485. Trump Says America will Run Venezuela

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1:17Welcome to an emergency podcast from The Rest is Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. And the reason I'm sure you are all aware is because of what's been happening in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, where President Nicolas Maduro was the subject, along with his wife, of a pretty remarkable military operation overseen from Mar-a-Lago in Florida by President Trump, who is certainly starting out the year very much in the style that we suggested he might when we spoke on the podcast on New Year's Day. Maduro has been in power for some time. He followed Hugo Chavez, who has been something in the thorn of successive American administrations.

2:08Trump has been building up military options in the Caribbean. and frankly as he said in a press conference he just finished now Maduro knew that he was coming for him I don't think he can have known he was coming last night and one thing that was absolutely key to this was the element of absolute surprise so Rory how surprised were you when you heard that Maduro was on his way to an American warship from there to travel to a court in New York Well, I think astonished that he managed to catch him because Maduro has been expecting this to happen for months. As we've been reporting on the podcast, the US has massed an aircraft carrier, an enormous number of Marines, some of its top stealth fighters all off the coast.

2:57In fact, you can almost see them in the Caribbean from the mountain next to Caracas. So Maduro has been expecting an American invasion, expecting an American abduction, and yet they managed to do it. And they did it with Americans wounded, but apparently no casualties. It looks as though the logistics of the operation is that the US seemed to have switched off electricity, or at least this is the early story about how they did this. Took out the air defenses, flew in helicopters, including one man that we're told by the admiral overseeing the operation was 49 years old, which is an encouragement to me as I have my 53rd birthday today.

3:32Happy birthday. And thank you. And have us extracted Maduro. The big question, of course, which we need to get into is, is this remotely legal? To which the answer is not. What does this mean for international relations around the world? And what's the future of Venezuela after the removal of Maduro? Where do you want to start with any of this? Well, I think let's start with legality. and it's interesting how what Rory you know America better than I do what does PSA mean I don't know well JD Vance has put out a social media post saying PSA to all those who are saying this wasn't legal I just I don't know what PSA means but I'm saying please stay away there's a terrible revelation I'll have to I'll to look up on my phone it's a revelation obviously of our complete tech incompetence well no it's I think it means please I'm guessing please stay away or please shut up public service public service announcement sorry one of our teams okay public service announcement he basically was saying shut up if you think it's illegal because it's not but why their definition of legality in relation to this is that they are they america are under threat from a terrorist narco state and a cartel led by maduro now what a supreme court would say about that, I have no idea.

4:58Most of the international lawyers I've heard on the airwaves today have said there's no legal basis of this at all, because under the United Nations, you either have to have a resolution for the United Nations, well that didn't happen, or there has to be a sense of an imminent threat. Now, the reason for this big military build-up, I guess, has been to indicate, to give a sense of some kind of threat, otherwise why are you sending your biggest aircraft carrier down there. But I think that is frankly for the birds. I think what this says, we've said this so many times in recent months, in particular when we're bringing the end of the year together, is that so far as Trump is concerned, the rules just don't count.

5:39There is no international law that he's going to kind of put this through the lens of. There has been no contact with the United Nations. There has been no sort of understanding that other voices might want to have a say before And more fundamentally, for a US domestic audience, no consultation with Congress. So people would point out that President Bush, of course, went to war in Iraq without a UN resolution. But he did get a vote in Congress authorizing that intervention. Congress is feeling particularly bruised. You've got senators coming out saying they were effectively lied to. Congressional committees called in the administration and said, are you planning regime change?

6:18And we're apparently told no regime change was planned. and Trump's and Rubio's defense of this in the press conference that you were watching appear to be that they thought Congress was leaky and couldn't be relied upon to keep a secret. Well, and the other thing that Rubio said was that this was, because this was, and the operation, I think we should hand it to the American as a military operation. This was absolutely extraordinary. And Dan Cain, who's the head of the, you know, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he did a presentation at the end of the press conference after we'd had Trump's kind of often, he's one of his weaves, which went from sort of, you know, what happened to how bad Maduro is to how they're bringing down crime in New Orleans and all sorts of crazy stuff.

7:02Then Hexer's doing one of his kind of, you know, pumping his chest, Fox News type things. But then Dan Kane did a, I mean, genuinely interesting presentation about how the preparation went. And the point he made was that they prepared for this, they'd rehearsed it. They obviously had somebody very, very close to Maduro. They knew where he was moving. They knew where he was planning to be. But they said that the weather was key and they essentially have been waiting for several days to do this. So I guess that's why they do have a point in saying the minute you start talking to anybody about this kind of thing, you've got to keep it reasonably tight.

