Washington’s Venezuela Strategy After Maduro, With Will Freeman

LINDSAY:
Following explosions in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, hours of silence from Washington are suddenly broken by an announcement.

CNN: President Trump says the U.S. carried out large scale strikes on Venezuela overnight.

NewsNation: Announcing that the U.S. has captured Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro.

BBC News: Flying him out of the country with his wife.

LINDSAY:
The world quickly learns of the U.S. military’s operation, “Absolute Resolve” and that Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro is in custody and bound for New York.
Around the world, many Venezuelans celebrate the downfall of a dictator, while others protest the U.S. action and condemn the incursion into their country.

Donald Trump:
CNN: So, we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.

LINDSAY:
After tapping U.S. cabinet members to oversee Venezuela’s government, current Venezuelan officials in Caracas denounce Trump’s statement, raising questions as to the future of Venezuela’s political future, its resources and its sovereignty.
From the Council on Foreign Relations, welcome to The President’s Inbox, I’m Jim Lindsay. Joining me for today’s discussion is Will Freeman, fellow for Latin American Studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations. Will, thank you very much for joining me.

FREEMAN:
My pleasure.

LINDSAY:
Well, I think it’s safe to say that most people were surprised to wake up Saturday morning, Washington time and to hear the news of the U.S. rendition of Nicolás Maduro. Obviously, it was a very successful military operation, so a tactical success. People can debate the legality of what was done, but I think the big question a lot of people are struggling with is what comes next? President Trump in his press conference on Saturday talked about a transition. He did not say a transition to what or when the transition would take place. Likewise, he talked about the United States running Venezuela. So, perhaps we could begin with you, give me a sense of what the current state of play is.

FREEMAN:
So, currently we, I think, have both Washington and Caracas sitting on two big decisions. In Washington, it’s does the Trump administration pursue what I’ve called in a piece that was just published on Foreign Affairs, abroad or narrow agenda in Venezuela. And for Caracas, the decision is, do we cooperate or resist? So, let’s talk about the first part, broad or narrow. Now, if the Trump administration were to pursue a broad set of goals, I think that that would look like not only securing interest in oil, which is obviously a priority for the president, not only deals on drugs and migration, not only pushing out geopolitical competitors, it would also look like pressuring for a transition to democracy. It would look like pushing the reshuffled Maduro regime towards either power-sharing with the opposition or new elections.
On the other hand, Trump could choose to pursue a much narrower agenda, which is what we saw him, I think, float in so many words in his recent press conference on Venezuela, just moments after this whole operation took place. He said, essentially, “We’re going to be focused on oil. This is about asserting U.S. dominance over the hemisphere and we’ll get to elections or talk of a transition when we get to it.” But that was not the-

LINDSAY:
Well, note that President Trump did not use the word democracy once during his press conference.

FREEMAN:
That’s right. And he even said-

LINDSAY:
Oil came up twenty times.

FREEMAN:
Right. And he said, “We can work with Delcy Rodríguez,” Maduro’s vice president, who was just sworn in as interim president of Venezuela. She’s a loyal Chavista, a loyal member of the regime. And he said, “We can work with her perfectly fine to make Venezuela great again.” So, I think that right now what we’re seeing from the president is a preference toward these narrow goals, but of course we have other actors in the administration, Marco Rubio, most of all, who’d like to see that broader approach, who I think will pressure for it.

LINDSAY:
So, let’s talk about the choice facing the existing government in Caracas. And I should ask first, who is in charge? I understand that Delcy Rodríguez has taken the oath of office. Does she actually wield power or is she a figurehead?

