144. This is Trump's Plan for Venezuela

0:06Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US with me, Kattie Kay. And me, Anthony Scaramucci. And our very quiet start to 2026. As we are speaking on this Monday morning, January the 5th, Venezuela's captured president, Nicolas Maduro, is heading into a courthouse in New York. You may have heard our emergency episode that Anthony and I did on Saturday with our initial reaction, both of us having spoken to people, to what happened in the country and to the extraction of the president. We're going to update you on that because obviously things are moving pretty fast on that. So we'll give you an update on what the situation is now and what people are saying about it and what the chances are for success.

0:46Then in the second half of the program, we're going to look at what President Trump is saying about this in the context of other countries. And we will discuss the FAFO doctrine and fill you in on what the FAFO doctrine is. Forget the Monroe doctrine. This is the FAFO doctrine and what it means for the rest of the world. So, Anthony, let's start because you got quite a lot of pushback during our live stream on Saturday from people saying that you were overly positive about what had happened and pointing out that this is in violation of international law and potentially in violation of US law. But actually, I would dispute that.

1:23I've spoken to constitutional lawyers and even members of Congress who I think will investigate this and who are coming out and saying he should have consulted Congress. But I think some of them are doing that kind of in anticipation of things going wrong and to be on the right side of things if it goes wrong, which it may do. I think the president has an awful lot of latitude when it comes to U.S. national security. George H.W. Bush did something similar in Panama when he extracted Daniel Noriega in 1989 and got away with it. So I don't think U.S. law is in contention here. But you were being criticized for ignoring the legal implications of America simply going in and extracting a foreign country's president and suggesting that this could be a good thing that President Trump has done.

2:06I listened to what you said and you were saying that you wouldn't have approved of this and that there are a lot of problems that Venezuela could have because of this and that it's not clear that this is going to work. But do you want to respond to those criticisms about the international legality of this? I'm going to maintain my view and if people don't mind, I'm going to restate it a little. But I also want to point out, if you've been listening to this podcast, nobody listening to this podcast was surprised about the action. We said it was going to happen. We predicted it was going to happen.

2:39We explained that they would hit the port and then they would go after Maduro and they would capture him. They offered him the opportunity for asylum. He said no to that. And so now he's here in New York in the court system. But I did say, one, in violation of international law. Two, I would never have sanctioned that. I don't think Harris would have. Biden wouldn't. There are Republican leaders that wouldn't because you're in a territory that once you go over into that territory, regime change has not worked for the United States, has not. And we have lots of areas. We can go all the way back to the Vietnam War, certainly Iraq and Afghanistan.

3:19in. And so I would like to focus on what goes on here in the United States and not there. Why did it happen? And could there be some positive externalities of it? I did try to suggest that. But one of the number one reasons why this happened, and I want to push it over to you here in a second, Caddy, but it does have to do with the oil. And it does have to do with that 17, 18 % of the world's known oil reserves. And you add those to the US oil reserves and the Canadian oil reserves, you've now put the U.S. in a geopolitical position on the table, which is more powerful, and it can also change U.S.

3:59policy in places like the Middle East, et cetera. People don't want to hear that. That's fine. I wouldn't have done it. I think it was illegal, but I'm telling you why they did it. The big issue for the United States is going to be, we were once seen as a benevolent superpower, and now we're seen as an aggressor. And the rhetoric around Greenland, I holistically denounce. And I will say this, if this woman who's married to Stephen Miller is putting out tweets with Greenland being striped with the American flag, if they think that is something that's going to fly, I don't understand how the American people could be in support of attacking a NATO ally and occupying territory of a NATO ally.

4:47I don't understand how they could even take cover in anything here. On the Greenland stuff, we're going to talk about all of that in the second half, because there's a lot already to talk about on Venezuela, because there's been polls that have come out even since this happened that suggest the American people aren't thrilled with what the president has done. There was a Washington Post text poll, they texted 1000 people and got responses to it just kind of over the course of the last couple of days. That's the most updated information we have. And Americans are split on this mission, which I think is kind of stunning.