7:39But no congressional law, no congressional authority, no international discussion or consultation. Keir Starmer's just done an interview with the BBC where he said he had no idea, hadn't had a discussion, which, you know, fair enough, you might expect that. But I think it goes to the heart of this, that Donald Trump now thinks that he when he says he's the leader of the free world, that is how he sees himself. He was very. And I think this goes back to we had that discussion not long ago about the national security strategy. He mentioned it specifically. He mentioned the Monroe Doctrine specifically.

8:15This idea that the United States kind of owns that part of the world, owns that hemisphere. He even said at one point they some people are now calling it the Don Roe doctrine, you know, bringing himself right into the heart of it. And this is what it feels like to me is that they are basically saying we do what we want here. And likewise, there was a question at the press conference just before we came on where he was asked about Colombia because the and he has basically said that the Colombian guy, to use Trump's phrase, needs to watch his ass. because they're, in his words, flooding drugs into the United States as well.

8:55And he repeated that today. He said, you know, yeah, he does need to watch his ass. He's also been talking about Claudia Scheinbaum in Mexico and saying that, you know, we've given her the chance to say she says she runs Mexico, but actually the cartels run Mexico. So he's kind of indicating, do what we say now, and then maybe we won't get too aggressive with the rest of you. Yeah. Well, let's hit the next thing, which is, of course, the problem here, which is Maduro was undoubtedly a profoundly unpleasant evil man. This is a guy that clearly lost the election, as we said, in 2024. He's a guy associated with murdering and torturing opponents.

9:39he's taken the Venezuelan economy to a fifth of its former size. It's a recession of 80%. It was the wealthiest country in Latin America. It's now one of the very, very poorest. And we now have a situation in which there are maybe 8 million refugees outside the country in which the oil infrastructure is destroyed, the water infrastructure is destroyed, the electricity is destroyed. It's a truly miserable place. and again as we had these arguments around uh the toppling of saddam hussein or gaddafi or indeed the taliban in afghanistan we have to find a way of balancing three different things number one is this an evil guy yeah absolutely he's an evil guy and people are very very relieved that he's gone number two is this legal is this the right way to do it i think our conclusion here is no third final thing i think the uh the question is what then happens and i think what's grossly irresponsible about this as so often is the question of the day after and whatever you you know at least with these other interventions there was some attempts at planning there were months of papers being put together this really does feel as though he's standing up making it up at a podium well on that very point he was asked i mean the the we came on air just as the press conference was coming towards its conclusion but up until that point virtually every single question was what do you mean you're going to run it how long are you going to run it who's going to run it and he basically said well these guys standing behind me um well that was pete hexath the secretary for war marco rubio the foreign secretary i think it was ratcliffe who was there the head of the cia uh stephen miller your friend who makes those wonderful speeches that draw on Goebbels and this guy Dan Kane they're not going to be sitting in Caracas sort of work you know organizing the public infrastructure and so forth the other thing that came through loud and clear and actually Rubio said something very very interesting Rubio I think was allowed to speak because Hex has been allowed to speak you know these guys like you know they've got egos and but he didn't have a script and so he just went up and did this kind a rather rumpety-tumpty, you know, you've got to understand, you're now dealing with the president.

11:58When he says something, he means it. And why have you? And doing the usual sort of praise of Trump. But I actually think that there was something in the way that he was describing Trump, which was essentially saying, take this guy at his word. And when he said that, and said, you know, so we've been going after Maduro, I was sitting there thinking, I wonder what Mark Carney and Metta Fredrickson, the Prime Minister of Denmark, is thinking of their sitting watching this now. Because that was, they basically kept saying, America is the only military power that can do this kind of thing. We are the greatest country in the world.

12:34Anybody who threatens us in any way, anywhere in the world, we're going to go after them. Now, that was a pretty, pretty heavy message. Well, on that, let's look at the day after problem. So this is not Panama. The most optimistic scenario when people are talking, they talk about the removal by George Bush, senior of the general in Panama, but Panama is 1989. By the way, by the way, that was exactly the same day. It was January the 3rd when Noriega. My birthday again and again. I know. It always happens on my birthday. Yeah. Always happens on my birthday. so noriego is is the optimistic scenario which is the u.s got involved in panama they toppled the general put in a new government and broadly speaking things worked out i mean panamanians will say wait a second 300 people killed 27 americans were killed but in the great legacy of international catastrophes panama went pretty well comparatively but but but panama is tiny compared to Venezuela.