FREEMAN:
We’re still figuring that out. I think she’s on her way to consolidating power. Why do I say that? Because at a press conference of her own, just hours after this operation unfolded, she managed to surround herself with other regime heavyweights. So, they were all in one room. She was the one speaking, saying that this was unacceptable, but just hours later, she was standing before the National Assembly being sworn in as interim president, and again, flanked by those regime insiders. Now, that doesn’t mean that there is no infighting below the surface. In fact, I’m almost certain that there is, but I think that we see her currently in control of the situation. And I should say along with her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, they really operate as a unit. He’s president of the National Assembly and influential lawmaker within Chavismo, and they’ve been a power center within the regime for years.
Now, there are others. There is Diosdado Cabello, regime hardliner. The United States claims involved in drug trafficking. He was just indicted alongside Maduro in control of parts of the coercive apparatus. And then there is Vladimir Padrino López, head of the military. So, you’re really looking at those three power centers now figuring out how are they going to redivide the pie? How are they going to share power going forward without Maduro in the picture? I think that that’s where you have either the possibility for them to come to some kind of agreement on how they cooperate with Trump or real discord, real disagreement, and real internal fissures over what posture they take going forward. And we just don’t know yet. We don’t know if Delcy and Jorge Rodríguez will be able to impose their vision of things on the others. If the Trump administration will accept working with people like Diosdado Cabello in the mix, we simply don’t know of that yet.

LINDSAY:
So, help me understand this, Will. Are we really talking at this point about leadership change as opposed to regime change? I mean, over the weekend, that’s all I heard was talk of regime change and obviously questions going back to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in particular. But what you’re describing sounds really about removing the head of a system, not necessarily overthrowing that system.

FREEMAN:
Correct. I think that’s all we’ve seen up to the present moment. And I believe the president’s critics, many Democrats, some Republicans who are calling this a headlong rush into regime change war. Look, I understand why they’re saying it for electoral purposes. Only a third of Americans say that they approve of this action even once it was completed successfully, but I think that they’re overstating the case and they may even know that. We’re not seeing an open-ended regime change war right now. Yes, we’ve seen an action that may push Venezuela towards instability, but we’re not seeing an Iraq style bid at regime change. This is, again, a leadership reshuffle where the Trump administration seems pretty open to working with this recomposed leadership.

LINDSAY:
So, let me ask you another question. I’ve seen some speculation that there have been ongoing conversations between members of the Trump administration and members of the Venezuelan regime. And some people have concluded that what this means is that essentially what happened was Maduro’s lieutenants decided to give him up because better to sacrifice him and save the regime than to go down with him. Any credibility to that sort of argument?

FREEMAN:
So, we saw the Miami Herald, among others, report this story earlier this year, that Delcy and Jorge Rodríguez had met with members of the Trump administration and they’d offered various plans. They’d said, “Delcy could step up as leader. Maduro would step down, but remain in the country with political rights.” Then they said, “Okay, if that doesn’t work, Maduro will go into exile.” Reportedly, Rubio maneuvered to block those plans, again, preferring I think a real democratic transition in Venezuela. So, they didn’t come to anything, but it suggests that yes, there were talks potentially ongoing. Could those talks have served as the basis for some kind of behind the scenes deal that ended up with Maduro turned over and Delcy in power? It’s conceivable, right? I just don’t think we don’t have the evidence to say yet. I’ll give one other data point, which is that you saw 150 American aircraft fly low over Caracas straight to Maduro’s bunker, seemingly eliminate his presidential bodyguard and take him and his wife into custody in a matter of minutes.
That’s uncanny, right? I don’t think that that happens without some level of complicity from their side, some level of help.

LINDSAY:
Yeah, but the question there would be complicity by whom? The complicity may not be by other leading members of the regime, but people who could be bought off-

FREEMAN:
You wonder who also would be in a position to have that kind of intelligence and to be able to give the Americans that kind of map and logistical understanding of how to disable and circumvent Venezuelan defenses. But you’re right, we don’t know at this point.

LINDSAY:
I want to talk a little bit more, Will, about the divisions within the Trump administration. At least I take it from what you’re saying that there is some division between whether one should go broad or go narrow. Can you sort of help me understand who might be making the case on either side of that question?

