What's Behind Trump's Venezuela Shift?

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Leslie Vinjamuri: President Trump has taken a sharp turn in Venezuela. He's moved from a counter-narcotics campaign to covert CIA operations and an increased military buildup in the Caribbean.

It is a dramatic policy shift after months of diplomatic outreach with the Maduro regime.

Donald Trump: I authorized for two reasons really. Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America. And the other thing of drugs, we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela…

LV: For years, Washington's lent on sanctions to pressure Caracas, but have they moved the needle? Now, this tougher approach risks deepening a crisis that's already displaced nearly eight million Venezuelans.

So what's really behind this turn? A crackdown on drugs, a show of force, or is this part of a larger rational strategy that the United States leadership has in South America? Is Venezuela really a threat to the United States?

To help unpack this, I spoke with Francisco Rodriguez from the University of Denver's Korbel School.

I'm Leslie Vinjamuri, president and CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and welcome to Deep Dish.

Let's start with the history, if you could give us your sense of things.

Francisco Rodriguez: Well, first of all, how can you tell a short history? Essentially, Venezuela suffered the largest economic collapse ever documented in a country outside of wartime. It's the largest in the history of the Americas. It's the fifth largest in the world, but when you look at the top four, they are countries that are ravaged by war. So, Venezuela is quite atypical in that sense. It also has seen the largest migrant exodus in the history of the Western Hemisphere. So it's an unmitigated collapse in living standards. What's happened in Venezuela is the equivalent of three consecutive Great Depressions. I, as a Venezuelan, remember when I studied in the US in the 1990s, it was so rare to hear a Venezuelan accent that the two or three times that I heard a Venezuelan accent during my graduate studies, I just walked up to the person and said, “Hey, you're a Venezuelan!” Well now you hear it every day in any city in the US and in Latin America. Venezuela, actually, in the 1970s, was one of the richest countries in terms of per capita income in the world. And, and it's now one of the poorest in Latin America.

What happened in Venezuela? It's a complex story. It has a lot to do with the populist policies of Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro. Venezuela was also a very poorly performing economy—one of the worst performing in the world—in the 25 years before Chavez came to power. And that partly explains how Chavez came to power.

What we've seen particularly in the last decade is that the mix has become a lot more toxic because it's not just policies. It's not just misguided government intervention. It's also economic sanctions, and it's also a political conflict between the country's government and the opposition that has effectively turned the country's economy into a political battlefield.

LV: From the outside looking in—to the problem of Venezuela, of an authoritarian regime, populist politician collapse of the economy—that the dominant response has been international economic sanctions. And as I understand it, there's been an ongoing debate, obviously, about whether sanctions have been an effective tool for trying to influence the regime to behave differently than it has. Tell us a little bit about your take on that.

FR: There's really two dimensions when you look at sanctions. One is the effectiveness, whether they can actually change the conduct that they're targeting. The other one is what are the consequences of these sanctions for people, for living standards in Venezuela? I've devoted a lot of my research to the second of these issues trying to understand how sanctions impacted the country's economy through its oil sector, primarily. What I've found is a very significant effect. In my recent book, The Collapse of Venezuela, I estimate quantitatively what percentage of the country's economic contraction is attributable to sanctions. Of the 71% decline, I attribute that roughly half of it, 52%, is attributable to sanctions.

LV: 52% to sanctions! Let me stop you there and ask you a question. What is the objective of the sanctions? Who is that affecting? Who's paying? Who's suffering the costs?

FR: It's affecting ordinary Venezuelans. It's a very significant contributor to the decline of living standards and therefore to increases in migration. It's also a very significant contributor to the decline in public health services. I published a paper early this year in the Lancet of Global Health that looks at the mortality effects of sanctions, not just on Venezuela. By using cross-national studies and quasi-experimental identification techniques, we estimate that the death toll associated with sanctions is comparable to a death toll of wars, currently. So, they have very significant effect on the most vulnerable populations, and these effects tend to fall on young children and on older age populations. When you're applying economic sanctions, you are essentially trying to strangle an economy. And of course in that economy there are going to be the government elites and essentially the cronies of the government; they will have their mechanisms to ensure that they're not the ones who are most affected by sanctions.

When you cut the source of foreign revenues of a country, you're going to cause a massive economic contraction. You're going to cause a depreciation of the exchange rate. You're going to cause increases, certainly, in inflation. And that's going to fall on the most disadvantaged and the most vulnerable populations.

LV: So, international sanctions against purchasing oil exports. You and others have shown that sanctions aren’t working in the way that the internationals wish them to work. They're not changing the behavior of the regime. They're hurting the poor people. They're presumably accelerating migration outside of the country. Are people listening to what you've said?