13:39You know, 3 million people compared to 30 million people. There was a massive... 8 million, as you say, who are living outside, many of whom may want now to come back. Panama had a massive military base. And of course, it was vital to US national security interests because of the Panama Canal. And so this is a completely different context. There are no American boots on the ground. Trump says he's not worried about boots on the ground, but there aren't currently any boots on the ground. This is a country which has, as I say, gone through an 80 % economic recession, where there's barely often electricity or water supply for two, three days in a week, where people are in such dire poverty, as you say, eight and a half million people have left.

14:23So now let's think about what reconstruction is like. And the big story is going to be about the regime itself, which is still there. I mean, as you pointed out, the defence minister, Maduro's defence minister has been on television attacking these strikes. The defence minister, the interior minister, the vice president, who reportedly is on their way to Russia. All these people are still in place. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. The vice president on the way to Russia, is that just a kind of a fake news thing? Because Rubio, Trump said, Rubio didn't say, but Trump said that Rubio had had a conversation with her.

15:02With Dwayne Rodriguez, yeah. With the vice president. And then the other thing is that one of the names that's been added to the indictment, this is an old, this is a rolled over indictment because it was an indictment against Maduro in 2020, narco-terrorism, cocaine, guns, etc. One of the names that's been added is actually the very, very powerful interior minister and also Maduro's wife and son. So I'd be very, very surprised if she's on her way to Russia. Anyway, on very rare. Let's see. Let's see. And just to sort of, I mean, to give people a little bit of a glimpse behind the scenes of how we're trying to pull this podcast together and who we've been talking to.

15:43I've been talking quite a lot to Andres Velasco, who was the finance minister of Chile. I've been talking to Michael Reed, who was the economist correspondent in Latin America. I've been reading a lot by a man called Javier Corrales, who's from Amherst, who has done an amazing analysis to the regime. And on that latter point, the military is the key here. So there is something like, you know, multiples more generals compared to the average soldier in Venezuela compared to anywhere else on earth, like 20 times as many generals as you would expect. And every general has a monopoly somewhere in the economy.

16:19They control the economy. They control the ports. They control mining. They control oil, as well as doing illegal stuff. The judiciary is also tied in. So he's also, Midori had also corrupted the judiciary, which is one of the reasons why when he stole that election, the judges still voted for him. So the first question is, what are all these senior people, interior minister, defense minister, and all these generals who actually run the country, what are they going to make of what's happened? Let's say the Nobel Prize winning leader appears and says, OK, I'm coming in. and I'm going to bring Maria Corina Machado absolutely Machado comes in and she says I'm going to bring transitional justice I'm going to prosecute people who are connected uh with the regime only at the very top I won't go down below the top I'll go this right they're going to be thinking hold a second I own a large mining concession I don't trust Donald Trump I don't trust this amnesty why on earth am I going to take any risks on this at all and it seems to me either they will try to cling on to power and do some kind of deal with Grinnell, who's Trump's envoy, do some oil deal.

17:32In which case, you have basically a regime even worse than Maduro's, run potentially by the former defenseman or current defense minister. Because Maduro is not like Stalin. He's not even like Saddam Hussein. This was not a personalist dictatorship. This was a big system, an Hugo Chavez system. And Maduro was a relatively kind of introverted figure who rose up within this big system. So just taking him out doesn't remove the structure of the whole state. And just on that, you see, Chavez, I think Chavez, whatever people think about him, and like Maduro, a terrible man and used power for its own ends, et cetera, et cetera.

18:12But he did genuinely have a kind of charisma and a force and a power and a personality. Maduro didn't have that in the same way. And one of the reasons I think he was put there in the first place is precisely because of that. Chavez, who was dying, like a lot of people when they're on the way out, they don't really want to be followed necessarily by somebody who's, you know, going to immediately take over and be absolutely brilliant. So Maduro, as you say, is the leader of, and this is where the Americans do have a point, he's the leader of a pretty criminal organisation where he's got hold of the government and he's kept hold of the government and he uses it for his own his own ends and his own power.

18:52And this guy, Diosdado Cabello, who's the one who's been added to the indictment, he is like his really big enforcers right hand guy. Now, all of these people, his vice president, the defense minister, the interior minister, they've all been on the airwaves basically saying this is outrageous. America is a is an empire out of control. People need to take to the streets and defensivers. They've got these things called collectivos, which are these sort of, you know, civilian groups that go around and keep control. They're now out on the streets basically saying, you do not come out and celebrate this.