FREEMAN:
I think the broad approach is quite obviously favored by Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. He spent decades at this point pushing for transition in Cuba and then Venezuela. I think this issue’s deeply personal to him. Now, you did see him just come out and give an interview where I think he’s trying to walk a fine line here and say, “This is going to take time. We’re not talking about a transition tomorrow,” but this isn’t off the agenda for him. So, he favors the broad approach. I think he will also push quite hard for real changes in Venezuela’s relationship to Cuba, cutoff in oil supplies to the island, which currently keep running its power grid. Now on the more narrow side, I would put the president himself, at least in his statement so far, he seems much more focused on two things, securing access to oil reserves in Venezuela and this as a display of U.S. dominance asserting hegemony over the Western hemisphere as a kind of geopolitical play.
So, those seem to be his two main concerns. I don’t hear Trump mentioning major concerns beyond that. And then I’d put the rest of the figures in the administration somewhere in the middle. So, each has their own interest. I mean, Stephen Miller, I think would like to mostly focus on deportations. How can he work out a deal with this new reshuffled Venezuelan regime to take even more Venezuelans? How can he perhaps use this conflict, if you will, as a legal pretext to deport Venezuelans in larger numbers? You have other administration officials coming at this with their own angles, their own interests. Right now, I believe that we will see the narrow approach win out for the short to medium term. And as time goes on, we’ll see if Rubio or others could push it toward a more broad direction. But I’ll note this, that as we get a new status quo, if we get a new status quo that consolidates between Washington and Caracas, soon there’s going to be a lot of vested interests in keeping that relationship the way it is.
We’re going to have U.S. companies, at least if we can take the president as word, we’re going to have U.S. companies going and investing in Venezuela big time. So, there’ll be plenty of interests that are going to pressure for continuity for stability that won’t want to take a gamble on democratization or a broad, thorough transition. So, in some ways, the clock is ticking against Rubio and others who favor that approach.

LINDSAY:
So, Will, help me understand the president’s talk about how the United States is going to, his words, “run Venezuela.” We don’t have U.S. troops on the ground in Venezuela. I would imagine there are CIA teams operating clandestinely in Venezuela, but my sense is the idea is that Washington will hold over Caracas’s head the threat of further kinetic action, further attacks, and use that to coerce the government of Ms. Rodríguez to give the United States what it wants with the obvious qualification as maybe debate about what it is that Washington wants. Is that how you see it working? And if so, how feasible is that?

FREEMAN:
That is how I see it working. I think very quickly, Rubio and others came out to clarify that that’s what the president meant. Now, how feasible is it? We haven’t really seen this in Latin America before, or we’ve at least seen it in very few cases where the United States-

LINDSAY:
We haven’t seen it. I would think that this brings back-

FREEMAN:
Well, it makes sense. No, because-

LINDSAY:
… Theodore Roosevelt and the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe doctrine.

FREEMAN:
In those cases, usually what happened is the United States backed a coup that then put in power its favored party or candidate. Here we’re having something very strange happen. It’s still a regime antagonistic to the United States, but it has reshuffled leadership and now the threat of further coercive action if it doesn’t comply. So, I don’t think we’ve seen something like that before. I don’t think we’ve seen an essentially hostile regime threatened once like this, having its leader taken away and then told, “You better obey us or else.”

LINDSAY:
Okay, but it’s still gunboat diplomacy essentially.

FREEMAN:
That’s right. But you could see why the earlier form where you simply install the leader favorable to your interests, that works out much more smoothly. I mean, that person has an interest in doing what you want. Here, things are pulling in both directions. Delcy Rodríguez may want to cooperate with us. Others may feel very threatened by that around her. So, I think that this gets to the answer to your question, which is will this work? We haven’t seen this exact form of gunboat diplomacy tried before. Rodríguez is not like puppets that we’ve seen emerge in Latin America in the past. She’s going to be pulled in both directions. And I don’t know if the threats of further capture or arrest, which seems to be what Trump is clearly threatening here, I don’t know if that’s going to work. She may fear an ouster or assassination plots or other forms of coercion by her own inner circle by the regime itself even more.