5:18Because usually when you have a successful Delta Force mission that goes very well, just militarily, you would tend to have a lot more support for it. The fact that the Americans are split on it, I think is worrying. Now that might just point to our split country. But here's the more worrying number for the White House going forward, only 24 % of Americans support the U.S. taking control of Venezuela. And you've had this bizarre situation over the course of the weekend where you've got Donald Trump saying we're going to run it, re-saying we're going to run it last night on Air Force One, while Marco Rubio, his Secretary of State, is trying to equivocate and say, actually, no, this is not about running the country.

5:57This is not about regime change. This is about leverage. We're going to use the leverage of an oil blockade to get the results that we want. I think on the oil side of things, it's so worth talking about because you've got the Wall Street Journal coming out this morning in their editorial saying that President Trump is speaking too much about oil. Remember, he spent a month, a couple of months talking about drugs. There's been almost no talk about drugs in the last 48 hours. It's been all about oil. Trump has said, we want access to the country's oil. And the Wall Street General says the problem with that is that it makes, as you just said, it makes this look like a mercenary operation.

6:34I mean, this does smack of 2003 when people are saying, are we going to Iraq because of the oil? I get Marco Rubio in a slightly condescending way, who was on every Sunday show yesterday was saying, people who say that this is like Iraq or Libya are basically idiots and don't understand it. I get it. Venezuelan's not Iraq or Libya. It's not Vietnam. It has a long history of democracy. That doesn't mean that when you go into a country and you take out the leadership, that you're not going to have problems. I mean, he seems to be saying because it's not Iraq and Libya, this is going to go smoothly.

7:08But my question to you is, what's the plan? Here we are two and a half days after as we're recording. Do you think the administration has a clear plan of succession of how this is all going to work? I'll give you the plan because obviously I've talked to the people that organized the abduction. I'll give you the plan. They are going to work with the military. So the opposition leadership does not have the support of the Venezuelan military. And so Trump didn't say that in the press conference, but that's the reason why they're not going with the opposition. They went to Delce Rodriguez and they told her, you can be the person, so therefore it's technically not a regime change.

7:52It's the arrest and the removal of a narco-terrorist from your country, but you still have the same government in place. And now the U.S. government is going to try to work with the Venezuelan military, okay, to stabilize the country. And I said this last week and said it three weeks ago. The plan is to have a 24 to 30 month stability interim government run by Delcey Rodriguez. Now, her rhetoric was probably a little too hot for Trump last week, which is why he started threatening her, which was, I think, a mistake by the president. I think her rhetoric was choreographed and coordinated because she's now on a balance beam between the Bolivar Communist Party, the people inside the country that want regime change and their military.

8:43Right. So that unholy trinity is going to be a very difficult thing for her to manage. Yeah. Not a position I would like to find myself in. Correct. So which is why she was. But I have I have talking to people that have spoken to her directly. she is on board with Rubio's plan. She's on board with Donald Trump's plan. And they're going to try to do this. But remember something, it's not Afghanistan, but they have these groups inside the country called the collectivos, which are armed militia. They're gangs. They're drug traffickers. They've been, by the way, running around Caracas the last couple of days.

9:21They have. And they've been installing their own level of power and their own level of authority on various neighborhoods. And these are spungling networks, Caddy, that are still going to exist. And they will obviously fragment out into violence when necessary to serve their monetary interests. And I'm leaving out the Cuban operatives in country, the Russian operatives in country. You know, this is a - The Iranian operatives in country. This is a complete mess. Another thing Maduro was doing that Trump wanted to stop, He was selling the Chinese oil at a 20 % discount, and he was selling it to them in rennenbi or gold.

10:06And you know the whole petrodollar diagram. I don't have to map it out for everybody, but if you want me to, I'm happily map it out. But since Henry Kissinger's doctrine in 1974, the U.S. wants everything run, the most valuable commodity in the world. the U.S. wants priced in U.S. dollars because it forces all the other nations' caddy to hold U.S. dollars in reserve, which gives the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government a tremendous amount of flexibility to print dollars. So again, I'm trying to tell people what is actually happening and the real politics of it. If you want to get into the ideology of it, of whether or not it should have happened, I'm in general agreement with Alistair.

