What Comes Next in Venezuela

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Phil, thank you so much for doing this in a complicated and stressful week for you in Caracas.

PHIL GUNSON

It has been rather, yes. Thanks, Dan. Nice to be with you.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to start on a perhaps somewhat more personal note than we normally would. How has it felt to be in Caracas over the last week? Were people expecting dramatic action? What has it felt like in the aftermath of [Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s] capture on Saturday?

PHIL GUNSON

Well, it’s been very quiet on the streets for the most part, and it’s very hard to talk authoritatively about public opinion, how people overall are taking it. All we have, really, is personal anecdotes, personal impressions, people that we’ve been able to speak to. From my point of view, of course, it’s been extremely busy because the international media attention on this has been huge, as you might imagine. It’s a really extraordinary event. But as I say, the streets have been pretty quiet, except for government people. They’ve called one or two demonstrations to demand Maduro’s release and to express support for the government, and so on. The security forces, in particular, military intelligence and also the colectivos, these armed civilians, have been doing the rounds and harassing people and getting people to show them their phones. And there were some journalists picked up, quite a few journalists picked up a couple of days ago. Most, if not all of them since released, fortunately, but it’s been tense. It started out, obviously, the shock, the initial shock. Then it went extremely quiet, eerily quiet. And I think it’s fair to say that, right now, the prevailing mood is tension. People are not going out for their own amusement or to do anything nonessential, trying to get on with their lives. But there’s definitely an air of nervousness, of apprehension.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

As you’ve watched other power centers, other actors within the Venezuelan government, and the Venezuelan elite more broadly in the days since Maduro was flown out of Venezuela to that U.S. Navy ship, has anything surprised you about that reaction? What have you made of the behavior of Delcy Rodríguez, now the interim president, and others around her?

PHIL GUNSON

Well, of course, these are unprecedented times. And we don’t know what they say to each other behind the scenes. All we have is their public statements and the way they look when they appear in public. I suppose the most surprising thing has not really been the reaction. The reactions here have been, as you would expect, a mixture of shock and rejection, obviously, anger that this would happen. It’s kind of ironic in a way because, of course, this is a government that, ever since the days of [former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez], has been talking about U.S. imperialism and the threat and CIA attacks: “At any moment, we were going to be invaded.” And most of the time it’s been nonsense, to be frank. It’s been a way of rallying the troops and so on. And now they’re faced with the real thing, and they don’t seem to know how to deal with it, really. They didn’t know how to deal with it on Saturday morning in the early hours when the much-vaunted air defenses failed completely. The U.S. forces seem to have, given the circumstances, had relatively little trouble seizing the head of state and taking him out of the country. So that has to be a real wake-up call for the people in government here. They must feel defenseless right now.

And so they’re in this situation where they’re really faced with an existential dilemma. What do they do? They accede to [U.S. President Donald Trump’s] demands, which almost amount to turning Venezuela into a neocolony. Or they resist and face what they’ve already seen the U.S. forces are capable of in a military sense, or worse, and economic strangulation. And it’s not an abstract threat. The United States is continuing to seize oil tankers, for example. Apparently they’ve seized a couple just today. And so how do you deal with that? Because at the same time, they have to somehow preserve this revolutionary rhetoric that they’re standing up to imperialism because they can’t be seen to be just capitulating.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The challenge for Delcy Rodríguez, as it appears from the outside, is whether she can balance her control over elites and decision-makers and other power centers within Venezuela with these demands from the Trump administration, which, as you say, are these neocolonial demands for control over oil and other resources. Presumably there are payoffs to various people around Trump and the U.S. government as well. The preliminary question to me is, How does power work in Venezuela right now? If you look at the key actors that Delcy needs to pay attention to and cultivate and keep on side, who are those actors, and what are the prospects of her doing so?

PHIL GUNSON

Yeah. She is in an extremely difficult position personally. She has to perform this balancing act between outrageous and unreasonable demands from the United States and the people here, as you say, that she needs to keep on side. And of course, she and her principal ally, who’s her own brother, Jorge, the head of the National Assembly, the parliament, they’re the civilians in that they don’t have any real control or influence over the armed forces. They’re up against, within the upper echelons in the ruling circle at the very top, they’re up against the defense minister, Padrino López, and the interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, who, between them, control all the means, all the guns, basically. The guns and the tanks and the planes. Padrino controls the armed forces. Cabello also has some influence in the armed forces, but he controls the police; he controls most of the intelligence services. He can call on these colectivos, these civilian gunmen, potentially even on Colombian guerrillas. And against that, what do they have to offer? Jorge and Delcy, how are they going to manage this?

I suppose the principal thing that they have, apart from their own native wit—because neither of them is stupid—they’ve been at the top of the greasy pole for some time, and they’re very clever operators. But I think what they really have going for them is that they are the ones who are in a position to negotiate with the outside world, led by the United States, of course, but other countries as well, which is something that really Cabello and Padrino can’t do.

So I think it would be premature to think that there’s going to be any kind of open power struggle at the top because they’re all very well aware, even the people who could depose Delcy in half an hour if they chose to. They’re not likely to do that because they know what the consequences of that would be. They need to hang together, and they need to come up with a collective response to what’s going on, which is going to mix defiance with collaboration, cooperation with the United States. I don’t really know how they’re going to do that.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do you have any sense of what the guns want? If you look at the colectivos or the intelligence forces, the military, what are their interests? And to what extent is that compatible with the kinds of demands that are likely to come from the United States, or have come from the United States so far, and are likely to continue coming from the United States?

PHIL GUNSON

Yeah. That’s really the crucial question. It’s pretty obvious that the demands from Trump center on material gains for the United States, whether it’s in the form of oil or other physical assets; whether it’s in the form of denying drug traffickers the use of Venezuelan territory, curbing the Tren de Aragua, or kicking out the Chinese, which may be one of the more difficult issues; cutting off oil to Cuba, for example, which may not even be a choice that they have to make because it looks like the United States can do that for them.

The redline, I think, is very clear. The redline is, they don’t want to lose power. Losing power for them is really, really existential. This is not a situation in which there’s any form of . . . free and fair election is not in the cards for the time being because they know that they would lose one and that losing power for them means jail or exile or, at the very minimum, losing assets, potential death in extreme circumstances. So that’s a redline. And the good news for them is that it doesn’t look like Trump is particularly interested in that. So that’s way down the list of U.S. demands.

And so it does seem to me that potentially there’s an area—what the mediation specialists like to call the “zone of possible agreement”—between the government here and the government in the United States, because they’re both focused on absolutely pragmatic considerations, and this ethereal stuff about democracy and human rights doesn’t seem to concern either of them. And of course, that really is, to my mind and for those of us in [the International Crisis Group], this is the big issue. The big gap in this whole plan on the part of the United States is, the opposition doesn’t have a seat at the table here. And what that means is that, it seems to us that there really is no long-term political solution on the table. What we’re looking at is a possible much-diminished Chavista regime hanging on, struggling on, but staying in power while the United States essentially turns Venezuela into a colony in all but name.