LINDSAY:
Well, that gets back to your question of how broad or narrow is the U.S. ask? The narrower the U.S. asked perhaps the easier it is for Caracas to comply. In that sense, it would have the president acting in almost sort of a pure realist point of view, given what you’ve said about his approach to this, that he’s not really concerned about how the government of Caracas of Venezuela treats its citizen. He’s worried about what other foreign powers are there. He wants access to the oil. And if it’s that narrow, you may be able to have a sustainable bargain.

FREEMAN:
And I think that these different power centers, I mentioned in Caracas, they will also be all more likely to come to an agreement around those kind of demands than say much broader ones about the shape of a transition, bold maneuvers against organized crime and drug trafficking, things of that nature.

LINDSAY:
Yeah. And I should say that history doesn’t have a lot of examples of dictatorial regimes voluntarily giving up power. If they have to cut a deal to stay in power, they generally tend to do that. What we haven’t spoken about yet, Will, is the Venezuelan opposition. We just had the Nobel Peace Prize Committee award the Nobel Peace Prize to Ms. Machado for her resistance in Venezuela. President Trump however seemed to dismiss her in his press conference, essentially saying that she had no juice or standing in Venezuela. What is happening with the Venezuelan opposition? What are they doing today?

FREEMAN:
They’re in a difficult moment because many of them have placed their hopes on Trump believing, and frankly, I’m not quite sure why, but believing that he has a deep-seated interest in seeing Venezuela democratize ahead of these other more realist pragmatic interests we’ve been talking about. So, they’ve really hitched their horse on Trump, and now they’re finding out that Trump has other designs, other ideas. I think you’re starting to see them perhaps quietly regret some of the decisions that they’ve made, but they don’t have many other options right now. So, you’ve even seen María Corina Machado already come out, I think, today and say that she’d like to dedicate or give her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump. I mean, it’s a little late for that. Clearly-

LINDSAY:
Well, that seems to be in response to a story that Trump didn’t support her because he was angry that she accepted it rather than saying, “I can’t accept it because it really belongs to Donald Trump.” I have no idea whether that’s true or not, but that’s, I think, been sort of passed around social media and elsewhere.

FREEMAN:
And you could see why it might be true, right? I think that it’s not out of the question that egos do matter here and that Trump felt spurned by that. I think there’s another factor, which is that Trump really did invest huge resources, time and attention into backing the Venezuelan opposition when it was led by Juan Guaidó during his first term. That attempt to transfer power in Venezuela clearly didn’t work out. And I think Trump walked away feeling burned by that situation, feeling that the Venezuelan opposition couldn’t deliver that it was weak. It’s unclear how much María Corina Machado’s leadership has really convinced Trump otherwise.

LINDSAY:
And I’ll note there have been news reports that the Venezuelan government has begun an immediate crackdown on the people of Venezuela. Arrested number of journalists, have sent out the message that you better not be out in the streets celebrating Maduro’s departure. And again, this is backed up by the state’s possession of the means of violence, both through the military, National Guard, police units, and colectivos. So, do you see any sense or any potential that we might see a citizen uprising or that’s not going to happen?

FREEMAN:
I don’t. I don’t see-

LINDSAY:
Why not?

FREEMAN:
… potential for that. Because Venezuelans have tried that many times and they see what happens. They are murdered in large numbers, they’re detained, they’re disappeared. You even had celebration after the 2024 election victory of Edmundo González, the opposition candidate, you had people coming out celebrating and hundreds of arrests. So, it’s no surprise to me that while the rest of Venezuelan diaspora around the rest of the region was celebrating the day that this all went down or the day afterwards, Venezuelans in the country were nervous and quiet.

LINDSAY:
And I think you alluded to something that’s important. A lot of Venezuelans have voted, but they voted with their feet. They’ve left the country. The people who are most opposed and most depressed have left, which tends to weaken the potential for revolutionary movements within the country.

