A new editorial in El País takes a quick look at the status of governance in Venezuela after the early 2026 US intervention in which the President, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife were kidnapped and sent to the US, where they are still awaiting trial on drug trafficking charges. The trial isn’t scheduled to begin until June 1 of 2027. The editorial states:
The enormous expectation aroused by the announcement of a beginning of a dialogue between Chavismo [Maduro’s supporters] and the opposition in Venezuela was diminished this Saturday, when the rapprochement was limited to a brief phone call between Jorge Rodríguez, president of the National Assembly, and the opposition Dinorah Figuera. It is still a very small step for a country shocked by a humanitarian emergency, aggravated by the tragedy of the earthquakes that caused more than 5,000 deaths, which needs to move once and for all towards a democratic future with real political plurality and free elections. Both parties committed to an upcoming in-person meeting.
This rapprochement takes place under the rules drawn up by the United States, which in practice maintains control of the country after the military intervention on January 3 in which it captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, now in prison in New York awaiting trial. The State Department is the declared arbiter of Venezuelan institutions, and it is the U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, who is leading the process. (1)
This is a genuinely weird situation. On the surface, it appears that Maduro was betrayed by his own government and armed forces, which basically allowed him to be taken without serious resistance. And if his government (without him) was totally willing to cooperate with the US – even in replacing Maduro – how much of a threat was Venezuela to US security? Or to anyone else’s?
Maduro before his kidnapping had offered massive concessions for US oil companies, which the replacement government also did. The acting President, Delcy Rodríguez – whose name isn’t even mentioned in the El País editorial – even created essentially a slush fund with oil revenues that is under Donald Trump’s control. As CNN reports:
On [July 27], President Donald Trump said his administration has collected more than $13 billion from selling Venezuelan oil since Maduro’s capture.
The US government has said it will hold the proceeds from the sale of Venezuelan oil in US-controlled accounts in a “custodial” capacity and intends to return them to Venezuela. Democrats in Congress have pushed for more transparency over this process. (2)
Yes, I’m sure all the money will go back to Venezuela for schools and hospitals and public infrastructure … (Do I need to specify that’s sarcasm?)
Shocking as it may be, the Trumpistas don’t seem to be particularly focused on establishing a functioning liberal democratic system in Venezuela:
Nevertheless, Trump’s government cannot also try to condition the vote of Venezuelans or impose the actors of a dialogue so awaited by the population while leaving out the opposition sectors with the greatest support, such as the one led by María Corina Machado. The opponent who led the electoral defeat of Chavismo maintains a discreet profile and has said that she will not be an obstacle.
A Trumpian version of “democracy” for Venezuela. Is there anyone who actually believes this Trump and his gang of misfits can or will set up anything but an authoritarian system? They may not even try to do that, if the current government is so corrupt that they are happy to be America’s satraps in Venezuela.
But that brings us again to the fact that this is apparently essentially the same government that was in
place on January 1, just without Maduro as the top figure. So why again was this regime such a threat that we had to kidnap its leader so that his second-in-command could head the government? Especially since Maduro himself was also offering enormous concessions to the US?
This is looking more and more like the kind of “gunboat diplomacy” that the US has practiced for way too long in Latin America. This has often not worked out well. To put it mildly. An example from 1914 comes to mind. (3)
This is a helpful conference discussion about Venezuela from the Quincy Institute, founded by Andrew Bacevich and an excellent cite for foreign policy information and analysis. (1)
The participants talk about the fact that Venezuela has been reasonably stable since the US kidnapped Venezuela’s then-President Nicolas Maduro and his wife in January.
Fracisco Rodriguez of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) notes that US sanctions have been rolled back. But Venezuelan revenue for oil sales still have to go through the Venezuela Government Deposit Fund the Trump regime set up after kidnapping Maduro. But the national state-owned oil company PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela) has a lot of flexibility in transactions, which Rodriguez expects will likely to provide new investment inside Venezuela that will strengthen the economy.
The sanctions on Interim President Delcy Rodriguez have also been lifted. From the BBC:
Rodríguez, a close ally of Maduro who served as his vice-president, had been placed on the sanctions list in 2018, with the US accusing her of undermining democracy.
She was sworn in as interim president by Venezuela's National Assembly, which is dominated by Maduro loyalists, days after the US raid and has been described by US President Donald Trump as "a terrific person". (2)
Having Donald Trump describe you as "a terrific person" is a real stigma!