The Venezuelan opposition, and I’m not just talking about the opposition leadership, but those people—María Corina Machado, whatever you think of her strategy, and Edmundo González, who won the election in 2024 and the rest of the opposition—it’s not just them as individuals. They represent the will of Venezuelans that was expressed in that July 2024 election, and Trump has thrown them out the window, it seems. I mean, yes, there’s some talk about a transition. There’s some talk, lip service given to the need for democracy, but it’s clearly not one of their main considerations. And so the big question from our point of view is, How do you bring the people of Venezuela, who are the main stakeholders here, let’s face it, 30-odd million Venezuelans, both here and in the diaspora, who have had a really bad time, particularly over the last ten to 15 years, and are desperate for a political solution, how do you bring them back in? How do they and their interests get back on the table?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

It is striking, reading the reporting in the last few days, just how completely the Trump administration seems to have thrown off María Corina Machado and the opposition and how much planning there was around this almost seamless transition to Rodríguez and others around her. Is there a sense in Caracas, from what you can tell, that there was coordination here, there was almost an inside job that got rid of Maduro with an understanding that it would allow these other players to more or less continue on as they were before?

PHIL GUNSON

I can see why that argument has a certain force. I can see why people would think that. My personal feeling—and of course, as somebody said to me the other day, we won’t really know until the Netflix series comes out—but my personal feeling is, no, I don’t think that this was a deal. In fact, this is actually one of the reasons why people think it might have taken place, because the deal does seem to have been on the table as an offer. Not just from Delcy. Obviously not the deal involving Maduro and [First Lady] Cilia Flores being taken off to jail, but the idea that Maduro would step down and leave Delcy in place, that does seem to have been offered at some stage before all this military buildup began, and the United States turned it down. So that was contemplated up to a point. But the idea that Delcy Rodríguez and the rest of them . . . because I think they would have to have done it collectively. It’s very hard to imagine it could have been a betrayal that wouldn’t have involved all the people at the top, because otherwise the consequences for those who did it might be very severe, would be very severe, I think, undoubtedly. So they must have done it together.

But why would Delcy Rodríguez or Jorge, for that matter, sign up to that? Them in particular, I think, because you were asking about how power works here. The way it seemed to work when Maduro was in office is that Maduro was the guy that reconciled the conflicting interests within the government, the different factions, military and civilian, and their different interests, and so on. And it was Maduro at the top of the tree whose great skill was preventing them from killing each other, not necessarily literally, but preventing them from being at each other’s throats.

Now, of course, Maduro’s been taken out of the equation. Now, as I say, that leaves Delcy and Jorge very vulnerable to the guys with the guns, as we were saying. So why would Delcy want to go along with that when Maduro, in a sense, was their protector? He was the guy that . . . If you remember, Delcy, under Hugo Chávez, in the latter parts of Hugo Chávez’s government, Delcy was really sidelined. Hugo had a falling out with her, and it was Maduro who brought her back in. Maduro continued to give Jorge Rodríguez more and more control. Jorge Rodríguez became a vital part of Maduro’s whole inner circle in all sorts of ways—electorally, in terms of control of parliament, in terms of negotiations with the outside world. But their power depended on Maduro. And now that Maduro’s gone, they are over and above what we were saying before about their ability to deal with the outside world. Since they don’t have the guns, it seems to me very unlikely that they would ditch their protector.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

In talking about Machado and the opposition, both Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, somewhat more surprisingly, have been quite pointed in describing her lack of power and alleged lack of influence within the country, despite having won that election in 2024, as you noted. How much support does the opposition have? How do you assess their power and their strategies over the last few months, and where do you think that’s likely to leave them as this unfolds?

PHIL GUNSON

Trump, in his typically—how can I put it?—understated and diplomatic fashion . . . It was brutal, wasn’t it? “He threw her under the bus,” is the phrase on everybody’s lips. But when he says she doesn’t have support and respect within the country, of course, he’s not necessarily very well briefed on that particular issue, but I don’t think he’s referring really to support in the sense of what people think about her or their respect. Really, what he’s talking about is, the United States came to the conclusion that if they simply effected regime change and tried to install María Corina Machado and Edmundo González in the presidential palace, that they were not going to be capable of controlling the situation because they didn’t have the support of the armed forces primarily. It’s not to do with popular support. It’s not to do with who would vote for them or whatever. It’s to do with the fact that they couldn’t control internal security, and they would be extremely vulnerable. And the likeliest outcome would be either they’d be immediately overthrown, or there would be some kind of violent power struggle, power vacuum, leading to possibly protracted, low-intensity warfare even.

And it’s ironic because we’ve been trying to tell the opposition leadership and the U.S. government and anybody else who would listen for some time that that was the case. When I wrote for Foreign Affairs, we made this point, and it took the U.S. administration a while to come to the same conclusion. I’d like to think that they read Foreign Affairs and took all that on board. But the question is, as I say, not to do with grassroots popular support; it’s to do with the fact that they couldn’t control the military. They always said they could because whenever this was raised, María Corina said, “No, no, no, there’s no problem. As soon as you get rid of the top guys, all the rest will fall into line because everybody in the military really wants to see the back of Maduro, and they want to see the present-day opposition in power.” U.S. intelligence came to the conclusion that that was not the case.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So, in some ways, like a brutal and unsentimental, but perhaps not crazy implementation of the lessons of Iraq. It’s the opposite of de-Baathification and the neoconservative hopes of bringing in a whole new leadership.

PHIL GUNSON

That’s right. Somebody said to me yesterday, “In a way, they deserve congratulations for having realized that in time.” And I do think it’s worth saying that so far, they have avoided the worst possible outcome, which was, indeed, violent chaos. And it was a real possibility. If they had just come in like a bull in a china shop and just wrecked everything in the hope that they could then bring their people in and install them. Because the fact is, as we always knew, and I think it’s even clearer now, Trump had no interest at all in getting involved in guaranteeing Venezuela’s internal security, not even on day one, let alone in the months and years to come. So there wasn’t any other way of doing it. You had to rely on the Venezuelan armed forces. And once they realized they couldn’t rely on the Venezuelan armed forces, they pulled back. And that is to their credit. They realized late, but at least they did realize.

But—and here’s an important caveat: I’m really worried, the way that Trump is handling this at the moment, because it seems to me that he just has the idea that he has to snap his fingers and the Venezuelan government will now do whatever the United States says because they have them under their thumb. And of course, the government here is in a really difficult position, and it’s hard to see what room for maneuver they have. But if Trump pushes this too far, he’s going to have on his hands precisely the kind of violent chaos that they stepped back from on Saturday when they did finally intervene militarily. So I think that’s something we really need to watch closely. He makes these statements about, “Now they’re going to give me 30 or 50 million barrels of oil.” They’re continuing to seize the oil tankers. Just even at the level of the discourse, they’re treating the Venezuelan government like vassals. These people do have pride. It’s not just a question of fear and concern over losing powers. They’re also proud, and they also do think that, mistaken as they may be, they’re carrying out socialist revolution. It’s the idea that this guy in Washington is going to tell them what to do, and they’ll just salute and carry out the ordinance, I can’t see that working.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If you imagine that worrying scenario, how do we get from this moment of relative quiet, compared to what we might’ve expected a few days ago, to that much more dangerous situation that you fear?

PHIL GUNSON

Well, I think it starts with a U.S. incapacity to understand. Let’s face it, the United States has had no embassy here since 2019. And of course, the CIA is here, so there’s some human intelligence on the ground. But in Washington, the ability to grasp the intricacies and how the levers of power work and what the relations are between one and the other, how far they can push Delcy without her having to either deny their requests openly or confront the military, which is going to go very badly for her, I just don’t think the United States understands that.

So what might happen? We might get into a confrontation, and they might call the U.S. bluff again. Well, they tried to before, and it turned out not to be such a bluff. This is a naked power struggle. And obviously, what the United States has is the world’s biggest military and the ability to come in and smash everything if they decide to. What does the Venezuelan government have to counter that? Essentially what they’ve had all along, which is the threat of chaos, precisely. So it isn’t just something that we might stumble into. It’s part of Venezuela’s military doctrine.