FREEMAN:
Right, right. I mean, you have a strange situation too in Venezuela where the coercive apparatus is very fragmented. You have, as I’ve mentioned, different factions, groups in control of guns, but all of the factions that have some control of guns want things to remain basically the way that they are today. They want this authoritarian continuity. You don’t have a sort of armed contingent of the democratic opposition, which one could imagine might be able to actually put some coercive force behind a popular uprising. Instead, you’re going to have defenseless, unarmed protestors just again, throwing themselves against the firing squad, essentially. And I think that that’s why that route forward is very unlikely.

LINDSAY:
But Will, that takes us back to Donald Trump’s ask. Whether it’s a narrow ask or a broad ask, it’s pretty clear that a part of that ask is going to be American oil companies get to go back into Venezuela and pump oil. But if you’re an oil executive and you’re looking at this, you may get a little bit nervous because you have to worry about the security of your people. I mean, these are huge investments. You’re talking north of $100 billion, they take time and your great fear is putting money into the ground and not being able to get the product out. Do you have a sense of how the oil community is reacting to all this?

FREEMAN:
It’s early to say. I mean, I’ve seen reports like many of us have of jitters and nerves of a sense that there are not the guarantees in place yet. We need to see how things pan out. So, I think a lot is riding on whether the Trump administration can show signs that there is a new status quo cohering around Delcy and Jorge Rodríguez, at least for the time being. I also think that they’re going to have to show that areas of the country key to oil production and oil infrastructure, that they can get U.S. troops there if necessary, that they can secure those areas physically. And in fact, I think that’s why you-

LINDSAY:
Yeah, but that changes the equation because if you put boots on the ground, as we’ve discovered everywhere else, your soldiers in the ground become targets. And I can’t imagine that there’s a lot of public appetite based on the polls that you hate to show just one-third supporting an attack that was tactically brilliant and led to no U.S. casualties, but they would think of American soldiers begin to come home in body bags in Venezuela.

FREEMAN:
I completely agree. And it’s a real dilemma for the administration. It’s simply that the only reason I can see that Trump would be saying, “We are not afraid of boots on the ground and we may have boots around oil,” is because he feels he needs to send this message of reassurance to the oil companies. And in fact, you saw him last night without many details say he’s willing to create some kind of compensation mechanism or incentivize oil companies to go back into the country. So, I think he realizes that they’re looking at this as a very risky bet.

LINDSAY:
Yeah. And my impression is that the president is also job owning these companies to go back in because he has posited this as the main reason for the rendition and arguing that it’s going to make Americans wealthy and also make Venezuelans wealthy. We’ll see if that is the case, but it seems to me that there are an awful lot of practical difficulties to the vision the president sketched out.

FREEMAN:
Could I make two quick points about oil? So, one is that I think the Trump administration’s also concerned with where the oil is flowing. Right now, we haven’t talked about Cuba much, but Cuba’s energy grid relies on Venezuelan oil imports to function, and it’s already at the teetering on the brink of collapse. So, I think that most likely what we’ll see next is the Trump administration using its naval blockade, using pressure over Caracas to cut off that flow completely and see what happens on the island, see if that triggers some kind of popular uprising that shakes loose this regime that’s lasted decades in Havana. Second is, I want to talk about the long term in oil here, which is that you and I think are completely correct to talk about all these short-term obstacles and difficulties, there is a rationale for why Venezuelan oil is so geopolitically important and strategic in the long run.
I’m talking 2040s, 2050s and beyond. And that’s that we’re currently at a time in which new oil exploration is very limited, successful new oil exploration, even more limited still. You’re going to have shale peak in the United States and other major shale producers in the 2030s, most analysts say. And by the 2040s, 2050s, you’re going to have global oil demand, most likely outstripping supply once again, much like it was during the 2000s. That will make reserves like Venezuela’s like Saudi Arabia’s extremely important. Again, provided that you can exploit them, you can get to them. So, there is a case here for why Venezuelan oil matters geopolitically. I don’t want to just-

