← The Ezra Klein Show
The Ezra Klein Show
What Trump Wants in Venezuela
00:58:03
What is America doing in Venezuela? On Jan. 3, the Trump administration launched an operation that ended with the capture of President Nicolás Maduro, who is now in New York City on narcoterrorism and weapons charges. “We’re going to run it, essentially, until such time as a proper transition can take place,” Trump said. Mr. Trump’s policy here is strange for a number of reasons: The U.S. is suffering from a fentanyl crisis, but Venezuela is not known as a fentanyl producer. Venezuela’s oil reserves are not the path to geopolitical power that they might have been in the 1970s. Mr. Maduro was a brutal and corrupt dictator, but Mr. Trump has left his No. 2 in charge. And Mr. Trump ran for office promising fewer foreign entanglements — not more. So why Venezuela, and why now? That’s the question we look at in this conversation. Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has profiled Stephen Miller and has been following the U.S. military’s drug boat strikes in the Ca...
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I have one question right now. What is America doing in Venezuela over the weekend? On January 3rd, the Trump administration launched an operation that ended with the capture of Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela. We have heard a lot of reasons from the Trump administration of why they decided to do this. Maduro, not a good person, not a good guy. A repressive, brutal dictator who has made the lives of many, many people miserable. But there are a lot of brutal, repressive dictators in this world. Venezuela is not a leading source of America's drug crisis. We have a fentanyl crisis, not a cocaine crisis. Venezuela's oil reserves, which we should not be invading other countries for anyway, is not an easy source of future wealth or power for the United States. President Donald Trump ran for office prom foreign entanglements. He wanted to be remembered as a peacemaker. What are we doing watching President Trump stand on that stage and say, America is now running Venezuela. The people standing behind him are now running Venezuela, watching Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio then try to walk that back, say, no, no, we're just running policy in Venezuela. Do we have a plan? This was a profound gamble from an administration to a very large extent ran for office this time promising an end to these kinds of gambles, criticizing those that previous presidents had made in the past. So what is the collection of arguments, views, interests, factions that led America to this point and what comes after it? Joining me today is Jonathan Blitzer, who has covered immigration and the Trump administration in Central America for the New Yorker. He's profiled Stephen Miller and gone deep into the drug boat bombings the Trump administration has been executing. He's also the author of the excellent book Everyone who is Gone is the United States, Central America and the Making of a Crisis. As always, my email, Ezra Klein show at NY Times. Jonathan Blitzer, welcome to the show.
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C
Thanks for having me.
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B
Who is Nicholas Maduro? How should we understand what he represents and was?
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C
Maduro has always been, to my mind, kind of Middling figure who attached himself to his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, who was a transformative, obviously highly controversial figure in Venezuela, who nationalized the oil industry, who made improving the lives of the poor kind of central plank of his political agenda, but also consolidated power in all kinds of ways, flirted with violating the constitution and so on. Maduro was essentially a member of that administration and became Chavez's appointed successor when Chavez became sick with cancer and died. And so Maduro took power in 2013 and never had the charisma of Chavez. And almost immediately when he took office, you had things start to change the fortunes of the country. You had the price of oil drop. There was an economic crisis. You started to have an increase in inflation that got steadily worse in the 2010s. You started to have a series of domestic flare ups, of mass protests, which Maduro responded to by cracking down on the population in increasingly aggressive ways. This is in 2014, again in 2017, in 2015, the Venezuelan opposition congressional elections and would seem could really bring Maduro to heel. And the response of Maduro and his inner circle was to essentially invalidate that victory of the opposition in Congress and to go on to try to neuter the power of the opposition. And what we saw in the years since was an increasingly brutal consolidation of power. So he's someone who was always a kind of weak personal replacement to Chavez, who in some ways channeled all of Chavez's darkest, most repressive urges and has basically been at the helm during a period where the country has really disintegrated in many ways. I mean, since 2014, you have close to 8 million Venezuelans who have fled the country. That's all been during Maduro's time as leader.