What do I mean by that? What I mean is that they know that, in conventional terms, they can’t stand up to the United States. So for years now, going back to Hugo Chávez, having realized that, they adopted a very different military stance, and they’ve been attempting to adapt the whole military setup here to that. And that involves asymmetrical warfare. What they say is, “Okay, yes, you can come in, and you can destroy all the infrastructure, and you can smash the barracks. But we will still be here, and we have guns and explosives and stuff hidden. And we have our people, and not just the military but the civilians, and we have other people who will help out.” Three thousand or so, whatever it is, Colombian guerrillas, armed gangs, violent criminal gangs, the colectivos. It doesn’t take very many of those people to create chaos. And so, really, the threat, the absolutely explicit threat is, you kick us out, and you have to deal with the consequences. And the consequences are going to be, Diosdado said it very explicitly a couple of months back. He said, “We think the time has come to pass over to a phase of revolutionary warfare.” And he said, “Sure, you can overthrow us,” but he said, “That won’t be a war of one day or two days or three days or four days or five days. It will be a war of a hundred years.” And he explicitly invoked Vietnam. Now, of course, he’s exaggerating, and, of course, the number of people who would actually sign up for that in Venezuela is probably rather small, but as I say, it doesn’t take very many.

And if what you’re going to do is overthrow the present lot, you’re back into the same dilemma that they faced and that they eventually resolved in favor of keeping these guys in power. So there is still a powerful incentive on the part of the United States not to destabilize. But right now, we’re in the phase where they’re testing it out: How far can we go? And of course, as I say, Trump is not subtle, and I think subtlety is required. The other thing is, I don’t know if this is official or whether it was just anonymous sources from within the government, but this idea that he’s going to put Stephen Miller in charge, it doesn’t really enhance the—how can I say?—the soft power aspect.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The deputy White House chief of staff, who’s leading the charge on crackdown on immigration here, of course. It seems that the attacks on alleged drug boats, presumably many of them, in fact, drug boats, we don’t know how many of them will continue. Does that have any effect on the income streams or power of major armed actors within Venezuela, either Colombian guerrillas or parts of the government that have been involved in the drug trade?

PHIL GUNSON

I think it’s interesting to look at. There’s a story, I think, yesterday in The New York Times about how the indictment against Maduro is stepping back from this idea that the Cartel de los Soles, the so-called narcoterrorist cartel that appears to be exactly the same thing as the Venezuelan government, if you listen to U.S. rhetoric. That idea in the actual indictment, when they have to present that in court, they’re not going to be able to stand up this idea that the government is a drug cartel and that, therefore, this is a narcostate and that the primary source of income for the government is drugs, because it never has been. I think if it’s any kind of state, it’s a petrostate, really. Oil continues to be the prime source. And yes, of course, drugs have been trafficked through Venezuela and continue to be trafficked through Venezuela. The interruption, the disruption to the drug trade is going to make a dent in the income of subgenerals. I think we can say that with a fair degree of certainty. But it’s always been something that, rather than going into government coffers, certainly my impression is that the way the drug trade works is that individual military officers, and probably civilian officials as well, are being paid off. And so that money’s going directly into their book. It’s not funding the government. And the disruption may make some generals unhappy, but it’s not central to whether the government can survive or not.

Oil is a different matter. That really is existential. Venezuela’s coming to the point now where it’s got no more storage capacity, and therefore, because it is unable to export the volumes that it was, it’s having to close down some operations, having to shut in wells, which is not just a case of turning off a tap and then turning it back on later. It’s much more complicated, particularly in the case of the Venezuelan oil industry. And this is an economy which is in extremely bad shape. The parallel exchange rate, to give you one measure, the parallel rate of the bolívar, the local currency, against the dollar is now twice the official rate. And that is making life for ordinary people even more difficult than it was. This country, already, with a longstanding humanitarian emergency going back more than a decade. People don’t have enough to eat. And the inflation rate is probably around 300 percent now, and will be, probably, double that at least by the middle of next year, the way things are going. And so this is very, very painful for the Venezuelan population, but it also means the government just doesn’t have the dollars to keep the lights on, or very soon won’t. So that’s the kind of thing that we’re looking at.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I haven’t been to Caracas for 15 or 20 years. The economic situation seemed unsustainably grim back then, and it’s gotten much worse. Is there a risk of a precipitous economic collapse that could itself bring the kind of chaos and instability that you were warning of?

PHIL GUNSON

Yeah. Well, we had a precipitous economic collapse around the time that you were here. That was getting underway. The first ten years of the Maduro government saw what the economists tell us is the biggest-ever economic collapse in peacetime in the modern era. The economy shrank by more than three-quarters. And what happened? Eight million people left the country out of a population of around 30 million. And here’s the problem now: what then happened after 2019, when Trump began the first round of maximum pressure, the government, and in particular Delcy Rodríguez actually, began this economic reform, which wasn’t really reform. They were stopgap measures to try to breathe some life back into the economy. So they partially dollarized, they stopped enforcing price and exchange controls, and they freed things up enough that the private sector could get things going. So there was a largely commercially driven . . . It wasn’t a boom, but certainly it meant that instead of shrinking, the economy began to grow again. And that helped some people. It didn’t resolve the underlying crisis, but it helped some people. Now we’re going back into recession.

The difference now is, of course, everyone’s a lot leaner, in the literal as well as metaphorical sense. The reserves are minimal to deal with this. There’s no cushion to absorb the collapse. But in addition to that, people often talk very loosely about the risk of another massive exodus of Venezuelans. And certainly, I think if we go to war, if chaos and violent chaos really break out, then people are going to start leaving. But the fact is that it’s not the same to leave Venezuela in 2026 as it was back in, say, 2016, ten years ago. The world was a lot more welcoming place. The region was able to absorb most of these eight million migrants. Colombia alone took about two and a half million. All that has changed. The economic situation of all these countries is tougher. The jobs aren’t there. The rules against immigrants are a lot tougher. Countries have had to for a variety of reasons, both economic but also social. Xenophobia is a problem in a number of countries, particularly up and down the western side of South America, the Andean countries. The volume of Venezuelans that they’ve had to absorb has obviously been a strain, and particularly socially, it’s tough to absorb that many people in such a short time. They’ve tightened the rules, and it’s not so easy anymore. And of course, the United States has closed the door.

In fact, the migration has been the other way around. The net migration, even since Maduro stole the election in 2024, and everybody said, particularly María Corina Machado said, “If Maduro stays in power, there’ll be another massive exodus.” And we said, “No, there won’t because people won’t be able to.” And it’s not just because the outside world is less welcoming. It’s also because people have less money because, contrary to popular belief, if you’re going to be an economic refugee, you need money. You can’t just set off and walk if you don’t have anything at all. A whole generation left, not just the middle class but right across the social spectrum, productive people in the prime of life, left the country because they could see no prospect of being able to survive here. And who’s left behind? The kids and the old folk. And yes, some of those kids have grown up, and some of them will leave, and some of them maybe can afford to get on a plane, go to Spain, for example. But really, the mass exodus that we saw before is not that. So that safety valve doesn’t exist, and that’s another serious issue to take into consideration.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I’ve thought back often to what you wrote in Foreign Affairs a month or six weeks ago, especially the line, I’m quoting you here, “The assumption that forcefully overthrowing the current government will lead to a smooth transition to democracy is dangerous. . . . Without a viable strategy for what comes after the government falls, ousting Maduro could lead to even greater repression and hardship for Venezuelans.” You’ve, of course, talked a lot about how we may end up in that kind of scenario. If you’re trying to be optimistic and coming up with a reasonably plausible scenario that would leave Venezuela in a better place, what might that look like? What’s an optimistic path here?