LINDSAY:
Yeah, what you’re pointing to is the long term, and I will note that for many companies, there’s a short-term component and obviously in oil, the laws of supply and demand apply. And if you succeed in putting more Venezuelan oil on the market that tends to drive prices down, that may be bad for Russia, it may be bad for American shale frackers, it may be good for China. So, there’s a complex web of geopolitical and domestic political consequences from all of this. But I wanted to go back to your first point, Will, there, because you sort of anticipated my next question, which is sort of the effects within the region of what has happened. And I really want to get into the question of Cuba, because even before this happened, there was a lot of speculation about how this move putting pressure on Venezuela really was motivated by this belief among some people.
And I think Secretary of State Rubio was often volunteered as being a champion of this point of view that if you could take out Venezuela, it would really be a three-fer because you would change the leadership group in Caracas, that would mean that Cuba wouldn’t get oil, which would then take down the communist regime in Cuba, but it would also take down Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, who’s had a long, very difficult history with the United States. How do you assess that argument? You’ve already alluded to what’s going to happen in Cuba theoretically. I guess I’d like your sense of how likely you think it is that taking out Maduro will actually have that kind of reverberation throughout the Caribbean.

FREEMAN:
Well, it’s a terrible business predicting the end of the Cuban regime. People have been doing that every year for the last sixty.

LINDSAY:
The Cuban regime is older than I am, so.

FREEMAN:
So, I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves here. I think that you could, no doubt, I think we will see energy supplies choked off. Will that lead to a power grid collapse in Cuba? Quite possibly. I don’t think there’s another country that will step up. So, you’ll have an even worse situation than you have today. And by the way, today you have entire provinces going without power for twenty-two hours a day. You have 40 percent of the country without power at peak hours. The regime in Havana is really concentrating its resources in the capital itself, trying to keep those dense urban neighborhoods from going dark. Because if they do, the concern is that you have mass protests there, the likes of which you haven’t seen for a very long time, and you have streets blocked off, you have government buildings seized, and you have the security forces pushed into a position where they have to decide, are we going to massacre protestors to put this down?
Which by the way, is something that does happen in Venezuela and Nicaragua, but which Cuba has never done. So, they prefer much more silent, selective harassment, arrest. They do not and have not gone out and killed dozens or hundreds of protesters at once. And we just don’t know how that situation would play out. Would those protests then cascade? Would more people come out onto the streets? But here’s why I think that even in that scenario I just played out, the regime survives, which is that even more so than in Venezuela, the guns, the people who control the guns are really concentrated on the side of regime continuity. The military in Cuba controls the economy through a web of companies that will vanish if there’s a political transition. Everything for the military and its elites is riding on the regime surviving and there’s really no conceivable alternative center of power that I think could challenge them, civilian or armed. So-

LINDSAY:
Okay. That’s a standard political science analysis that regimes fall when they fracture and if they hang together, they tend to hang in. What about Nicaragua?

FREEMAN:
Nicaragua view is completely isolated from this. So, it’s also quite different in the sense that Nicaragua has, up until now at least, a pretty unconstrained trade relationship with the United States. It’s poorer than almost the entire rest of the hemisphere, and there’s a real potential for a new wave of out migration. It’s of course also quite close to the United States. So, I think that that’s why you’ve seen most administrations walk very carefully around what kind of economic pressure they put on Nicaragua. You may see the Trump administration try those tools. You may see them try other moves, but I’ve heard Nicaragua come up almost not at all during this administration. It seems to have dropped off the map. Of course, its diaspora is also smaller and much less politically significant than Venezuela’s or Cuba’s, especially in the United States and in U.S. domestic politics.
So, I mean, this is Daniel Ortega’s lucky day. He’s flying under the radar right now. He’s receiving less hostility and attention from President Trump than Panama’s conservative president, Mulino, who’s been much more in Trump’s crosshairs. So, it’s a bit of an irony, but I don’t see Ortega’s interest fundamentally threatened now by this. There is a succession crisis brewing in Nicaragua, as Ortega himself gets very sick and old and his wife takes over. So, that’s something else we could talk about, but it’s somewhat ancillary to all this.