FR: Well, I would hope that they are, but I think that it's actually a complex question. I think in the Biden administration, it's clear to me that the people who were framing Venezuela policy knew that sanctions policy had failed. That's why they started reverting that policy and that's why they started giving licenses to oil companies. Of course, in a very complex political setting. Because policy makers might be aware that the sanctions don't work and that they have all of these negative effects. But on the other hand, you have groups that are well-organized diasporas that are extremely pro-sanctions. For example, politicians that come out of the state of Florida, whether they be Republicans or Democrats, tend to be very strong advocates of sanctions; like right now, we have a Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. There was a discussion a few months ago in the other Trump administration about what to do with the license that had been issued to Chevron. In the end, that license was canceled. Then it was reinstated under more restrictive circumstances. But the defining factor there were three Republican legislators in the House of Representatives. All three of them from Cuban origin, who effectively told the Trump administration that as a condition for them supporting the Big Beautiful Bill, the Chevron license needed to be rolled back.

LV: So, there was some movement listening to you, to actually allow some oil exports, presumably with the idea that the revenue then goes to the people?

FR: Yes, exactly.

LV: And the people who are under pitting the politicians who then sort of push back and we have the sanctions back. What is their motivation? Why do they prefer the sanctions?

FR: Well, I think that there's two types of motivations. One of them is just basic Florida politics, and it's what their constituents want. The probability that a country will be sanctioned is an increasing function of the share of the diaspora population of that country in US swing states. So it's not just having a big diaspora, it's having it in the right place, and Florida happens to be a swing state in that case. We're talking about Venezuelans who came in 10, 15, 20 years ago that are US citizens, that are US residents. This is a group that’s in favor of sanctions. They believe that sanctions are a good way to punish the regime. It's almost an emotional response. It's not really a discussion about the effectiveness of the policies or not. 

LV: They can see that the regime is still there. That the regime is still in power. Yes, the country is poor, but they can see that the sanctions aren't leading to a change of overall policy by Maduro. It's not leading to regime change, but they're locked in.

FR: This gets mixed up with something else, which is the Venezuelan opposition. There is a very important group, which has a leadership of the Venezuelan opposition right now, which is fully in favor of this sanction strategy. Maria Corina Machado, Edmundo Gonzalez, and Leopoldo Lopez are prominent advocates of sanctions or prominent advocates of the maximum pressure strategy. Despite the evidence, they believe that if you just increase the pressure on the Venezuelan economy that's going to lead for Maduro to be overthrown. They believe that an economic crisis generates discontent and that discontent is something that the regime can be blamed for, and that will therefore lead to a popular rebellion. They also target the revenues of the regime, but the regime is also the government of Venezuela, and these are the revenues with which the Venezuelan economy runs. So it's very difficult to target just the regime without targeting the Venezuelan economy.

LV: The headline coming from you seems to be A.) the sanctions aren't really working. They're having deep humanitarian costs. They've led to a migration crisis and the destruction of the economy, and they're hurting the people internally. And secondly, you seem to be suggesting that the people who are proponents—the long-term Venezuelans in the state of Florida who have representatives that are on their side—they're waiting it out. They think that sanctions haven't worked…yet.

Everybody is now talking about Venezuela because now President Trump seems to be accelerating intense campaign covert operations within Venezuela. 27 people killed in the Caribbean by strikes on boats that President Trump alleges are carrying drugs from Venezuela to the United States. But can you give us your sense of what's happening and why now? Why are we suddenly seeing this sort of intensification and acceleration of a very militaristic and hardline US policy?

FR: Well, it's interesting. Part of the reason why is because it has nothing to do with Venezuela. It has to do with the Trump administration being able to claim that it's doing something about drug trafficking. That it's doing something about the fentanyl epidemic. These boats may be carrying cocaine, it's not clear. If they're carrying it, they're not carrying it to the US because you actually need to refuel those boats like 20 times to get to the US. They're carrying it to Trinidad. They're not carrying fentanyl. Fentanyl does not come from Venezuela. So why is the Trump administration doing this? I think it's doing it because the public that it wants to speak to with these images of blowing up boats in the Caribbean doesn't really care about those details. That's not part of the discussion in the MAGA world. They're just blowing up things that are blowing up villains, and that little snippet is what they are giving to the republic. Fentanyl was also the reason that Trump put tariffs on Canada and Mexico and China, which were what began the whole trade war on the rest of the world. So Venezuela, is right now, a convenient pretext. Now, I do think that we have the Trump administration. We also have Marco Rubio. And Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, as one of the most powerful persons in this administration.

LV: Interesting you say so, because I think some people feel like he's not so powerful in this administration. But maybe when you're looking at Venezuela and Latin America, the picture is different.

FR: Well, what we definitely saw is that the Trump administration actually began with a different approach to Venezuela. Rick Grenell, special envoy, went to Venezuela, met with Maduro, started negotiating issues such as opening up of the oil sector and deportation flights just to handle the migration issue in a bilateral way. Rubio stepped in and said, “No, let's close this. We're gonna take another approach.” And the approach is going to be maximum pressure towards Venezuela.

After Chevron's license was revoked, it was partially reinstated. So that Chevron is exporting some Venezuelan oil, around 50% of what it had been allowed to under Biden, so it's still a significant restriction. But it's a lot more than what it was allowed to export during Trump 1, which was zero, so it’s kind of complex. You have these warships in the Caribbean, and they are creating this image that there's a lot of pressure on the regime, but actually there are some dimensions in which this is not as close to maximum pressure as you had during Trump 1.