10:49It should not have happened. And it is a violation of international law. If they want to take another step further and go after Greenland, I think you're going to have a dissonant community here, a more activated dissonant community here. I think you're right that that's the ideology. And I think there is an aim of the Americans to control not just oil supplies, but refinery production. And that would give it a huge amount of geopolitical clout beyond the Western Hemisphere. I think this is a more than just a Western Hemisphere play. But I think there has to be questions being asked. And that's why I asked you if they have a real plan for how to run this, because just saying, OK, well, if you, Delcey Rodriguez, don't cooperate, look what's going to happen to you, you'll end up in a prison.

11:40And even if they take out some of the most corrupt, most ruthless people like the interior minister, and they decide, OK, to put him on a perp walk too, you still have a long term planning and maintenance operation and investment operation that has to happen into Venezuela. And I'm not sure that just having an embargo around the country and threats is enough. I mean, if you, these collectivos, all the people that have been making money within the military, which is basically the military from gold and oil and drugs, who's to say that in six months time or a year's time, they don't decide, actually, we need to start making that money again.

12:23I mean, I'm not hearing, that's why I asked you what the plan is, because I know that you've been speaking to people who are involved in this. What is the actual concrete day-to-day plan for how they keep security, how they run the election system, what the law enforcement is? In preparation for the podcast, I'm going to give you their six-point plan, and I'll do it quickly. They want political and institutional reform, and they want to move genuinely towards democratic governance, which means that they're going to have to sort of revamp their current political system. We'll talk about the colectivos and the incentives on them in a minute.

13:02Okay, so they definitely want to revamp the judicial system. This is something Rodriguez has said to them. They have to eliminate the corruption in the judicial system to make the Venezuelan people feel that that system is less biased than it currently is. But what? They're just taking Rodriguez's word at this, who has been Maduro's number two for all of these years and has been involved in the rape and pillage of the judicial system? No, I think they are taking a combination of words. I think there are dissidents inside country, and I think there are expat, Venezuelan expats that live outside of the country who have family members that are still in the country.

13:45And I think they're taking a blended word, and I think they've gone to Rodriguez and said this, and she's in agreement with it. economic stabilization and reform. I think the U.S. is going to have to come up with an aid package, whether Elon Musk likes it or not, but they're going to have to come up with an aid package and they're going to have to do something to stabilize that currency. Okay. And so that's a big part of this. This will be U.S. aid going in once the U.S. is confident that they're going to sort of do what the U.S. wants. Okay. And then there's going to be a big push by the U.S.

14:21government to push foreign investments like you say Chevron, or it could be Royal Dutch Shell, but there'll be a whole group. It won't just be oil caddy. They need electrical infrastructure. They need communications infrastructure. They need healthcare infrastructure. The healthcare system in Venezuela has flat out failed. 60 % of the hospitals in Venezuela have no running water. Okay, just to tell you how dire the whole thing is, okay? A friend of mine who's, I spoke to a Venezuelan economist yesterday about this, and he described this as akin to the Soviet Union post the fall of the Berlin Wall.

15:01It's Soviet-level reconstruction that's needed, which is an enormous amount of investment and time and patience from whoever is going to be running this. And I just don't know that America has that level of time and patience and investment in it. I think this is the central problem. This is the problem. You broke it. It's what Colin Powell said about Iraq. If you break it, it's pottery barn, right? He said, if you break it, you're going to have to fix it. We don't have the will to fix these things after we break them. And so then the real question is, will the Venezuelans themselves, will the expats and will the current opposition forces, political and otherwise, inside Venezuela want to fix it?

15:43But you did mention something at the beginning that I want to go back to. If you don't incentivize the people that are making money right now off the drugs and the oil to make money in a different or potentially better or more lucrative way, you're going to be in a civil war in Venezuela. Okay. But again, as I've said, I want to remain hopeful for those people, and I want to say prayers for those people. They're one of the richest countries in the world if you look at their mineral resources and you look at the oil and gold, et cetera. But it's mismanaged, Caddy, and they have the poorest living standards.