- [05:33]
B
So Donald Trump has been talking about deposing Nicolas Maduro, the previous leader of Venezuela, since his first term. Why and why didn't it happen then?
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C
I mean, the most interesting thing to those of us following Trump's stance on this issue during his first term was that there were real hawks and hardliners in his administration that first time who were pushing for more aggressive direct action in Venezuela and in the region. And the person who was uncomfortable moving forward was Trump. He was skeptical of the idea of putting boots on the ground. He was skeptical of the idea of overextending American, you know, involvement in the region. And so I think probably the most striking thing has been his change from Trump 1 to Trump 2. But I think the Venezuela issue for him has always loomed large. Part of that is just purely political. The South Florida Republican Latino community, which is obviously very important to him and is important among a lot of his supporters. And members of the administration has always really been fixated on Venezuela. They see the Venezuelan regime as being the key to unlocking the kind of downfall of socialist regimes across the region, in Cuba, above all, also in Nicaragua. And so there's always been a real appetite for high flying, saber rattling rhetoric on the issue. And Trump initially understood the kind of priority of Venezuela in those terms as a political imperative.
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B
But the idea that we did this for political support in southern Florida, that doesn't track for me. There have been too many players involved. Donald Trump is not running for reelection again, probably. What were the conceptions of American interests at play?
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C
I mean, there's no question that oil is a huge interest for Trump and something that he's always been fixated on. It's bothered him and it's bothered people in his inner circle that Maduro's predecessor, Hugo Chavez, nationalized large parts of the country's oil sector and essentially forced out American and international companies in the early 2000s. And so there's been this idea, for one thing, that, you know, American capitalist interests have been dispossessed, that it's a matter of recouping what, what was lost. There's a sense of opportunity there. And I also think that he's someone who has grand designs for asserting American influence in the region as a reflection of his political power. And so I think the Venezuela issue has always been an opportunity for him to do that on a big international stage, to really be the kind of bully that he's wanted to be.
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B
Tell me about the oil and the geopolitics of oil side of this, because that does seem to have been quite compelling to Trump himself.
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C
Yes. And the thing that I've heard is that inside the administration there was from the very start of the current term, tension, on the one hand, the hardliners like Rubio and that broader delegation of Rubio aligned members of Congress wanting the administration to take increasingly aggressive action against Venezuela, roll back, for example, some easing of the sanctions done during the Biden administration. The Biden administration created a special exception for Chevron to continue to do some measure of business in Venezuela. And it seems like at a certain point the threat was made to Trump that these members of Congress would block or drag their feet on the so called big beautiful bill, his big domestic spending bill, if he didn't kind of chart a harder course against Venezuela. So in one sense, he was responsive to all of those things and conscious of the need for everyone to be in lockstep, particularly around that, that big domestic spending bill. At the same time, he was very concerned about the idea of Chevron losing its foothold at a time when a lot of observers will point out the US Hard line against Venezuela has allowed other countries, Russia, Iran, China, to establish increasing influence both in Venezuela and over the Venezuelan oil industry. And so there was kind of this plan to sort of try to manage both things. And I actually think in some ways the aggression that we've seen is an outgrow of the administration trying to square that particular circle. So Trump ostensibly acceded to the demands made by hardline anti Maduro Republicans in Congress to continue to keep these sanctions, to try to roll back some of the Biden administration allowances on Chevron's activity in the region. And then by the time that bill had passed, by the end of July, you have the White House signing this kind of legal memorandum to essentially justify or at least set in motion the start of these boat bombings. I think Trump thinks very, very actively about the oil issue. What's unclear to me is what he's hearing from advisors about the difficulty of kind of propping the Venezuelan oil industry back up. I mean, the big problem has been Venezuela is responsible for less than 1% of the world's overall oil output. It's producing half of what it used to produce per day in the 90s. And so reestablishing the industry is going to require huge amounts of investment.