Julia Buxton of Oxford Analytica on the panel suggests the current government is looking to reinvigorate the politics of Chavismo, which she distinguishes from Madurismo. She also notes the cocaine traffic, which the Trump regime used as an excuse for his mini-invasion, is actually cheap these days, unlike the 1970s when many of US popular impression on narcotrafficking were established. The Forever War On Drugs that the Nixon Administration began will surely be remembered as on of the more destructive delusions in which the US has indulged.
But Orlando Perez emphasizes that the basic structure of Maduro’s regime seems to be stable. He notes that some of the most senior military leaders have been removed. But their replacements were figures that apparently support the basic structure of Maduro’s government, so that it’s “continuity, not really reform.” He also notes that Trump’s general policies in Latin America are creating new political opportunities for left populists in the region going forward.
Venezuela has the longtime blessing and curse of being a petrostate with a huge part of its economic directly dependent on the vagaries of the world oil market. Thanks to the Trump regime’s Iran War, Venezuela stands go get a big boost in its national income, as Fracisco Rodriguez noted. I expect there will be some very interesting developments with the Venezuela Government Deposit Fund Trump’s government controls. The grift always has the highest priority with the Orange Man and his cronies. It unimaginable that this crew will be scrupulous in managing that fund for the benefit of Venezuela and its people. As Trump himself periodically blurts out, the points of wars and “military operations” against petrostates is to take the oil. By which he mainly means, take the money.
As Trump himself said just this week in the speech about the Iran War that sent oil prices soaring: “We could just take their oil. But, you know, I’m not sure that the people in our country have the patience to do that, which is unfortunate. You know, they want to see it end. If we stayed there, I, you know, I’d prefer just to take the oil. We could do it so easily.” (3)
Despite having been sidelined by Trump in favour of Rodríguez, Machado struck an optimistic note, calling the meeting "excellent" and praising the US secretary of state's "dedication to democracy, freedom and Venezuelans' well-being".
An obvious question that corporate media will be reluctant to ask is, if Marco Rubio and other advocates for the rightwing, anti-Cuba and anti-Venezuela voting bloc are okay with Delcy Rodriguez’ regime, which is actually a direct continuation of Maduro’s regime, just how bad could Maduro’s regime have been?
And, more to the point on the international law front, how much of a security threat to the US can Venezuela really be, if the US was able to conspire with senior members of Maduro’s government who were willing to have the US kidnap and imprison him with minimal military resistance? Compare that to Iran’s preparations for the current US-Israel war against them, in which they are able to do massive damage to the world economy and directly to Israel, US bases in the regions, and other Middle Eastern governments who allied with the US and Israel.
Notes:
(1) What is the New Paradigm of US-Venezuela Relations Post-Maduro? Quincy Institute YouTube channel 04/02/2026. <https://www.youtube.com/live/KDErgdUE_PE> (Accessed: 2026-04-03).
(2) Buschschlüter, Vanessa (2026): US lifts sanctions on Venezuelan interim leader Delcy Rodríguez. BBC News 07/02/2026. <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cje4l9de0d1o> (Accessed: 2026-03-04).
The agitation and threats by the Trump 2.0 Administration is continuing with demands for regime change.
If and when the US invades Venezuela, it’s worth remembering how the regime change operation in Iraq in 2003 started out.
The International Crisis Group in a report on June 11, 2003 addressed the situation as of eight weeks of the US seizing the Iraqi capital Baghdad. Complete with the famous ritual toppling, organized by the US for its publicity value, of a Saddam Hussein statue:
Eight weeks after victoriously entering Baghdad, American forces are in a race against the clock. If they are unable to restore both personal security and public services and establish a better rapport with Iraqis before the blistering heat of summer sets in, there is a genuine risk that serious trouble will break out. That would make it difficult for genuine political reforms to take hold, and the political liberation from the Saddam Hussein dictatorship would then become for a majority of the country’s citizens a true foreign occupation. With all eyes in the Middle East focused on Iraq, the coming weeks and months will be critical for shaping regional perceptions of the U.S. as well. [my emphasis] (1)And it’s always good to remember what investigative journalist I.F. Stone had to say about wars: “All governments lie.” Those three words are often quoted. It’s not often quoted with the rest of the sentence in Stone’s 1967 book, In a Time of Torment: “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.”