16:20I agree with that. No, I mean, I have many Venezuelan friends who will tell you, and that's why I think you're not seeing many tears, obviously, for Maduro going. And you're seeing some optimism. And I'm asking Venezuelan friends, you know, do you feel optimistic now who have family members there? And they say there's this kind of eerie calm. This one guy said to me, look, my family members are all at the beach this weekend. It's like, you know, nothing has really changed. And he says they don't want to risk being optimistic because things have been so bad for 25 years that it's hard for them to see the light.

16:52I think people who are outside of the country who are not at the moment rushing to say they're going to go back, by the way, they want to wait and see how this turns out. But I think the biggest question is whether I understand what you say, that Rubio understands the situation well, I'm told. He has a small group. It's not a very big group of people. The bench is not very deep who have been planning for this. and I get that this is not analogous to Libya and Iraq and Vietnam, but you take out a leadership, you have to replace it with something and then you have to think, I mean, there's already reports that Venezuelan ships are escaping the blockade.

17:35Oil tankers are suddenly kind of getting through that blockade already by turning off their transmitting signals and things. So this is going to be harder, I think, than Donald Trump, who sounds to me, when I listened to that whole press conference that he gave on the plane last night, he sounds like he's on the high that presidents get when they successfully use military force. And we'll get into kind of all the other countries that he managed to threaten during that mini press conference. But he's just seeing the short term. And there's a huge long term. You're not going to get oil production up, certainly not by the midterms in any significant way.

18:11You might get some kind of reduction in global oil prices on the anticipation of Venezuelan oil coming on stream. But you and I know that's going to take a long time. American oil companies are going to look at this carefully and cautiously. They're not going to run in. I mean, the president is being pretty equivocal when he was asked about this directly, which of the oil companies have said to you that they're going to go in. Actually, he didn't name any names because they've been burned. They know that the infrastructure is shot. They know what this is going to take. They know how hard this is going to be.

18:44So I think I'm just not hearing from the administration the level of hubris and caution and detailed planning that would make Venezuelan expats or Venezuelans themselves confident that this is more than just a kind of mercenary oil grab on behalf of the United States. And even that oil grab may not work. Let me make a comparison to Peru in the 1990s, post-conflict Colombia, and Argentina in 2002, after it had to go through that major monetary restructuring. All of those countries came back. Okay, what Venezuela has going for it are world-class oil reserves, arguably the number one oil reserves knowable in the world.

19:31They've got an educated diaspora willing to return to the country. Only willing to return if it works out. I'm not hearing Venezuelans jump at going back because I think the reintegration will be harder than people suggest. But anyway. Okay. All right. But I'm giving that as a potential. Okay. You have damaged but rebuildable infrastructure and you have geographic proximity to the US market and you have an administration now that's likely to lift the economic sanctions and provide economic aid. Okay. And somebody should be listening in right now and say, wow, this is so very hypocritical. There was a great meme on social media today, Caddy, where it said Maduro's arrested, but then ICE realizes he's in country.

20:19So they deport him back to Venezuela. off and then the process happens again. You're laughing because you see the circularity and you see the ridiculous hypocrisy to it. So again, I am sitting here saying to you that I'm heartbroken at my country's government. I'm heartbroken at the decisions that they're making that are outside a set of rules and norms that have served the global population well for the last 80 years. But we're now here. What will happen, and I'm hopeful that this will generally be better for the Venezuelan people. I'm hopeful. If it isn't, if it isn't, it'll be a disaster like in Afghanistan or Iraq, which is why when someone says regime change, in my mind, based on a historical prism, I would not be pushing regime change.

21:13Can I make one other note to the White House? If you are going to get into the business of regime change, and OK, you're keeping the vice president in position for the moment, but this is still a change of the Chavista regime effectively. It would help if you had some of the organizations of government who had experience in doing that. The United States Institute of Peace had a long history of helping with post-conflict situations. The United States USAID, long history of actually helping rebuild the structures of government and the healthcare system, etc. that you need. But unfortunately, they got rid of those things.