19:28Leave the celebrations to those that are happening in Chile, where they're being organized to say, this is marvelous because the new president's friend in the White House is doing this great thing. And then the other thing which I think lends itself to your theory, they're slightly making this up as they go along. military success notwithstanding, is that Trump looked genuinely surprised by some of these questions coming at him. So then to sort of say these guys are going to run it basically means these guys are now going to start to work out how it might be run. And the other thing he did, he said that, and this may be clever, I don't know, he kept talking about there was a second wave ready to go.

20:11He talked about, and you know, we keep saying you've got to think of it as a kind of TV presenter. He actually said in an earlier interview today, you know, I was watching it like the most amazing TV show. I was watching it as it was happening. These guys were moving so fast. And then he said at the press conference, you guys are probably never going to get to see what I saw last night. It was amazing, right? But he then said we had a second wave of attacks ready to go. And he was very explicit that I think, when I say explicit, the message he was putting out to these people, you know, Delce Rodriguez and her brother who runs the parliament and all this stuff, was unless you come on board, you are going to be hit by the second wave.

20:54I think that's what he was saying. And meanwhile, the other thing I think we should probably talk about, Rory, is how other international leaders are meant to react to this. Because what happens now, if let's just say that the Venezuelan military don't cave, that these Venezuelans who are part of Maduro's clique and who are up to their neck and no good as well, that they just decide to assume power and take power. She gets sworn in as the president because that's the way the Constitution works. And on they go. If that happens, then Trump is signaled and Rubio says, take him at his word. Then the second wave comes.

21:34Surely now the only thing that might even begin to stop that is if world leaders somehow coalesce to say, hold on, Donald, is this really, really, really sensible? And there is very, very, very little sign of that. Yeah. I mean, and of course, the real key here is Latin America itself. So when he stole the election, 2024, or most blatantly stole the election, the Biden administration signaled very, very strongly to Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, that they were not going to intervene. They weren't going to topple him. But if Brazil, Mexico and Colombia did it, Biden's administration would be standing behind them with financial support and all forms of reconstruction support.

22:21And Biden, in fact, recognized the guy that won the election as the proper leader of Venezuela. And nobody did it. Nobody actually did anything. In fact, Brazil is rather interesting here. Lula, who's now out there saying this is absolutely terrible, This is a challenge to international law and state sovereignty. It's the same Lula, of course, who turned up to visit Putin and watched his big military parades and hasn't called him out for the invasion of Ukraine. So there's a lot of weird double talk here. But it has to be ultimately not Britain, but Latin America that decides how to come behind this and what to do.

23:01I don't think they're going to want to put troops in on the ground. I think very, very unlikely that Brazil or Mexico or Colombia is going to want to put in troops. Argentina, maybe he could try to lean on Millet, but it's the last thing that Millet feels that he can afford to do, I would have thought at the moment. So then we get to the question of all this stuff that has been talked about again and again. People have obviously been talking about regime change in Venezuela for more than a decade. So there are all these think tank papers. We can put in the links if people are interested. I looked at 10 of them, right, all the way from Brookings to AEI, war games, etc.

23:39And they keep coming back to the stuff that will be very familiar to you and to listeners who remember the stuff from the Balkans and Iraq and Afghanistan, which is. Firstly, you need to think about what do you do about the former regime elements, right? So in Iraq, those were the Ba 'ath Party. You know, how many of you of them do you prosecute? Well, if you prosecute too many and sack too many, then you have a massive resistance movement moving against you. if on the other hand you forgive them all and say it's all great and you can all keep your mining concessions 80 of the country says what the hell is this we didn't sign up for a revolution to have these corrupt generals keep 80 of the mining concessions secondly what do you do with your colectivos who you just mentioned so we don't know 200 000 300 000 of these people who control all the food distribution they're not in the jungle they're in the barrios they're in the urban centers and they've been armed they're paramilitary groups so again the story needs to be demobilization disarming of these groups guns to jobs there's this horrible slogan ddr but in colombia you were doing it with 14 000 people here you're talking about doing it with 300 000 people now again people say venezuela has all this oil so we you know we've got to get the economy going and that will pay for all this stuff.

24:55Well, Venezuela has got oil, but oil production is now about a fifth of what it was at its peak, because basically there's been no investment in any of it. It's much worse than Iraq. You remember in Iraq, everybody was struggling 2003, 4, 5, to get the production up to a million, two million barrels, because it turned out that the whole thing was welded with rust. But in Venezuela, it seems, at least on the basis of professional energy economists, even worse, that sort out the electricity system, the oil system. could take five, 10 years before you get decent revenue coming in. But this was the other thing that, again, back to Rubio's point, take Trump at his word.