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B
Yeah, I've seen things like $60 billion of investment over a long period of time in a place where we don't know its long term stability. We don't know what Venezuela is going to look like after this, in five years, in 10. I mean, the record of this kind of we depose of the leader we don't like, everything's going to be stable and aligned to American interests for the foreseeable future is not great.
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C
And these oil companies, by the way, American oil companies are extraordinarily risk averse. I mean, it's not lost on them. First of all, the Iraq example is looming large in their mind. But you know, all of these questions that you and I can't yet answer and that no one really can answer about the long term American plan for Venezuela, all militate against these companies getting involved in the oil sector right now, given the unpredictability of what's ahead.
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B
You've talked about this in some of your reporting and other reporting I've read as in part a Stephen Miller theory that there is an effort to establish, you might call it deterrence, but fear among every leader in the Western Hemisphere, and that Venezuela was, for a variety of reasons. We'll get into the best example to use when we talk about Venezuela. We're not really just talking about Venezuela. We're talking about making an example of Venezuela, such that every other leader in Latin America acts differently when Trump rattles his saber in the future.
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C
That's exactly right. I mean, that's always been the case with Venezuela. When we talk about Venezuela, we're never just talking about Venezuela. One former Trump official said to me at the start of the boat bombings late last year, insofar as any foreign government was looking at those bombings and scratching their heads and wondering, what is the message here? Is this going to come around for us? Well, like, you know, mission accomplished. If the idea is to scare everyone and to make everyone feel that Trump is crazy enough to do anything, then his actions are achieving some desired effect. The interesting thing about Miller's involvement in this is as someone who covered the administration during the first Trump term and profiled Stephen Miller and spent a lot of time trying to understand Miller's role in the government then and now, he was not someone who was anywhere near this issue during Trump 1, which is unsurprising to those who know Stephen Miller. As, you know, Trump's sort of immigration advisor, a hardliner on domestic issues. What I think has changed and what's been interesting to see this go around is how Miller has inserted himself into this space. When this current administration took shape and you saw someone like Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, it stood to reason that the administration was going to take a series of very aggressive actions in the region and specifically vis a vis Venezuela, because Rubio has always been, both when he was a senator and obviously now, a really ideological player in this space, someone who has always seen the Maduro regime as illegitimate, which he's not wrong to, particularly after Maduro lost the 2024 election and declared himself the winner. But going back years and years, Rubio has always had an ax to grind with the Cuban government. He's always been among the hardest line Republicans on these issues, although he's particularly well versed in them. And so he's. He's a kind of complicated player in all of this. Unsurprising that a Trump administration with Rubio as Secretary of State would be angling for regime change in Venezuela. What I think has surprised me is the degree to which Miller, putting his thumb on the scale for intervention, kind of changed the the development of the administration's position in this. In the late summer of last year. Miller is chiefly obsessed immigration. And so, you know, to someone like Miller, the situation in Venezuela is responsible for a huge influx of Venezuelan migrants that really exploded during the years of the Biden administration. So again, not surprising that he would be interested in the region in that way. But another thing that I think he's always really fantasized about was using increasingly broad military style powers for the president to crack down on immigration enforcement in the United States. And the Venezuela issue represents a kind of nexus for him into that way of thinking. You know, one of the first things the administration did in 2025 was invoke the Alien Enemies act, an extremely obscure 18th century law that has only ever been invoked during wartime. The United States, obviously, at the start of 2025, was not in any war. And yet the logic that Miller put forward and the administration adopted was to say that mass migration represented a kind of hostile foreign invasion. And that was defined primarily in terms of Venezuela. And so a lot of the most aggressive immigration actions taken in the United States were taken over the last year and a half in refere reference to Maduro, in reference to the idea that he posed some sort of hostile threat to the United States. And in fact, the whole premise of Miller's thinking was that if, you know, if we bomb these boats and if the Venezuelan government reacts harshly, then we can make some kind of claim that we are in a state of open hostility with this country and therefore need to take more dramatic action within the country. So you have, you know, 600,000 Venezuelans living in the United States with temporary protected status. You have at least 100,000 other Venezuelans who came into the United States during the Biden years through a parole program, which was always gonna leave them in a precarious position because that was just a program designed to get them into the country lawfully. They would then have to apply for some more lasting status. Those people are living in an intense sort of limbo right now. A lot of their work authorizations have been canceled. So I think the Venezuelan population in the United States has always been a very ripe target. It should be said of Miller, maybe it no longer needs being said. He's smart. You know, the Venezuelan population is really ripe in Millerite terms to be exploited because they're people who've arrived recently, in the last couple of years who are kind of on these sort of the legal fringes, you know, with status that will eventually expire. And the last thing I'll say is something that I was guilty of dismissing a bit during the Biden years. I found myself in conversations with congressional Republicans during the Biden years who spoke very seriously about the idea of the US Bombing fentanyl labs in Mexico. And I kind of rolled my eyes and thought it was a lark and just a bit of high flying rhetoric while they were in the opposition, the political opposition. It's something that Trump had openly spoken about during Trump's first term. And they were basically brought to heel by various kind of establishment players, the.