Given Trump’s own personal mental deterioration and the stunning incompetence of his diplomacy this year, an actual invasion and regime-change attempt in Venezuela is virtually guaranteed to be a major disaster.
Deutsche Welle reports in a report featuring warmongering ghoul Elliot Abrams and AP reporter Ellen Knickmeyer: (2)
Abrams was a leading adviser on Venezuela during Trump 1.0. Not at all to Joe Biden credit, he also picked Abrams as a member of a public diplomacy commission.
Abrams, who was assistant secretary of inter-American affairs from 1985 to early 1989, later pleaded guilty to two charges of illegally withholding information from Congress – including his role in soliciting $10m from Brunei – during two October 1986 hearings, one before the Senate foreign relations committee and a second before the House intelligence committee. (3)
Knickmeyer in the interview starts off her comments by referring to her experience during the Iraq War.
(2) US' ‘next step could be to hit targets inside Venezuela’ to prompt overthrow of Maduro | DW News YouTube channel 12/03/2025. <https://youtu.be/TwVJwmc9xJc?si=5UoGeJogz4P6izzO> (Accessed: 2025-04-12).
So, we have a US President who has nothing resembling a conventional strategic vision for US foreign policy. A President who flip-flops constantly in his commitments, whether the question is whose side is he on today in the Russia-Ukraine War or on tariffs.
It would be tempting to say that Trump’s Everlasting Peace Plan for Isrrael-Gaza is already metaphorically a smoking ruin. And for those Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese who continue to be under attack from Israel, it’s not even metaphorical.
And now he appears to be about to go to war against Venezuela.
The US has said it will designate a putative Venezuelan drug cartel allegedly led by Nicolás Maduro as a foreign terrorist organization, as the Trump administration sent more mixed messages over its crusade against Venezuela’s authoritarian leader.
The move to target the already proscribed group, the Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns), was announced by Marco Rubio on Sunday. ...
But shortly after Rubio’s pronouncement, those hopes were undermined when Trump hinted he might be prepared to negotiate with Maduro representatives. “We may be having some conversations with Maduro, and we’ll see how that turns out. They would like to talk,” Trump told reporters.
Asked if he would rule out US troops on the ground in Venezuela, Trump said “no I don’t rule out that.” (1)
This DW News report is mostly an interview with James Story, who was US Ambassador to Venezuela 2018-2023. He this interview he gives the standard neocon talking points about how we need to help the Venezuelan people replace their government. (2)
The word “oil” does not get a single mention in the ten-minute report. Because, of course, the US as always is primarily concerned with democracy, Juman rights, and the national integrity of our Latin American neighbors. Deutsche Welle often has informative reports. But this one just brings on a hardcore hawk to hype regime change in Venezuela.
Using the forever drug war has long been used for reckless and illegal US interference in Latin America, although there is a real US interest in reducing the vast narcotics trade. A serious nationwide shift in the paradigm on counter-narcotics to a heavy emphasis on addiction treatment would actually be the single most effective element in such an approach. Chas Freeman in the video below also alludes to this needed policy shift.
Drastically reducing illegal arms sales from the US to Mexico would also make the whole situation less damaging. But as long as the US preserves its dominant policy of unlimited proliferation of small arms, that illegal arms trade will also be impossible to drastically reduce.
But the Trump 2.9 regime is so far pursuing a neocon war policy of accusing the Nicolas Maduro’s government of directing the drug trade in Venezuela and, because of the violence involved with the trade, labeling it “narco-terrorism.”
Greg Grandin describes what he calls Trumps’s Murder Incorporated policy of deliberately killing fishers on unsubstantiated allegations that they are drug smugglers:
Today, Donald Trump presides over his own Murder Incorporated, less a government than a death squad.
Many brushed off his proclamation early in his second term that the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be called the Gulf of America as a foolish, yet harmless, show of dominance. Now, however, he’s created an ongoing bloodbath in the adjacent Caribbean Sea. The Pentagon has so far destroyed 18 go-fast boats there and in the Pacific Ocean. No evidence has been presented or charges brought suggesting that those ships were running drugs, as claimed. The White House has simply continued to release bird’s-eye view surveillance videos (snuff films, really) of a targeted vessel. Then comes a flash of light and it’s gone, as are the humans it was carrying, be they drug smugglers, fishermen, or migrants. As far as we know, at least 64 people have already been killed in such attacks.