PHIL GUNSON

Yeah. I should say, first of all, that when we wrote that—I said it and wrote it in other places too—we were accused of being government collaborators. We were told that we were echoing government talking points and that we were in the pay of Maduro. And it’s interesting that now the United States has come to the same conclusion. But what’s an optimistic scenario? I’m glad you asked the question because I’m often accused of being a pessimist, to which I usually respond that the old definition of a pessimist is a well-informed optimist. The biggest flaw in what the United States is doing right now is that they’ve completely ignored the role of the opposition. And by the opposition, I mean not just the leadership, as I said before, but the bulk of Venezuelans, whose interests really ought to be taken into account when the fate of their country is being decided. Right? One would imagine.

What they would do is they would use this immense leverage that the United States now has— unprecedented leverage—to say to the Venezuelan government, “Look, we’d like the oil and all that, and that’s very nice. Thank you for tying it up with a nice little bow and sending it to the United States. But that’s not good enough. You have to come up with a plan for resolving the underlying political conflict.” And what that means is you have to start talking to the opposition, and you can’t just talk to the people you decide are the opposition, your tame opposition. You’ve got to talk to the people who really represent most Venezuelans. And they’re going to say, “Yeah, don’t like that idea very much.” And the United States is going to have to say, “Well, that’s tough because if you don’t like that, then you’re out.” That bet that we just made, that you are a better guarantee of a stable transition, we can forget that, and we’ll bring somebody else in. I don’t think it’s particularly realistic that the United States is likely to do that, but here’s where I think it should go.

At the moment, the United States is not paying attention to this kind of thing. I think that there’s an immense burden on the opposition itself and the different factions of the opposition because, remember, María Corina took this ball and ran with it like she was the only show in town, because she won the primary in 2023. She should have been the candidate. She was banned, and her substitute candidate won the election by a mile. And so she says, “I’m the leader. I get to decide what the strategy is.” And a lot of other people in the opposition, whose voice is not really being heard right now, said, “That’s a really bad idea.” I think in the light of what’s happened in the last few days, we can say that they were actually probably closer to the truth.

It wasn’t a very good idea to put all your eggs in the basket of a U.S. military intervention because guess what has happened? They don’t really care about you. They’ll ditch you as soon as it becomes expedient, which they did. So I think it’s now time to reassess that. And it’s time for María Corina, in all humility, with her Nobel Peace Prize under her arm, to try to make peace initially within the opposition, to bring the different factions of the opposition together around a minimum set of demands, not just for the people in government here, but for Washington, too. To say, “This is what we, as the representatives of the Venezuelan people, need, and this is what you need to do,” because nobody else has the authority to say that. And I think María Corina no longer has the authority to say, “I am the opposition.” As I say, she needs to . . . Politicians don’t generally apologize. I wouldn’t ask for an apology, but certainly say, “I’m not the only show in town anymore.” We’ve gone down this road, and it hasn’t worked out. We obviously need to rethink.

And I think that that process needs to be supported by other governments, especially in the region, but also elsewhere: the EU, multilateral organizations, to the extent that they have any say at all. They need to get together around that and say . . . There’s a very simple set of demands, five demands. And it’s very obvious. You need to release political prisoners. You need to start opening up the political system. You need to allow exiles to come back in without being prosecuted, and you need to start talking to them. And if that process needs . . . I don’t know. It’s not going to be UN blue helmets because the UN Security Council’s never going to come to an agreement on what to do about Venezuela. But if it needs some sort of guarantee on the part of foreign governments, then the United States should exceed to that and they shouldn’t treat this idea, well we now have to call it the “Don-roe Doctrine,” where the United States now owns the Western Hemisphere, or at least that part of it around the Caribbean basin and all that, everybody else needs to stay out and no government here is going to tell them what to do. This is the twenty-first century, and that’s not good. We can’t go back to “big stick” diplomacy and gunboat diplomacy and the idea that you send in the Marines if somebody expropriates your company. We can’t go back to that. We shouldn’t go back to that. And if the United States is reluctant to accept that, the rest of the world’s got to try and get together and tell them that they have to.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That was Phil Gunson speaking from Caracas. Now to my conversation with Juan Gonzalez.

Juan, thank you so much for doing this and for the great piece you wrote in the hours after Maduro was seized on Saturday. That piece was called “The End of the Beginning in Venezuela.”

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

Thank you for having me.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There’s a lot to talk about when it comes to news of the last few days, but I want to look backwards. You have served in the U.S. government for much of the last 20 years or so. You were in the State Department; we were colleagues in the State Department. You were the Senior Director for Latin America and the White House during much of the Biden administration. The challenge of the Chavista government, first under Hugo Chávez, then under Nicolás Maduro, has been a thorn in the side of American policymakers for a long time. As you look at the failures and challenges of that policy over that period, how do you assess them? If you would go back and do something differently, whether in the George W. Bush years, the Obama years, the Biden years, what might have been done to get us to a different place than where we’re at now?

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

That’s an excellent question. I’ll start with a brief anecdote. After the death of Hugo Chávez in 2013, which really marked my involvement in Venezuela—I was the Andes director at the time at the [National Security Council]—we had a meeting in the Sit Room with the president, and we were talking about what is going to happen after Hugo Chávez. Ricardo Zúniga was the senior director at the time. And the president asked me, he asked everybody, but at the very end—I was the note taker—he asked me a question. I almost passed out from nervousness, but I remember saying, “There are basically two paths.” There’s one path where the opposition and Chavismo find some sort of third way, because Chavismo as a social ideology or as a social project was something that was very compelling. Chávez invested a lot in social programs. That’s a sustainable way for Venezuela, where there’s some sort of compromise between both sides.

And then the other one is, if both sides basically dig in then, I said, every political science book I ever read suggests that this is not going to end well. Our focus at that time, and I’ll say that I agreed with that focus, was not to really escalate the problem or to become distracted by Venezuela, but really think about how we message it and how we manage it. As opposed to becoming a political actor inside the country, we wanted to create a space for Venezuelans to really rise up and force that debate, also in the region. I think at that time, at the time when Maduro was the weakest, it wasn’t clear that he was going to come in. He was very unpopular. Maybe that was the time for us to really ramp up sanctions pressure at the individual level, and really at the weakest point, press the opposition to try to enter into some side dialogue.

So bottom line is, I think, we could have been much more hands-on early on. But I think a lot of the failures of Venezuela—and I’ll stop here, I don’t want to filibuster—is also a failure, frankly, of the region because Latin America and the Caribbean is very good at ignoring problems until they get really bad. And often the region can’t cooperate regionally without the United States as a superstructure. That sounds really paternalistic, but it’s the reality. And it was a space for, I think, primarily Brazil, but Colombia and others, to really put pressure on Venezuela in a way that we could not. And I think they kind of ignored the problems. Now that it’s too late and the United States is involved, now everybody wants to be a mediator.