25:33When, if you remember the time of Iraq, and there was a whole sort of thing run against George Bush, oh, it's all about the oil. OK, and Bush would be at pains to say, no, no, no, no, it's not. Trump is very close to saying it's all about the oil. And he was basically saying that, you know, he actually said at one point, I mean, you know, it's pathetic. They've got all these reserves. It's pathetic how much they've been pumping. Well, of course, there is a sort of massive oil embargo against Venezuela, but they do have massive oil reserves. We said this on the podcast a few weeks ago that America has been producing a lot of oil, but through fracking and the shale gas stuff, it's very, very thin, weedy oil, whereas Venezuela has lots of the black stuff.

26:16And what Trump was saying today is that American oil companies will go in there. They will help make Venezuela great again. They will help Venezuelans get rich. But of course, the oil companies, they're not going to do it because they're a charity, because they're not charities. So this is, I think, has been very, very clear that the Venezuelan, getting the Venezuelan oil industry working properly, presumably then if they do manage to get some sort of governance going, then getting sanctions lifted, getting the embargo lifted, etc. But it seems that is such a big thing to try to do that unless you've actually planned that through, there's a lot that can go wrong.

26:55The big question, did you get a sense from the press conference who it is that they're proposing is going to be the government of Venezuela? I mean, is it going to be the Maduro regime without Maduro? Or are there going to be elections and then some new democratic government comes in? Because you could imagine the former, couldn't you? You could imagine Trump in full cynical realpolitik thinking, I don't care. I'll get rid of Maduro and I'll cut a deal with the next general in line. will put in the oil companies. It doesn't matter. It's an autocratic dictatorship, in which case you're just going from bad to worse.

27:30I mean, a part of me was thinking that, you know, I even had this weird thought that Donald Trump had actually persuaded the Nobel Prize Committee, listen, don't give it to me. Give it to Maria Carina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, because then she'll become the legitimate, such a powerful, legitimate force. But actually, I don't think she even came up in the press conference. And when he was when he mentioned that earlier, it was quite sort of cool. He wasn't sort of, you know, buying into her at all. And that's why I thought it was fascinating that he dropped in that Rubio had been talking to Delcey Rodriguez, who's the the number two in the regime.

28:11So I think it's not impossible you'll try to cut some sort of deal with the sort of, you know, those who are left of the Maduro regime. A couple of things, Rory, from our eagle-eyed listeners. Colin Jones has told us that Russia has denied the report that she's heading to Moscow. And then maybe there's another thing to hear that this word is going into. Flame Basilisk 2533. Really interesting question. In legal terms, how does the U.S. try foreign nationals in their courts? how do their laws apply and can you explain the 2020 indictment i mean there is a precedent for this of course and this is if i'd have been at the press conference this is the question i think i would have asked that is juan orlando jenandez this is the president of honduras who was sentenced to 45 years in an american prison in an american court because of similar offenses narco-terrorism running drugs as the elected head of a foreign government.

29:14And there was no difficulty. But after he stepped down, I think the important thing is that he was not actually taken from his presidential palace while he was the serving president. No, my point is, though, he was a foreign politician whose crimes conducted in his own country because of the impact in America. an American court felt it had jurisdiction and it didn't. And there was no question about that within the debate in the American system. So the Supreme Court would let him away with that. But the point might, because the big point is that Donald Trump, who says this is all about drugs and this is all about these terrible Latin American leaders bringing in drugs, this guy who got 45 years for doing exactly that.

30:00And what has Donald Trump done? He's pardoned him. so you know i think the the thing with maduro what what is extraordinary about trump and you said when we did our kind of new year's day and we were both sort of discussing well what might we be looking forward to in the year year ahead and you you actually said well i think the thing to watch out for the black swan moments there's things that we don't expect but then suddenly they came along now did any of us go to bed on january the 2nd thinking we're going to wake up on January 3rd and this has happened. And this, by the way, has been planned for months, months and months and months.

30:36And this is also why your point about Rubio repeatedly saying Trump does what he says matters. Because, of course, we didn't go to bed thinking that. But equally, now that it's happened, we think, well, okay, we've been doing a lot of podcasts about this massive American buildup around Venezuela and the taking out of Venezuelan boats and Trump making his normal ambiguous comments where he's frequently said his objective was to get rid of Maduro and then sometimes he said it wasn't and then sometimes it was and back and forth, which is why Congress got them in and said, are you trying to do regime change?