LINDSAY:
Okay. Well, let’s talk about the reverberation of the rendition throughout the rest of Latin America. Maybe give me a sense of what the reaction has been in other capitals, particularly in South America, but also there’s the question of Trump’s, I take it to be threats against other leaders in the region. I think he said of President Petro in Colombia, he better, and let me quote him here, “Watch his ass.” He also said some positive things about Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, but also said she really wasn’t in control, the drug cartels are. How do you see all of this unfolding in the region?

FREEMAN:
First of all, I’d say that there’s a lot of leaders around the region. We can talk about Petro in a minute, but a lot of the others who are quietly, very privately breathing a sigh of relief right now. They like that there’s change in Caracas. They were not benefiting from a dysfunctional Maduro regime, even some of the leftists. So, I would suspect even some within the Lula government, maybe Lula himself.

LINDSAY:
Oh, I would think so. I mean, they were unhappy with so many Venezuelans coming across the border.

FREEMAN:
Well, and remember when Venezuela threatened to invade Guyana, which was only possible by moving assets through Brazilian territory and Lula rushed the military to that border. I mean, this was not a good relationship. So, I think that-

LINDSAY:
But there’s an important point here, which is that sometimes what world leaders say isn’t what they really believe, their strategic behavior and their sincere behavior.

FREEMAN:
Yeah. And both Lula in Brazil and Sheinbaum in Mexico, they have to play to a part of their base, which is anti-U.S., anti-imperialist, and needs to hear this. And I think they also don’t want to look like they can just be pushed around. They’re not going to become public buddies of Trump overnight, but they are certainly not putting their money where their mouth is on this. They’re not actually retaliating in a meaningful way that I can see yet. Now, Colombia, totally different category. There you have Gustavo Petro. I mean, a personality much more like Trump himself. Lives on social media, lives for the fight who has already compared the strikes on Caracas somewhat ridiculously given the scale of civilian death and destruction. He’s compared it to Gaza. And he said that this cannot stand. He’s also limited intelligence sharing with the United States over the boat strikes that we saw as a buildup to this.
And I mean, he’s making real moves, I think, to retaliate against Trump. Trump sees that, he’s not willing to accept that. So, he’s escalating. And has even said that it sounds like a good idea to him to do land strikes on Colombia. So, now I don’t think that we’re going to see a scenario where he tries to arrest Gustavo Petro or attack Bogotá, the capital, but could we see U.S. military strikes on coca or cocaine producing facilities in remote parts of Colombia as a message and a warning ahead of those countries‘ elections? I think that we could.

LINDSAY:
Well, I think it’s important to point out Colombians go to the polls in a couple of months to select a new leader. I’m not sure how this will reverberate through Colombian politics and whether it advantages one presidential candidate over another, but I think it’s something to keep an eye on.

FREEMAN:
That’s right.

LINDSAY:
So, one thing we haven’t spoken about is the reactions of other great powers. And for years, Caracas has drawn support from Moscow, drawn support from China. The Chinese recently upgraded relations with Venezuela to what they call an all-weather partnership. I believe a senior Chinese official met with Maduro on Friday just before the rendition. And indeed the Chinese delegation was likely still in Caracas when this operation went off. What has the reaction been from China and Russia? Have they done anything besides issue press statements?

