. No, no. I mean, it's truly mind-bending. I mean, there's no way around it. But I think that for someone whose whole political brand seems to be built on the idea of his strength and that, you know, we're returning to an era of the Monroe Doctrine. Can you just say quickly what the Monroe Doctrine is? The Monroe Doctrine from the 1800s is the idea that any foreign involvement in the Western Hemisphere will prompt American reprisals or action that this is the United States is in charge of the Western Hemisphere and that we'll act accordingly.

52:12And that gave rise to a series of American interventions in the region and this view that the U.S. is the kind of police force for the Western Hemisphere. And to your question, like, that seems to fly in the face of this MAGA idea of the importance of isolationism and avoidance of international conflicts, et cetera. But I think so much of it also speaks to this issue of presidential power and this idea of unapologetic, you know, muscle flexing and so on. I mean, again, I'm casting about for explanations for a series of actions that I don't think have logical or substantive explanation. But I'm trying to imagine what the thinking is in the White House where they're embarking on a project that is extraordinarily complicated.

52:57And there have been a number of off ramps. I mean, I expected this kind of, you know, the boat bombings, the intercepting oil ships. I expected that to continue for several months more before there was direct military action on the ground in Venezuela. I was surprised by the suddenness of this, not necessarily by the outcome, because the administration has been explicit about always wanting to do this sort of thing. But I sort of half expected all along that there'd be some way of drawing down this kind of conflict and declaring victory and moving on to the next thing. But that's clearly not how these guys think.

53:30How much do you buy there being a wag the dog dimension to this? So Trump is down in the polls. The 2025 elections were across the board horrendous for Republicans. Anybody reading punditry over the new year was reading piece after piece about the weakening, the shrinking of Donald Trump. the Trump era is already beginning to end, you're already seeing the fractures in MAGA, that there has been an overwhelming narrative that Trump is a lame duck of some sort and that he has lost control of the agenda. There's affordability and he doesn't have an affordability plan. Given that this is something they have actually signaled they want to do, to what degree do you buy the argument I've seen people making that among what is happening here is simply Trump attempting to reassert control as the forceful actor of history.

54:36This is his affordability agenda because in theory, one day oil will be cheaper, right? This is his, you know, we are, he's now talking about Greenland again, right? Maybe you can't pass much in Congress, but maybe you can take territory and, you know, show that the world is under your thumb. Do you buy that? You know, I don't quite know, frankly. I mean, I think the—I keep going back to the idea of propaganda through force, which is the phrase of a former Trump administration official who put this in a kind of political context that I thought was helpful, which is there's always got to be some ongoing conflict where the president gets to demonstrate his power, his sense of control, his authority.

55:17And in that sense, I do think this is kind of tailor-made for him in this moment, a kind of issue that he gets to bang the drum on. He gets to say that the Venezuelan government is now taking orders from us. He gets to say that this guy who he's talked about ad nauseum for being a horrible person, Maduro, is finally out. You know, my understanding of what the administration has done in Venezuela is that it was not an outgrowth, a kind of idle outgrowth of this sense of like, well, we need to do something to kind of revive our brand. I think this is something that's been brewing for a while. and I think to your earlier point, I think it was a bunch of different things that finally aligned at the right moment that allowed for the situation to escalate as quickly as it did.

55:55So I do think that this was already set in motion, but I think it's a very useful political prop for the president. Of course, I hear myself saying this and I'm gassed at the idea that this kind of intervention is a quote-unquote prop, but I do think that for the administration it is useful in that sense. I certainly think they view it that way. Then that was our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? Three books. My first would be a novel called The Known World by Edward P. Jones about Antebilum, Virginia, one of the most astonishing novels I've ever read. One of my favorite American novels.

56:25I cannot recommend it highly enough. My second recommendation is a memoir by Carolyn Forche called What You Have Heard is True. When she was 27, she was living in El Salvador at the start of what became the Salvadoran Civil War. And it's sort of a reflection on what that period was like for her. It's incredibly haunting and beautiful and very much relevant to the current conversation. And my last recommendation would be The Spy and the Traitor by Ben McIntyre from several years back about a Soviet double agent who was working for the KGB, became a double agent for British intelligence during the Cold War.

56:59Absolutely astonishing true story that reads like fiction. Jonathan Blitzer, thank you very much. Thanks again for having me.

57:17This episode of The Oslo Clown Show is produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Amin Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassione, Marina King, Roland Hu, Kristen Lynn, Emma Kelbeck, and Jan Koble. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience Strategy by Christina Samalewski and Shannon Busta The Director of New York Times Pending Audio is Annie Roastrasser