The kill rate is accelerating. In early September, the U.S. was hitting one boat every eight to ten days. In early October, one every two days. For a time, starting in mid-October, it was every day, including four strikes on October 27th alone. [my emphasis] (3)
Tom Engelhardt in his introduction to the Greg Grandin column observes, “When it comes to the United States of America and its presidents, while Donald Trump is now distinctly upping the ante, there’s nothing faintly new about the disastrous ‘war on drugs’.”
Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff talks about the possible influence of Israeli efforts in the push for a regime change war in Venezuela: (4)
Chas Freeman also calls attention to how Trump’s threats against Venezuela have led Britain’s MI6 intelligence services and the government of Colombia to seriously restrict their cooperation with the US on the drug war.
From the stereotypically establishment Foreign Affairs:
These [recent military] moves [by the US against Venezuela] reflect a recent, broad shift in the administration’s policy toward Venezuela. As reported by several major news outlets, for months after Trump’s January inauguration, internal debate pitted long-time advocates of regime change—led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio—against officials who favored a negotiated settlement with Caracas, including the president’s special envoy Richard Grenell. During the first half of 2025, the negotiators held the upper hand: Grenell met with Maduro and struck deals to open Venezuela’s expansive oil and mineral sectors to U.S. firms in exchange for economic reforms and the release of political prisoners. But by mid-July, Rubio reclaimed the initiative by reframing the stakes. Ousting Maduro, he argued, was no longer just about promoting democracy—it was a matter of homeland security. He recast the Venezuelan leader as a narcoterrorist kingpin fueling the United States’ drug crisis and illegal immigration, tying him to the Tren de Aragua gang and claiming that Venezuela was now “governed by a narco-trafficking organization that has empowered itself as a nation state.”
That narrative appears to have persuaded Trump. [my emphasis] (1)
As the authors emphasize at the end, “some might still argue that regime change is justified by the United States’ strategic interest in Venezuelan oil reserves, which are the world’s largest. But negotiations over U.S. access to those resources were working.”
Last week, Alejandro Velasco appeared on Democracy Now! to discuss Venezuela policy: (2)
This is one case where the Peace President Trump is following the neocon game plan.
Deutsche Welle recently did this backgrounder on the now-active armed conflict by the US against Venezuela: (3)
(3) What does Trump really want to achieve with his military actions in the Caribbean? DW News YouTube channel 10/30/2025. <https://youtu.be/HMhu9gSWrkg?si=3K8T1KWsOUz-_4sx> (Accessed: 2025-02-11).
The Telegraph recently posted this audio podcast in which Brian Finucane of the International Crisis Group talks about the recent history of US-Venezuela relations and the Trump Administration drone murders against Venezuela and the increasing US threats of war and subversion against the current government. (1)
When American policymakers look at Venezuela, it’s a very safe assumption that the main background for their thinking is that Venezuela has the largest known crude oil reserves of any country in the world.
But foreign policy can come from a mixed set of elements: greed; geopolitical power-balancing; ideology; war lust; misguided good intentions; delusions; blundering stupidity. With Venezuela, oil is always a big part of the mix in the heads of US policymakers.
Democracy Now! recently addressed the question of how much of a role Marco Rubio’s far-right, old-fashioned anti-Communist ideology may be playing in the current situation. Although how to reasonably categorize Venezuela on a left-to-right political spectrum is a messy question. For Peace President Trump’s cult, the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is some kind of commie. And he is holding lots of oil. (2)
For what it’s worth alongside Venezuela’s massive oil reserves, the V-Dem democracy ratings for 2024 classify Venezuela as an “electoral autocracy,” a category that also includes El Salvador (one of Trump’s favorite allies), Egypt, India, Pakistan, Russia, and Ukraine, among others. (3) So Rubio and the neocons would have at least a figleaf of a pro-democracy claim in attempting a regime-change war.
Given the regime-change talk, it’s worth remembering that even angry opposition politicians and activists can have patriotic restraints about calling for the US to invade and forcibly overthrow their country’s government:
Trump’s belligerence toward Venezuela - military actions off its coast, demonization of Venezuelan immigrants and their mass deportation, and the stiffening of sanctions - has deepened polarization in an unexpected quarter: the Venezuelan opposition. Until the July 2024 presidential election, the opposition’s leading parties had rallied behind María Corina Machado and her chosen candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia. Today, that unity has fractured, and much of the division can be traced to Trump’s Venezuela policy.