- [16:44]
B
Department of Defense, very specifically, the Secretary of Defense.
- [16:48]
C
Correct.
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B
And I think that gets to something I want to talk a little bit about because we're bringing in the staffing here, and every administration action is an emergent property of the people around the President and the President himself. Tell me just a little bit about the difference between the kind of staffing coalitions here in Trump 1 and Trump 2 and the way those conversations ended up playing out.
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C
I mean, I think that's everything. I think you're right to identify that. I mean, the one response I get from everyone who'd been involved in this issue during Trump Won, which ironically includes people who ideologically are more predisposed to interventionism and regime change than some of the current players, is that in Trump one there was this constant sense that, okay, key elements, the Defense Department are gonna say, look, we can't do this. One person was saying to me yesterday, a former high ranking State department official during Trump 1 said to me, you know, Trump and the kind of more hawkish members of his cabinet were told the first go around, this has never been done before. That was a refrain that particularly bothered a lot of the real Trump loyalists, that they were kind of told, no, you want to do this transformative thing, it's just not done. And that was taken as a kind of taunt and a challenge to some degree, certainly for someone like Miller. But I think that was the bottom line. And I think, interestingly, you know, in configuration of his advisers, there is no one who could impose a meaningful check on, you know, Trump's worst impulses or on Miller's worst impulses. And the one person who kind of represents a more whatever sort of establishment, grounded type voice happens to be one of the most ideological people in the administration, that is Marco Rubio on this particular issue. That said, interestingly, at the start of the current administration, Miller brought up this idea of bombing fentanyl labs in Mexico. It was something that brought together all of his kind of pet projects and ideological and frankly, Racial obsessions, the idea that the Mexican government was allowing for cartels to export people and drugs into the United States. And he was essentially told this would be counterproductive in all of these ways. We actually have a pretty strong working relationship with the current Mexican administration. It's not a relationship the Mexican government wants to tout particularly, but, like, they're doing everything we want them to do. They've helped us with drug interdiction, they've helped us increase enforcement along the border. All of these kind of traditional things that the Mexican government has actually taken a very active role in doing behind the scenes. Why would we openly provoke them? They're our largest trading partner. There would just be kind of catastrophic downstream consequences if we were to take this kind of action there. So even in the current administration, that message was sent to someone like Miller. His response essentially was, okay, well, let's find somewhere else to bomb.
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B
Okay, But I want to hold on this for a minute, because they didn't just find somewhere else to bomb, they found something else to bomb. And this has been one of the strangest dimensions of the arguments around Venezuela, of the high profile bombing of the drug boats. America has a profound fentanyl problem. And fentanyl comes from, among other places, China and Mexico. And fentanyl is very, very hard to stop because it is such a potent, synthesized, concentrated molecule that you can make an amount you could carry in pockets that can kill huge numbers of Americans and does kill huge numbers of Americans. Meanwhile, they appear to have moved to bombing cocaine smuggling. And I'm not saying cocaine is great, but it was not a major issue in either the 2020 or 2024 election that America is a huge cocaine problem. So there has been this weird movement from we have this big fentanyl problem. We need to do something about it, to we're bombing these boats that are allegedly smuggling cocaine. And it's perplexing.