So I think it’s two parts. We could have engaged very early on, been a little bit more aggressive and pressed for dialogue early on. And the second is, maybe diplomatically, we should have been pressuring governments to really look for a solution, but certainly on their own, they weren’t doing it.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

In 2013, you were the junior guy, the note taker in the room. By the Biden years, you were the senior Western Hemisphere official on the National Security Council and the White House. I imagine you had those kinds of conversations with your counterparts in Brazil and Colombia and Mexico and other regional governments. What were those conversations like? What was their response to that message?

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

Yeah. I think particularly on Brazil, they put consensus and multilateralism above everything. And I think also Venezuela, to a certain extent for Brazil, was part of a foreign policy project to really develop, I would say, hegemony in South America. Their political project was building a united [Union of South American Republics] to counterbalance the United States. The conversations we had were really frustrating because they felt like they could work with Maduro. They thought that they could handle him.

At the same time, and I remember this, we traveled to—then Vice President [Joe] Biden—to the Chilean presidential inauguration for [Michelle] Bachelet. And I remember distinctly something that Bachelet told us. She said that they weren’t sure which opposition they were dealing with because at that time the [Democratic] Unity Roundtable, which was an opposition unity group, was engaging in international diplomacy. But you’d have one wave of engagement by the Unity Roundtable talking about democratic outcomes, and then you would have a whole different part of the opposition coming down, pressing for pressure in a much more confrontational approach. I believe and I think the Chileans thought that the opposition undermined itself by being at tensions with each other on the way forward on Venezuela. And that’s something that Hugo Chávez, and even Maduro has been able to do successfully, which is to polarize and divide the opposition, has been part of their strategy to stay in power, and they’ve been very, very good at it.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

In the Biden years, you were one of the people who spent time negotiating with members of the Maduro government. Some of that was about American prisoners in Venezuela, about access to oil; some of it was about the 2024 election, which María Corina Machado, the opposition leader, was not allowed to run in, but her candidate won fairly decisively, from everything we know. When you look back at those negotiations, was there ever a chance of something working there, or things that you would, if you could go back to the Biden years, that you would’ve done that, again, might’ve gotten us to a different place?

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

I think both. I think one clarification is, we never negotiated over access to oil. At that point, U.S. production was increasing significantly. There was an allegation that when I traveled there, in March 2022, where we secured the release of two Americans, that we negotiated oil over that. But really, the incentive that I gave—and I met with Maduro, I met with Delcy Rodríguez, I met with Jorge Rodríguez, I sat down with the two Rodríguez brothers for several hours to really talk about the way forward—the bottom line was this, and this is what the instructions from the president and from [former U.S. National Security Adviser] Jake Sullivan were. I said, “Look, a U.S. official has not been to Venezuela since the inauguration of Hugo Chávez in 1998. We are taking a huge political risk by being here. We are opening a line of dialogue.” And my message was, “If prisoners are not released within 24 to 48 hours of my departure, the channel is closed permanently.” And that’s what prompted them, with [former Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens], to actually release those two Americans.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That was the hostage negotiator.

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

Correct, yeah. Roger Carstens. But then in terms of the negotiations, to your question: look, the negotiations worked in that they created the democratic moment that allowed María Corina Machado to initially become the primary candidate and Edmundo González to be the opposition candidate that won the election in July 2024, where the opposition and others criticized the Barbados agreement that we signed at the end of 2023. But without Barbados, you do not have Edmundo González as the elected president of Venezuela. Certainly we did not expect Maduro to allow an election where he did not control the outcome, particularly when María Corina won the primary. We saw it becoming an uphill battle as soon as she was elected because the regime hates her with a deep passion. So I think parts of it worked, right? But in any democratic engagement or process, these things take time, and they are imperfect, they are slow, they are fragile. But they are the sustainable approach based on . . . We tasked the intelligence community, talked to academics to help derive lessons from negotiations around the world to try to inform our approach.

What could we have done better? I think maybe we could have pressed the opposition to provide political guarantees earlier on. That was very difficult for them to do. When we would deal with their lead negotiator, the perception we got was that political guarantees would have broken up the unity in the opposition because there were some that did not want those political guarantees. The other is, I’ll say that a lesson that I've derived from Donald Trump is that the United States often needs to be a ruthless international actor. I think the president is taking that to a very destructive and negative level, but maybe we should have posted a destroyer off of the coast of Maracaibo around the time of the election. Maybe there’s something we should have done to really ramp up the pressure to ensure that they respected the results, but we, at the same time, thought, “Look, we don’t think that Maduro’s going to accept the outcome.” We were taking a longer view. It was difficult for us to say that publicly because if you’re in the White House, you can’t say, “Well, if Maduro doesn’t accept the outcome, we’ll think about what comes next.”

We were very focused on the outcome of the July 2024 election, but we were also thinking, well, the municipal elections are in 2025, and traditionally the Chavistas, which is the coalition around Maduro, will allow regional members of the opposition to win elections. So there are pockets of democracy inside of Venezuela. It’s Miraflores, the presidential palace, that has been really the focus of the opposition. It’s been the main power center that’s been fought over since Chávez arrived in power in the late 1990s.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

It’s fascinating that you sat down with Maduro and also with Delcy and Jorge Rodríguez. What’s your sense of them? What was it like?

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

Well, you know the whole term, “the banality of evil”? I wouldn’t call them evil, but they’re very charismatic people. I think Nicolás Maduro is somebody who has a very thin skin and a very brittle ego and will never take a decision, even if it’s in his interest, if he is seen as being forced into that decision. At the same time, he is a believer in the Chavista ideological project of socialism and believes that the problems of Venezuela are not because of the mismanagement under Chavismo, but rather because of sanctions. I think they fundamentally believe that. And they wanted to enter into this status quo ante that existed under [former U.S. President Barack Obama], where we still worked together in some areas and agreed to disagree, but maintained a civil, or at least a diplomatic relationship.

Delcy and Jorge are very different animals. Really briefly, by way of background, their father was detained and tortured to death.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Detained by?

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

By the government that was in power at the time.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So all pre-Chávez.

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

All pre-Chávez. He was detained and tortured to death. And they, I think, secretly blame the imperialist powers for that. So I think they have a deep animosity against Western powers and the United States, for what they believe happened to their father. Again, they’re preventing the blossoming of this ideological vision that began under Hugo Chávez, but they’re also fundamentally pragmatist. Jorge Rodríguez is a very good negotiator. He’s a psychiatrist. He’s actually a very charismatic person to talk to, but he’s there to win the negotiation. Whereas Delcy is very, very serious. I believe, ideologically, she’s also very aligned with the Chávez worldview, but I consider her, and I think others do, to be probably the best manager and bureaucrat of the bunch. But she doesn’t have the political power that Maduro and that Chávez had.

Right now we’re in this position where Vladimir Padrino, who was the minister of defense, Diosdado Cabello, the minister of the interior, who controls the intelligence apparatus and has been behind the crackdown post-election, and now they hate her. But I think there’s this understanding that Delcy is keeping the Americans at bay. Right now, the relative stability, even though there’s violence in the streets, is very, very brittle.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to come back to Delcy, in this incredibly complicated balancing act she’s trying to pull off, but sticking with the Washington side of this for a bit. You, of course, are not in the U.S. government right now, but you have deep connections with the government. You served for a long time. What is your understanding of how we got here? What was the policy process? Who was driving it? How much of the planning for this kind of operation was on the shelf in the Pentagon versus stuff that was spun up relatively recently?