The situation mirrors the Trump-provoked polarization in the United States, which is not just left versus right but pits Democrats and Republicans against one another with unprecedented fervor. In Venezuela, one bloc of the opposition consists of leaders who, from the outset, have been vehemently anti-Hugo Chávez and anti-Nicolás Maduro, but are now distancing themselves from Washington. They find themselves at odds with the pro-Washington bloc, aligned with Trump on everything from immigration to regime change by any means possible.
Machado’s recent Nobel Peace Prize win sharpens the rift. The intensity of the opposition’s division starkly contradicts the Nobel Committee’s claim that Machado is a “key, unifying figure in a political opposition that was once deeply divided.” [my emphasis] (4)
Plus, the US record on regime-change operations is remarkably messy and ugly. But neocons like Rubio don’t let that worry them much, because they seem to stay perpetually high on their own ideological stash.
The nominal justification of the war, that the Venezuelan President is the head of a drug cartel, is preposterously phony: “U.S. intelligence has assessed that little to none of the fentanyl trafficked to the United States is being produced in Venezuela, despite recent claims from the Trump administration, a senior U.S. official directly familiar with the matter tells Drop Site.” (5)
Kyle Kulinski (whose style may be a bit raw for some) reports on the Drop Site report and adds useful background on Trump’s hostility to Venezuela and his fondness for Veneuelan oil. (6)
The Trump regime’s justification for murdering people in fishing boats and for regime-change operations against the Maduro government is painfully preposterous:
The official narrative is a fabrication. The existence of a Venezuelan government-run “Cartel de los Soles”, let alone its control of the transnational cocaine trade from Venezuela, has been largely debunked. And while “Tren de Aragua” is a real criminal organization with a transnational presence, it lacks the capacity to operate in the ways suggested by the United States; it certainly pales in comparison to the power of cartels in Colombia, Mexico, or Ecuador.
Tellingly, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration’s National Drug Threat Assessment of 2024 does not even mention Venezuela. And a classified National Intelligence Council report established that Maduro did not control any drug trafficking organisation. (7)
Guillame Long continues with a description of the challenge of the US invading and taking over Venezuela, Iraq-style:
There is no understating the extent of the asymmetry of a potential war between the United States and Venezuela, nor the US capacity to easily overwhelm Venezuela’s conventional forces. But it would be mistaken to think an invasion of Venezuela would be a replay of Panama in 1989–1990 or Haiti in 1994, the last occasions the US occupied countries in its hemisphere. The 20th and 21st centuries were, of course, marred by constant overt and covert US meddling in the national politics of South American states. But unlike Central America and the Caribbean, where smaller and less powerful states became the testing ground for the rise of the US Marine Corps, Washington has never carried out an outright military intervention on the South American landmass. Venezuela, with about 28 million inhabitants, has roughly the same population as Iraq had in 2003 and more than 10 times that of Panama in 1990.
Trump 2.0 is deliberately blurring of the lines between counter-terrorism and anti-narcotics operations. But that process has also been in progress for a while. The Intercept describes a 2015 report from “the federally funded Institute for Defense Analyses” that shows antecdents for the murdering-fishermen policy of Trump 2.0 :
The report, which was obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request and has never previously been made public, provides a window into the inner workings of major drug-trafficking networks. The report also shows the central role the Pentagon sees for itself in countering those networks at a time when the Trump administration is claiming broad war-making authorities and beginning to openly use the military to assassinate alleged smugglers.
An attorney whose client was interviewed by researchers working for the Pentagon told The Intercept that the report proves that the recent sidelining of counternarcotics police in favor of bloodshed at sea is what military insiders have wanted for years.
“There’s a huge difference between the Coast Guard or the Navy boarding what they suspect to be a boat with drugs coming into the United States, and prosecuting those people, and those people having lawyers and facing charges and appearing in court, and potentially going to prison if they’re convicted — and the summary execution of suspected drug dealers,” the lawyer said. “And now we’ve crossed that line.” ...
The report shows glimmers of the mentality that Trump has made into policy with his tropical drone strikes, but the president has done little of what the Pentagon-funded researchers ultimately concluded would be the most effective means of taking on cartels: fighting corruption and arresting drug lords. [my emphasis] (8)
The Obama Administration’s usage of assassination (aka, “targeted strikes”) as a routine foreign policy tool (9) also helped legitimate the policy we know see in the snuff video’s the Trump regime releases showing their murders of people in fishing boats.