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C
Yeah, I mean, it's perplexing if you try to disentangle it logically. I mean, it is extraordinarily cynical. And, you know, someone had told me at the Defense Department that quite literally the rationale was, well, we want to do something. The phrase they all love to use is kinetic. We want to do something kinetic. We want to do something that's never been done before. We want to show that Trump is stronger and more serious than any of his predecessors, will literally pick a different target. The bombing of those boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific are exactly that. I mean, to your point, the President comes out and says, this is an act of self defense. Drug overdoses are up. You know, there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who've died as well, actually.
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B
Fell over the or fallen recently.
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C
That's true, that's true.
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B
I mean, but drug overdoses are high and a genuine disastrous problem. But from fentanyl, primarily, 100%.
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C
And as everyone points out, I mean, if you look at Coast Guard data and all of that, none of this is coming through the Caribbean. And what's more, the cocaine that's through the Caribbean and the eastern part of the Pacific tends to have as its destination European cities, not American ones. And so I don't think there was any serious substantive point behind selecting these targets as a matter of, you know, curbing the drug trade. I think it had a lot more to do with asserting a new raw sort of power and sending a broader message. But I think, yeah, it's utterly perplexing. It's in many ways nonsensical, I have to say. Trump's pardoning of Juan Orlando Hernandez, the Honduran ex president who was charged and convicted in almost precisely the same way, obviously short of this kind of military intervention to extract Juan Orlando from Honduras in the way that Maduro was extracted from Venezuela. But there was someone who was charged in the Southern District of New York is now being held in Brooklyn. The Department of Justice who worked on those charging documents and those investigations go back to Trump's first term. One of the most prominent players in that investigation in the Southern District of New York was a guy named Emil Bove, who was a prosecutor in that division during Trump 1 and then eventually became Trump's personal lawyer, then served at a high level at the start of Trump's second term in the Department of Justice and has since been nominated and confirmed as an appellate court judge. He was the person who was largely involved in helping prepare that research showing how Juan Orlando Hernandez had been involved in the drug trade. There wasn't a lot of controversy around the charges brought against him. And nevertheless, Trump, at the end of November, in a move that frankly, is inexplicable, really in every sense, I still.
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B
Don'T understand how that happened. You don't either. You're telling me that you don't have an explanation?
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C
I mean, there is what Trump himself said, which was this was a Biden frame up, because technically Juan Orlando was convicted and sentenced during the Biden years. Again, that flies in the face of everything we know about how the case against Orlando Hernandez was built during the first Trump administration. You know, Juan Orlando, at a certain point wrote an obsequious letter to Trump that Roger Stone delivered to him, basically comparing both of them to kind of victims of American justice run amok. None of these things justify the pardoning of Juan Orlando. And least of all, at a time when the current administration is saying above all that the reason why it has ousted Maduro from power and brought him to the United States for trial is because he's an Arco terrorist. These are exactly the same charges brought against Juan Orlando Hernandez. And so. So, I mean, it pretty much voids any pretense that American interests right now in Venezuela have to do with stemming the drug trade. But it was the randomness of how the administration shifted from a not illegitimate concern about fentanyl labs in parts of Mexico, say, to the indiscriminate bombing of small drug boats in the Caribbean is really, I think, a product of a political calculation above all.
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B
Well, you say what they want to do is something kinetic, which is the Orwellian way that violence gets described in military action. It seems to me what they wanted to do was something that was spectacle, that there is a certain amount of governing or propagandizing or signal sending through spectacle and the release of the drone videos that then you see the eradication and killing of these people on these boats, and that they were looking for something that was televisual. They were looking for something that worked as vertical video on X. I mean, the photos of the makeshift situation room at Mar a Lago during this operation, and they have a huge screen showing X with a search for Venezuela on it. The whole thing seems so built around spectacle. Maduro, I mean, the photos, they release of him that, I mean, I think you have to see this, as this might have actually been in one of your pieces or certainly in somebody's piece that I read in preparing for this. But propaganda through force.