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

It’s interesting because at the beginning of the Trump administration, both [Special Presidential Envoy Richard Grenell] and Secretary Marco Rubio rushed to try to get ahold of the Venezuela account. Ric Grenell went down, met with Maduro—there’s a photo of them—got the release of a bunch of Americans, and started developing a plan that would allow the United States to have access to Venezuela’s resources, would help them drive a wedge between Venezuela and external actors, China, Iran, and Russia, but would preserve Maduro in power. And Rubio rushed to recognize the legitimacy of Edmundo González, who I’d mentioned is the person who won the election in July 2024. And since then, there’s been a tension between the two. My takeaway is Rubio won because he commanded the entire State Department bureaucracy and was the [acting] national security advisor. And I think Ric Grenell made the mistake of thinking that when the president says something, it becomes the law, right? And you know, because you’ve served in government too, is that sometimes presidential ideas die at the bureaucratic level if there isn’t this wherewithal within the bureaucracy to really drive. Often, particularly if there’s change involved, the bureaucracy resists change. And Rubio was just a better bureaucratic knife-fighter than Ric Grenell.

I also think Rubio’s been preparing for this project since he was in the Senate, right? In Trump one, he played a very key role in Venezuela and Cuba policy, Latin America policy in general. He, I think, pressed for the indictment, and then as Secretary of State, the designation of Tren de Aragua, which is this vulcanized and diffused criminal group, the creation or the designation of Cartel de los Soles, which is not really a cartel in the vertically integrated sense but rather a label used to describe officials in the military and the government that are getting money from helping traffic drugs. That bureaucratically started putting Grenell in a corner.

Now, how do we get from there to a natural intervention, the way that happened? I think that in any scenario like this—and you’ve seen these too—when the president wants options, you put together all the options, even the worst options, and you try to weight those. But you say, “Look, we can invade, but we don’t think it’s a good idea because of this and this and this and this.” They presented those options to the president. I think Rubio won the argument that they eventually had to get to this point where they were going to pull him out. And I think the scenario we’re in right now is where Rubio wants to have his cake and eat it too, where he’s not going to actually put boots on the ground. They got Maduro, so they checked the box as a law enforcement operation. They’re going to get the resources from Venezuela. He’s going to try to pull the strings from the outside by continuing the oil embargo and using sanctions leverage and the threat of a future invasion to try to actually manage an eventual transition in Venezuela. I do believe we’re eventually going to get to elections, but not before the United States has basically taken over the entire oil and gas sector in Venezuela.

And I’ll say on the operation, coincidentally, the morning of the invasion, I was up at 1:30 in the morning going down this rabbit hole on the internet of whether a special forces op inside of Venezuela was viable, of all things. And I concluded, based on what I know, decades of working on this issue, that it’s just a very difficult undertaking. The risk was too high. It was a very high-denial environment, an urban area. And so when I saw this go down, I was blown away. It goes to show that the capabilities of the United States, when it comes to doing something like this, are second to none. I was amazed that they were able to pull this off.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Is that about a level of penetration of circles around Maduro that allowed the relative ease of operation, or is that just a reflection of American capabilities?

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

I think it’s both. It got to this point, and I think this is where Rubio’s approach succeeded, because I had never thought that . . . The circles around Maduro, there’s regime cohesion insofar as they need each other. And I think over time, and with the support of the opposition on the ground, they were able to identify players inside the inner circle of Maduro that were eventually able to pinpoint the location and help them stage this operation. Because you’re not able to do that if you’re only getting human resources and the CIA is on the outside, that’s way too risky because human sources are notoriously untrustworthy. They had to actually develop some sort of infrastructure inside of the country, which is very difficult to do, and they were able to pull it off. As an operation, this was something that . . . I’ve never seen it. I’ve never worked in the Middle East, so I’ve never seen the stuff that we do there, but in Latin America, I’ve never seen something this complex be executed.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I’m interested in your relatively optimistic view of the path to a transition, but first, lingering on the current administration, how do you understand their objectives? If we’re applying the “Don-roe Doctrine” to Venezuela now, what is the policy path ahead, and what do you expect the consequence of that to be? Some of that’s about oil, but also about their ability to keep relative stability in that very complicated power structure within Venezuela.

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

Yeah. Well, in the United States, obviously the “Don-roe Doctrine,” it’s the revival of that very old idea that we’re familiar with, and it’s unilateral enforcement. It treats, as I wrote in the piece, engagement as a choice rather than a requirement. And it aligns closely with, I think, Rubio’s worldview on Latin America, where he believed that U.S. policy in the region has been too hesitant, too multilateral, too constrained by process. So a more muscular approach, they’re seeing it as a return to not the Monroe Doctrine, more like the Roosevelt Corollary, where if these countries aren’t doing what’s in their own interest, the United States will come in and do it for them. That is an approach that is going to fundamentally change how U.S.-Latin American relations work from this point forward, in the sense that we are now in a very transactional environment, but also one where countries in Latin America and the Caribbean do not have agency because the United States decides, and they are bystanders when it comes to these sorts of decisions. And I think that you could only point guns at your friends so long before they start pointing them back. So I don’t think this approach is sustainable over time.

Now, what does the administration want to get out of this? I think number one is this whole “peace through strength” brand that the administration has in the National Security Strategy, exercising control over what we call “our hemisphere” is a return to 1950s, to 1970s U.S. policy. And it’s going to be one where even the threat of intervention is going to allow the United States to shape political dynamics, at least in the short term, inside of Latin America and the Caribbean. And the other is, my wife actually says this, she says that we’re right now in World War III, not a conventional war—I agree with this—but rather this competition for resources at a time when the world is going through transformation, revolutionary changes, where China’s really on the ascendant, Russia is going after Ukraine and really pushing Europe around.

I think Donald Trump has really latched onto that idea as, that’s the way of the world. We saw Stephen Miller do that on Jake Tapper, that might makes right, at this point, is really what they want. And then lastly, it’s the oil, but the oil is . . . I don’t think it’s going to be the panacea that this administration is promising it to be. And I think, over time, this approach is not going to age well necessarily. The idea that they’re going to sell it to the American people when it’s actually not going to yield concrete results, I think people are going to start asking questions.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Just as, let’s say, a thought experiment, it does seem possible that the Rubio approach or the Trump approach will work on its own terms, that the United States has such extraordinary leverage and capabilities at this point that you could see both the resource extraction parts of it and the political control, at least for some period of time, shape the region. Is that plausible?

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

Yeah. The flip side is by, quote, “running the country,” Rubio and the administration inherit everything that goes wrong. Right now, the violence that’s taking place, the 800 political prisoners, the repression, the corruption, any economic failure, it all becomes a political albatross for this administration. What I’ve been telling people, I’ve been very clear, and I mentioned this in the piece: there is a chance Rubio pulls this off. This is not the Middle East. Certainly, 26 years of Chavismo have complicated the criminal networks that are basically embedded inside of Venezuela and are going to make it very difficult for the United States, even if we have troops on the ground. But there’s a chance that with Delcy Rodríguez, if she’s able to basically consolidate control, is able to find an arrangement with the United States where she’s making Trump happy, but she’s also able to stabilize the Venezuelan economy, generate jobs, get sanctions lifted, that this becomes not a regime change, but an autocrat change. And it becomes a scenario, that in six months to a year, you have an election. Even though there was already an election in 2024, this administration is talking about having a new election. In that election, there’s definitely a scenario where Delcy Rodríguez becomes a competitive candidate because people see the benefit, and they don’t want this shift to the opposition.