21:49And now they seem to be getting into the business of regime change without some of the better tools and knowledge banks of the people who know to the extent that it's possible to help to do that. I think this is messy. I'm hoping that this is good for the Venezuelan people. I understand that you've got Venezuelan expats saying this could not be worse because it has been so bad for Venezuela that let's just give this a try at least. And I hear that argument. I just wish we heard a little bit more detail and anticipation of the potential problems. Because Donald Trump last night flying back from Mar-a-Lago sounded just like he was on a kind of rah-rah high.

22:28Did you see the great ass kisser of Lindsey Graham standing there? I mean, it's just you can't be more revolted than that. Right. I mean, Lindsey, where have you gone, man? Yeah. So this is what MAGA is thinking. I mean, you've got MAGA voices out all over social media. You know, hold on a second. This is the no new wars president plotting regime change in Venezuela and a host of other countries. And who does he have standing next to him? One of the biggest neocons in the administration, Lindsey Graham. We're going to take a quick break, come back and explain what FAFO is.

23:04Welcome back to The Rest is Politics US, more on Venezuela. Not just Venezuela, it turns out, potentially, because last night as he was flying back from Mar-a-Lago, the president actually mentioned five other countries that he may have in his sights for US intervention. Colombia, Mexico, Iran, Greenland and Cuba, all places that the president is looking at. And this, I think, gives us a hint. The best way of understanding this administration is just to listen to what President Trump says. A few months ago, you might have heard the president say, well, actually, we're going to go after a whole lot of other countries or threaten a whole lot of other countries or say that he hopes that those regimes will fall as well and think that doesn't really mean anything.

23:49I think that after what happened in Iran and the strikes against Iran's nuclear facility, what's happened in Nigeria recently, and now, of course, what's happened in Venezuela, any country and any foreign leader that hears Donald Trump say something and says, OK, I'm going to dismiss this as just trolling the liberals is probably missing something because there is a new doctrine, a new term that is going around. Washington, D.C. at the moment coined the FAFO doctrine, the fuck around and find out doctrine. And this is the Donald Trump doctrine. If you mess with us, if you mess with the United States, either when it comes to trade or when it comes to having our resources that you want or not being pro-American enough, however Donald Trump wants to define that, then you fuck around at your peril, as Nicolas Maduro has found out.

24:41So there is this new doctrine in place, which is the FAFO doctrine. It applies particularly, I think, to the Western Hemisphere, but not exclusively because he did mention Iran last night as well. So do you think Donald Trump is serious when he says and threatens this list of other countries last night? Or is this just him throwing out words? Before I answer that question, I just have to ask a question. When this podcast started in April of 2024, did people think that Katty Kay would be the more profane of the two podcasts? I'm not being profane. I'll tell you, I didn't think that. I mean, I would have bet against that on Cal.

25:19Excuse me. You say more curse words than me. Period. Period. The end. Period. The end. This is not my doctrine. The White House has embraced this doctrine after this terminology was, I think it's the Atlantic that first came up with it. I'm just happy that you are the one saying it and not me because everybody thinks I'm the profane one. But here's what I would say to you about FAFO. Can't believe we're even saying this. But anyway, yes. OK. The FAFO doctrine. It is ridiculous. OK. And so I will maintain that we are not going to attack and or invade Greenland. I will maintain that even stupid weathervane Marco Rubio would say, I can't be a part of that.

26:02Hexeth, of course, would do anything Trump wants. He's now demoting Senator Mark Kelly. He's made that announcement this morning because they don't like what Mark has said about Trump. So they're going to demote him, which is a bunch of ridiculousness and hurts our military culture. Which actually, as you've reported on the podcast before, Anthony, the military doesn't like. The people inside the military don't like the way they're treating Mark Kelly. They do not like it at all, Caddy. They do not like it at all. Number two, okay, Cuba. I do think that Rubio would support regime change in Cuba.

26:39Support it. He would love it. Okay, yes. So we got to be careful there. And I think the Cubans have got to be thinking about that. And I don't think the Russians are going to help the Cubans because the Russians want that actually, weirdly, because they think that'll fortify their actions and give them justification to Trump for what's going on in Ukraine and eventually, in their minds, Moldova and others. This is why this is an unmitigated disaster, by the way. And I think Cuba, of all of those five countries, Cuba is the most likely to suffer from this because they are so dependent on Venezuelan oil.