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C
Yeah, no, it's exactly. That was a phrase used by a former Trump administration official in describing this. No, you're absolutely right. It's also worth pointing out, you know, what was happening in the United States at the time at the start of these boat bombings. You know, there was also an increased militarization in American cities related to this immigration crackdown in Los Angeles, in Chicago. And, 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. It'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 done all of these obviously horrific crimes. How do you engage with him? There are long standing 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. And 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. And so it's kind of a weird confluence of the different interests of people at play, such that this becomes a kind of a 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's 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. 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 boil down to this sense of, can this really hurt us that badly? Like, 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.
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And I'm a longtime reporter with the New York Times. I've been here for 30 years and I've seen a lot of things change. I was here before there was a website, but one thing hasn't changed at all, and that's the mission of the New York Times. To follow the facts wherever they lead. And if that means publishing something a government or a leader or a celebrity doesn't want aired, that's not our concern. I have never been told to go against the facts to accommodate anyone, and if I had, I would have quite frankly left the building. This is the way it was when I was covering the aftermath of 9 11, and this is the way it is now as I cover the United States of today. If you believe in the importance of fact driven reporting, you can support it by becoming a New York Times subscriber. And if you already subscribe, this veteran reporter thanks you.
- [30:51]
B
So 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?
- [31:23]
C
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 Maduro has been removed and now the administration has elevated hardliner and delsey Rodriguez to this new role as interim president in this world where the US 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 gonna 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.
- [32:22]
F
Right.
- [32:22]
B
The Venezuelan opposition leader just won the Nobel Peace Prize, dedicated it to Donald Trump, and Trump just dismissed her, dismissed her, saying she doesn't have the juice to run the country.
- [32:35]
C
Yeah. And the biggest concern for people who've been following the opposition in particular, that was always the concern for Maria Corinna Machado, the Nobel laureate and leader of the Venezuelan opposition, an incredibly charismatic figure who 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. And 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. 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. There's further domestic crackdowns, and the Venezuelan opposition, such as it is, is 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 collectivos, 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. You 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, Delcio 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 consolidated all of this power for now, decades, just exceeding to that idea that they're just puppets of an American administration. Certainly, 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.
- [35:27]
B
I mean, the credible violation of international law.
- [35:29]
C
Exactly. I mean, you take your pick.
- [35:31]
B
I mean, but there was a bad guy, right? He's a genuinely bad guy.
- [35:35]
C
Yes.
- [35:35]
B
There are a lot of bad guys leading countries.
- [35:38]
C
Yes.
- [35:39]
B
As Donald Trump has said before, he's exchanged love letters with Kim Jong Un.
- [35:42]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [35:43]
B
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. 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 is writing for the Washington Post and hacking him up with a bone saw? At least allegedly.
- [36:12]
C
Well, and this is your point, too, about the history of American involvement in the wider region in Latin America, I mean, the United States government propped up some of the worst actors for decades.
- [36:20]
B
We're negotiating with Putin right now.
- [36:21]
C
Exactly.
- [36:23]
B
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 an attractive ideology to people, nobody's looking at Venezuela as a successful country that might inspire a lot of imitators. I 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. 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 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, and the expectation is not that the future will be won by whoever has access to the deepest oil reserves. Again, 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.
- [38:18]
C
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. 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 Najibu Kele, 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 trend, to a notoriously brutal Salvadoran prison. The Salvadoran government got $5 million to hold them for an indefinite period of time. They were brutally tortured. They were held in conf. Communicado. To someone like me 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 after years, particularly during the first Trump term, of villainizing immigrants on the basis that many of the Central American immigrants who'd 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 early 2000s and led to large numbers of people showing up at the border during the first Trump administration. Now 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 hard line 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. 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. That is almost exactly what the Trump administration fantasizes about in ways both literal and figurative. So I think 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. It'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 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. And 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.