People game it as a five percent—I don’t think it’s that low. I would give Rubio good odds. I would say there’s a 30 percent chance that Rubio pulls this off, but there are so many other ways that this goes horribly sideways. You know this as well as I do: you have the National Liberation Army in the west of the country. You have, in Colombia, hardened nonstate actors that have been fighting a very well-trained military for about 50 years. You could see a scenario where three are . . . People forget what Colombia looked like in the late 1990s, when there were car bombs going off everywhere, where there were assassinations going on all the time. And these are groups that are experts in urban warfare. That’ll become, I think, very difficult, with or without U.S. troops on the ground.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let’s stick with that relatively benign scenario first. If you were in your old job in the White House or you were at the State Department, what would you be doing in terms of U.S. policy to get us to that kind of outcome?

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

Yeah. Let’s say I was in the administration now. I think they’re doing the right thing by opening up the U.S. embassy. The second thing is that we can’t take all of the resources. We have to make sure that we are bolstering Delcy Rodríguez. The third, which the administration has already started hinting at, is, you find a way to arrest Diosdado Cabello. I think he’s probably the biggest veto player for Delcy at this point. Both Vladimir Padrino and Diosdado Cabello are heavily implicated in drug trafficking. If there’s a Cartel de los Soles, they are the Cartel de los Soles at the highest levels of the government. And you need to find a way to really control the military apparatus. But I think Diosdado Cabello has to go. You make sure that you empower Delcy to a certain extent. And if things start going sideways, I think this president at some point is going to have to have some sort of presence inside the country, especially as oil companies go in.

You’ve been seeing the reports that the administration has offered to subsidize the investments by the oil and gas industry. Because what I’ve been hearing is, in some of the meetings that the president or the White House has had with the oil majors, they’re not rushing to get into the country because they want some legal certainty. The United States is going to have an election in 2028. The Democrats may win, by a small or large margin, the House of Representatives, and the oversight mechanisms will start. There’s a concern because you need to grant licenses for these companies to go in. If you do a general license, those are public. That’s what we did. We did a general license lifting, temporarily, sanctions on the oil and gas sector. Individual license to specific companies, those are private, and that’s a huge space for graft. And I imagine Democrats are going to want to be all over that.

So I think it’s something where it’s going to be very complicated for this administration to execute, but if oil and gas companies go in—maybe they get [Blackwater founder] Erik Prince to go in there with a private army, I don’t know—but I don’t think it’s going to be as easy as . . . I think there’s going to be violence, there’s going to be instability. There are these pseudo-paramilitary groups that are already roving the streets. I don’t think it’s going to be as easy as people think.

And I think there’s a very real danger that, despite the resources that Venezuela has, we start seeing Venezuela become almost like a Haiti, where gangs start developing around the country. Because today, the Venezuelan military does not have full control over the state. There are times where they will engage in battles and firefights along the Colombia-Venezuela border, where they will lose these battles. There are entire parts of the country, ELN basically serves as a way for the government to maintain control of areas where they have no presence. Farther in the east, there are cartels and other criminal actors that are going to be really hard to control. It’s not going to be easy by any stretch.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Given your experience sitting down with Delcy Rodríguez, how do you rate her chances of managing this very, very complicated process, this balancing act?

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

She’s a very effective manager. Some people have spent a lot more time with her, but every conversation I’ve had with her, she’s . . . You know the type. You meet somebody in government that they’re very straightforward. When they say they’re going to do something, they do it right away. They’re very effective. She’s not somebody who wastes time. I sat down with her and Jorge, with Jimmy, and had long conversations about what comes next when we did that visit in 2022. She is . . . I don’t want to say she’s the boss, but she is formidable bureaucratically. I think the challenge for her is going to be political. I give it a good chance. Her brother, Jorge, he was a key advisor to Hugo Chávez, has been essentially the right-hand man of Nicolás Maduro and is a brilliant negotiator and has been really good at basically mobilizing and moving around inside of the Chavista coalition. So the two of them are a pretty formidable group, but sometimes all it takes is an assassination to throw the country into a tailspin. So they’re going to have to be very careful as they try to consolidate power.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One of the sharpest warnings in your piece—and I’m not sure I fully appreciated the importance of this when we were first talking about the piece over the weekend—was the effects on the Venezuelan economy and the prospects for some kind of better path if the United States is extracting such extreme concessions on oil. And from what we’ve seen so far, that seems to be the main focus of White House policy at this point. How do you see this playing out, and what kinds of consequences will that have for the prospects of Venezuela going forward?

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

What I would say first is, it’s unclear whether Venezuela has the highest oil reserves. That’s something that you self-report in OPEC. And Hugo Chávez began that trend because of a pride issue. I don’t think anybody really knows because most of the oil companies have been out of there. So people need to go in and see what’s been contracted, uncontracted. What are the wells like? What are the reserves like? Nobody really knows. But I think also Venezuela has the highest reserves of gold in Latin America and the Caribbean. They have critical minerals, a lot of rare-earth minerals inside the country. So they have the resources.

But the country’s infrastructure is completely dilapidated. The electricity grid is collapsed. There are bridges that are falling down. So there are investment opportunities, certainly, but there’s a lot of risk, on the oil and gas side particularly. The United States is already producing at historic highs. Venezuela, by contrast, is, as I mentioned, a restoration story. And heavy crude trades at a much lower price than light, sweet crude, and so at current prices, the economics are tough for this. And I think that’s why the oil majors are cautious, and that’s why the administration may end up needing to subsidize or guarantee the investment.

So I think oil can shape the trajectory, but it’s definitely not a silver bullet. And again, I worry that those that are going to be first in line to go into Venezuela are those that have membership in Mar-a-Lago. If the administration wants to reassure other companies and the broader public, there should be some transparency around who gets those licenses to be able to actually go in. But Venezuela can be a success story. It’s just going to take, by some estimates, over $110 billion worth of investment and a whole lot of time.

And the idea that they’re going to have production . . . I think they could have production online faster than people think, because when I talk to folks in the oil and gas space that are there now, what they say is that, “Look, it’s not that we need a hundred miles of pipeline. It’s often that we just need six miles.” Chevron was able to ramp up production much faster than people thought. So it will be able to be produced, but is that going to be something that’s going to be seen as a benefit? The balance here is going to be, can the president deliver on benefits at the pump, at the gas pump in the United States, ensure that the United States is deriving benefit on Venezuela before the security situation begins to deteriorate? In Iraq, it took six months. Here in Venezuela, we’re already starting to see that security situation deteriorate because the United States is not on the ground.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

In the piece, you have three scenarios. One is that relatively optimistic managed transition. The other is what you call “criminalized continuity.” The third is escalation, as you put it. And this is what you’re hinting at: power struggles escalating, different armed groups causing chaos and violence in the streets, and the United States being pressured to get more deeply involved. What’s the path there? What worries you when you look at that prospect?

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

So I think that the managed transition, that’s basically where you have an election that ends up with legitimacy. And the escalation one, I think, is the one that I worry about the most. If you end up having fragmentation of this coalition that Delcy needs to maintain, you’re going to see different actors, similar to Haiti where you had political actors that are aligned with gangs, and different groups are going to start battling out in the streets. That is something that is incredibly dangerous. And then that leads into a direction of creeping U.S. entanglement. Obviously, I think the scenario we’re in right now is the one that matters most, which is the one of criminalized continuity. We need to understand that the guns are still in the same hands, the networks are all still intact, and we’re basically in this handoff. And I think that’s why the crackdown right now matters analytically because I think the criminalized—

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

This is the Venezuelan leadership’s crackdown on opposition within Venezuela, you mean?