FREEMAN:
No, I understand there’s been a vote in the UN Security Council condemning this or some action within the UN Security Council, not a vote proper. And there have been, of course, these expressions of condemnation, but again, I don’t see them doing too much. And for me, it underscores something which I’ve long believed, which is that there was a certain type of foreign policy hawk in the United States who always claimed that Venezuela was this essential chess piece for Russia, China, Iran, rather than just a convenient poke in the eye of the United States in its own neighborhood. I really think it was the latter. So, it’s not surprising to me that you don’t see these countries rushing to save Maduro or something or retaliate majorly against this. I think for them, it’s very, again, convenient to have Venezuela as a sort of staging ground for disturbing the United States, rattling its confidence, but I don’t think that Venezuela is somehow indispensable.
Now, I will add that China does have a real material interest here. It gets about 4 percent to 5 percent of its fuel imports from Venezuela and it gets them cheap because these are largely skirting around U.S. sanctions or rather sold at a price that the sanctions force Venezuela to have to sell at. And China has invested increasingly in oil infrastructure in the country. And I think that’s part of what has Trump very concerned here. So, there are consequences, but I don’t see any of those actors being decisive. And it does, in a way, this gives some credence to what Trump says, which is that the Western Hemisphere is the United States hemisphere. No other power has the ability to dictate outcomes in the Western Hemisphere, certainly in the countries near the United States that the United States itself does. It’s America’s backyard, unfortunately. Not that I endorse describing it in those terms, but we’re seeing it treated that way. We’re seeing that it can be treated that way. And there are very few who can push back.

LINDSAY:
Well, I want to close out on that point because the Trump administration released its national security strategy last month. And I think it is safe to say it was different than national security strategies that preceded it, was also very different from the national security strategy that Trump 1.0 released. That one talked about peer competition, particularly with China, but the new Trump national security strategy, call it National Security Strategy 2.0, essentially argued that the core interest of the United States is to dominate the Western Hemisphere. I guess the logic is you can’t be a superpower if you don’t control your own area of the world. So, are we looking at a shift in American foreign policy where the United States gives up the role as the quote global policemen to become the policeman of the Western Hemisphere in some sense go back to the future, in essence, taking us through what we experienced in the 19-teens and 1920s?

FREEMAN:
I think reading just from the document, we get a sense that yes, there are pressures pulling in that direction. There are some administration officials who would like things to move that way. And there’s an interesting meeting of the minds here between Rubio, who I think is genuinely very interested in the Americas and assigns it priority. And then the isolationists and the nativists who aren’t much interested in other parts of the world, but to the extent they need to be concerned with one, it’s those which have borders close to us and are significant to migration. So, I think that there’s a convergence there that’s put up for now, the Western Hemisphere on top. But are we seeing this actually in terms of the administration’s actions? Well, this is an administration which has bombed Iran, which has been quite aggressive towards Europe, which has pivoted on its approach to China, but hasn’t, let’s say, disengaged.
And so, I think that it’s easy to overstate the extent to which we’re seeing a durable shift to a “Americas first” foreign policy. We’ll see if that pans out in time, but I’m skeptical that anyone besides Secretary of State Marco Rubio is that deeply interested in the fate of the Western Hemisphere itself. I think as long as the borders are shut, as long as there aren’t migrants coming, and as long as there can be a performance of a war on drugs, whether or not we’re seeing a real fight against organized crime itself, I think that much of the administration will be happy and this mostly remains talk and bluster, but-

LINDSAY:
So, you don’t see the United States going into Mexico?

FREEMAN:
That’s a good point. Bluster was too strong. I do think that, look, there’s a real chance of land strikes in Mexico and Colombia, but whether or not that means that the United States is going to, in some kind of durable way, retrench elsewhere and really pull back from engaging in the rest of the world to focus in some kind of holistic or more meaningful sense on how the Americas develop going forward, that’s where I get more skeptical. So, I think we will see coercive actions like that. And in fact, the success tactically that Trump had with this one, it must embolden him to do more of this. I mean, he saw that this worked out from his standpoint pretty well.

LINDSAY:
So far.

FREEMAN:
I think it probably leaves him confident. Yeah, that’s right so far.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I’ll close up this episode of The President’s Inbox. My guest has been Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin American studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations. Will, thank you for spending time with me.

FREEMAN:
Good to be with you, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Today’s episode was produced by Justin Schuster, Director of Video, Jeremy Sherlick, and Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Our recording engineer was Jorge Flores. Production assistance was provided by Oscar Berry and Kaleah Haddock.