- [41:53]
B
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. The acting president of Venezuela has to do what we want her to do. What do we want her to do?
- [42:14]
C
I don't exactly know what the US expectation is for Delsey Rodriguez, the interim president.
- [42:21]
B
Have we done a lot of planning, I mean, about how to run Venezuela?
- [42:24]
C
Yeah, it does not seem to me to be the case. Delta Rodriguez, the acting president of Venezuela, is a strange person for the US to elevate. Delcito 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. Then 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 in 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's been dealt economically to stabilize inflation, try to increase oil production. But she's someone who 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, of the Maduro regime and its actions. And naturally, during Trump's first term, was actually sanctioned for this by the Trump administration.
- [44:04]
B
Amazing how things work out.
- [44:05]
C
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. The Maduro regime. I 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 on the international stage, make very uncomfortable the existing powers in the country. And so there's always gonna 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 gonna be a conundrum under any circumstance if the current leadership was removed. And so the logic seems to be that in picking someone like Delcio Rodriguez to be the kind of interim figure that calms the nerves of the key players in the military, in the government, the Interior Minister, the head of the armed forces. But those guys aren't naive. I 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.
- [46:23]
B
It 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 a accumulation, it was enough to push the decision making over the finish line. 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 kept stacking these up. George W. Bush's like, 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 because 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 it 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 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. Again, that's absurd. But is Marco Rubio's position, in part, 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 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 interests we are gonna have in the aftermath. In a way that just makes me very nervous. Again, I'm not saying it goes away, Iraq did. But it just reminds me of that in that respect.
- [49:18]
C
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 Hegshath, whose primary concern, as I understand it, in this configuration is to get on Miller's good side. So, 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 hearkens 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? I 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. The 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, and they're kind of, I do think, reflect a kind of warped vision of what's happening in the region.
- [51:36]
B
Well, 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 nevertheless repetitive way across the campaign, something we were told about him 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 when that was happening, but he certainly ran as a critic of it in 2016. And 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 gonna 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?
- [52:46]
C
I don't know that this is a meaningful response, per se, but there is 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. So 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.
- [53:45]
B
Because we know these things are judged simply. The moment you capture the, you know.
- [53:51]
C
I try to put myself in the.
- [53:52]
B
Sovereign of the country.
- [53:53]
C
No, no. I mean, it's truly mind bending. 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, you.
- [54:07]
B
Look, could you just say quickly what the Monroe Doctrine is?
- [54:09]
C
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 will act according. And that gave rise to a series of American interventions in the region and this view that the US 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, an 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 happens, 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 and 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 expect 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.
- [55:40]
B
How 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. This 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?
- [57:06]
C
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 gotta be some ongoing conflict where the president gets to demonstrate his power, his sense of control, his authority. And in that sense, I do think this is kind of tailor made for him in this moment. 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. 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, 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. So 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.
- [58:21]
B
Then that was our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
- [58:25]
C
Three books. My first would be a novel called the Known World by Edward P. Jones about antebellum Virginia, one of the most astonishing novels I've ever read. One of my favorite American novels. I cannot recommend it highly enough. My second recommendation is a memoir by Carolyn Forche called what yout 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, you know, working for the KGB but became a double agent for British intelligence during the Cold War. Absolutely astonishing. True story that reads like fiction.
- [59:14]
B
Jonathan Blitzer, thank you very much.
- [59:16]
C
Thanks again for having me.
- [59:28]
F
This episode of the sir clancho is produced by jack mccordick. Fact checking by michelle harris with kate sinclair and mary marge locker. Our senior audio engineers, jeff geld, with additional mixing by isaac jones and aman soho. Our executive producer is claire gordon. The show's production team also includes annie galvin, marie cassione, marina king, roland hu, kristin lin, emma keldeck and jan kobel. Original music by pat mccusker. Audience strategy by christina semiliewski and shannon busta. The director of new york times opinion audio is annie rose strasser.
- [60:05]
C
Sat.