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

Correct. They’re going after anybody who is suspected of having aided the U.S. operation. Over 14 journalists now have been detained. Opposition leaders are in hiding. And so I think criminalized continuity can impose order for a while, but it does so through coercion. What is happening right now is that Delcy is buying time, not legitimacy. I think we’re in a very dangerous period right now. And I believe that Rubio understands that, which is why they are waving this threat. You’re seeing, in reports yesterday and today, that Diosdado Cabello might be next. He’s going to avoid going fishing in international waters, if you know what I mean, because he may get picked up by [the] American military if he does something like that. And I think you’re going to see that a lot of these guys that are very close on the higher level of the regime, they’re not going to be leaving Venezuela anytime soon because they’re going to be afraid that anywhere they go, they can get grabbed.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There’s been lots of discussion of the presence of Cuban intelligence, but in geopolitical terms, what probably matters more is the Chinese role and Russian role and perhaps Iranian role and those connections. How deeply embedded are those actors in power structures and the oil sector and other parts of Venezuela? And do you see any prospect for reducing that influence? I imagine that that will be another administration priority going forward.

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

Yeah. I think Cuba’s role is overstated. They helped Maduro consolidate power within the party in 2013, because that’s what they do. They’re experts at the in-house management of that. They provided advice and security to Maduro, but they didn’t call the shots. Often when I would talk to the Cubans in the context of some of the negotiations we had during the Biden administration, they would complain about the Venezuelans as being obstreperous. And so when you hear that from the Cubans, who are the most obstreperous to negotiate with, it should tell you something.

I’d say the Iranian role is also overstated. Iran has tried to get a foothold inside of Latin America for a really long time, but they’re just not good at it. And I think, fundamentally, a region that is primarily Christian is very averse to that influence. Even though you’ll see mosques that are popping up, that does not signify Iranian influence. And there are examples of some actors inside of Venezuela that are Iranian that are trying to expand Iranian influence, but they really haven’t been able to get traction. I think the Iranians have been able to sell drones and some military equipment, but they’re not in there. And in terms of the oil and gas sector, they provide diluent. I think that’s the main thing. And then for the longest time, the Venezuelan oil was getting pulled out on sanctioned Iranian tankers. So the Iranians were basically giving us the middle finger as we were opposing these sanctions. They would go to Malaysia, get transshipped, and then they’d end up in China.

China, people think that China owns the oil and gas sector. They have some presence in the upstream, but they’re primarily a consumer of Venezuelan oil. I think Russia is probably the one that has the largest presence, but even they are not in control because the Venezuelan constitution says that the natural resources of the country belong to the country. And so anything that the Russians are doing are in a joint venture with [Petróleos de Venezuela], which is the national oil company, and those terms can be renegotiated. I think Maduro was like this, and I think Delcy is like this. She would rather be able to deliver oil in a day as opposed to the four days it takes to actually get something across the Atlantic. And American companies are much more effective. They are much more transparent, whereas with the Russians, there’s some coercion involved.

Where I’m more concerned about Russia and China has been on the military side. Russia provides intelligence support to Venezuela. They provide security. They have Russian techs that keep the planes flying and do training. Right now, what is known of the air defense systems, there’s a lot that they had from China that is not known, if you know what I mean. And that was concerning to me when I was thinking about a potential air assault. But obviously the F-35s made very short work of Venezuela’s air defenses, as we thought they would, because the way the F-35s work is any sort of radar, even the Chinese radars, had no idea the F-35s were there until they were right on top of them. But I was still surprised. I expected that maybe there’d be one plane shot down, or there’d be some kind of pushback. What this showed me here—and it should be a message to everybody who’s buying Russian and Chinese equipment—is that they don’t stand a chance against the United States.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Rubio clearly hopes that the end of Venezuelan oil flows and support for the Cuban government will cause the Cuban regime to crack. That’s been hoped for a long time among many parts of the . . . certainly people around Rubio, but also other parts of the foreign policy world. Do you foresee any risk of the Cuban regime falling?

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

I think that’s been the top goal of Rubio. Venezuela has been a means to Cuba, fundamentally. I’ve seen some commentary and I’ve talked to some Venezuelans in South Florida who are dismayed that the Cubans don’t care about what’s going on inside the country because they want a repeat of that in Cuba. Everything I know about Cuba and our common friend, [Daniel] Erikson, who wrote Cuba Wars and knows this much better than I do, when I talk to him, he would agree—and I agree with him—that the Cubans are not going to go willingly. The idea that you’re going to negotiate their departure is just not what they do. Their approach is, crack down when you’re there on their back foot, circle the wagons, and try to wait out an administration. Often they do it for too long. Under Obama, they were obstreperous until the very end. And then when they saw that Obama was leaving, they freaked out and tried to rush to actually come to an agreement.

So I think what we will see is a further deterioration of the humanitarian situation in the country. Of course, Cubans are already suffering significantly. I think that’s going to get worse. I worry that, so far, we have not seen people getting on boats off the coast of Cuba. But in April is when the Florida straits get calm, so I would keep an eye out for that. If the situation gets really bad, people are going to get on boats. We saw a lot of Cuban migration during the Biden administration. That was of people that could afford to go to Guyana or could afford to go to Mexico and then go up. The people that are suffering the most are going to put together makeshift rafts and just jump in the water and risk it. And that worries me a lot because that means that we are pricing in the cost of Cuban lives in the name of actually changing the regime. And that’s a theory of change that I fundamentally do not agree with. I think it is not only not effective; it is morally wrong that you promote regime change by crushing a country. I think there’s a better way. It’s slower, it’s more painstaking, but it is more sustainable in the long term.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

What have you made of the broader regional reaction within Latin America thus far? And what do you expect the long-term repercussions to be?

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

Not surprised at all. It’s been a left-right divide. Brazil came out against, Colombia, Mexico, all came out against this. And that’s what I expected. A lot of countries are . . . Everybody around the world has celebrated the departure of Maduro, but you’re seeing others that are basically reserving judgment until they see what happens. And if Rubio pulls this off, then people will maybe applaud the ends, if not the means. But I think a lot of people are waiting to see if Rubio falls on his face, including Republicans on the hill, are seeing this way. But I think a lot of Latin American countries, even those of the center and of the right, are concerned. Because again, this is a situation where it doesn’t matter if you’re a democratic country, the United States can come in and impose its will on you is something that is incredibly concerning and takes us back to a time when we did that. And I think if we do a look back, hindsight is 20/20, hopefully we should have learned from that experience that we did not do ourselves any favors through containment during the Cold War.

I think the approach now is to actually use economic tools. As I mentioned in the argument, today, the military is not the best tool of the Monroe Doctrine or the “Don-roe Doctrine.” It is economic tools to actually help Latin America and the Caribbean take advantage of these revolutionary changes that are happening in technology, in health care, in other sectors. Because Latin America today is a region that remains very dependent on fossil fuels. Productivity is low. Their adoption of technology is behind its peers. And so Latin America is heading in a very negative direction, and the U.S. military is not going to solve that. The United States has to come in with more than just trade, but have a very ambitious approach to economic policy, especially if it wants to compete with China and the Western Hemisphere.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Juan, thank you so much for joining me today and thanks for the great piece you did over the weekend. It’s called “The End of the Beginning in Venezuela,” one of the sharpest early analyses out there. And we will obviously have a lot more to talk about and for you to write about in the coming stretch.

JUAN S. GONZALEZ

Dan, thanks for having me. It’s a great conversation.