LV: But we know the other big motivation, or the big kind of selling point for President Trump to frankly a lot of Americans, is that he's tough on immigration. We've seen what, 8 million Venezuelans leave the country in the last decade. It's not clear that any of this is actually going to solve that problem. I mean, what is the policy that's intended to solve, not just the drug trafficking issue, if it's an issue, but immigration problem? Can you give us the numbers? How many are coming into the United States?

FR: 900,000 is the most recent estimate of those who have come to the US. So there's 8 million, it's a bit more than a tenth of the total Venezuelan immigration. So most of the immigration has gone to Columbia, has gone to Peru, Ecuador, Chile, and other places in Latin America. For the Trump administration, what it's actually ended up doing is just scaring migrants and really none of them want to come to the US anymore. The level of border encounters of people who are identified trying to enter the country illegally has just plummeted during the Trump administration, as a result of the forced deportations.

Because, you see, Venezuelans only began coming to the US relatively recently, after COVID. What's being done to the Venezuelan economy, if you effectively put maximum pressure on this country again and you cause another recession, that's going to worsen the migration problem in Latin America, maybe not in the US. If the US is able to continue with this policy of deterrence of migrants, to scare them from coming into the US, then these migrants are simply going to end up in other countries in the regions. It can be a problem for Latin America.

But there is definitely another element here and it’s regime change. I mean, yes, the Trump administration would like to see a regime change in Venezuela. And I think Marco Rubio would like to see regime change in Venezuela and in Cuba and in Nicaragua.

However, what I think is also clear is that there does not seem to be intent right now to take this to an explicit armed military intervention to try to overthrow the Maduro government. The US has mobilized 10,000 troops in the Caribbean. This is 1/10th of the size of the Venezuelan army. You do not have a land base from which to carry out operations because neither Brazil nor Columbia are willing to let American troops in. So what that means is that you'd have to carry out an amphibious invasion with 10,000 soldiers. Even if they are very well-trained American soldiers, that would be completely suicidal.

LV: 10,000 troops have been mobilized in what time period?

FR: Well, since Trump came into office, in the past six months.

LV: What do we know about the covert operations inside of Venezuela?

FR: We weren't supposed to know anything because they were supposed to be covert. If you have an administration that is, first of all, leaking information about covert operations (because the New York Times is not going to publish a story on these covert operations in Venezuela unless the leak comes out of somewhere) and the CIA knows how to keep these things secret unless it wants to. And then you have the president actually admitting in a press conference that, yes, they're doing covert operations. Well the standard would've been to deny it if they're really covert. I think that what we're seeing here is something completely different. What we're seeing is a standard psychological operation. They want the Maduro and the Venezuelan armed forces and the military to believe that the US is serious about invading because they believe that that can lead to a crumbling of the regime. And the problem with that is, first of all, you've tried it before this. It was also tried in 2019.

LV: So Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0. This was not a Biden administration policy?

FR: Exactly. No, not the Biden administrations. During Trump 1, it took somewhat of a different form. There was an attempt to actually have Juan Guaidó, who is president of the National Assembly, was sworn in as president of Venezuela, recognized by the US. He went to the Colombian border and said that he was giving orders to the military to accept humanitarian aid. Which presumably Maduro was rejecting as a way to get with all of the support of the US and there with full maximum pressure sections to try to get the Venezuelan military to turn on Maduro. And it didn't do it. Right now, we've seen even less defections.

But nevertheless, the thesis here appears to be that if you generate the expectation, the Trump administration, and as I said the Venezuelan opposition— Maria Corina Machado, who's the main leader—they talk a lot about this idea of credible threat. If there's a credible threat, that's going to lead the regime to buckle. So now, credible threat of what? Credible threat of military intervention, that's their thesis. Now the problem is that a threat can't be credible unless you're actually willing to carry it out. What's happening is that Maduro, in 2019 and today, is calling their bluff. He’s saying, you guys are not serious about invading, so we're just going to stay put here and nothing happens.

LV: So where do we go from here? I mean, it sounds like, from what you’re saying, that this is basically a bluff by the Trump administration. The obvious thing then is that the Trump administration is going to have to walk this back at some stage. So, how in your view are they going to walk this back? Or is this just going to kind of continue to hit the headlines? Is this about distracting people domestically? What's driving this?

FR: Remember this is an administration that in less than ten months in office threatened to take control militarily of the Panama Canal to invade Greenland. It's declared trade war on Mexico, Canada, China, and then essentially the rest of the world. It also said that it was going to have peace in Ukraine even before Trump was sworn in. Now it's making an attempt, which appears to be falling apart, for brokering a peace deal in Gaza. When people start thinking about and assessing these policies, of these regimes in terms of their effectiveness, their efficiency, and whether they make economic sense, I think that they're missing the picture. Because these policies are really about two things. It’s about Trump being able to exercise much more power and to concentrate that power in the presidency. The US presidency is doing things that it never thought that it was possible or legal to do. Imposing tariffs on the rest of the world by using emergency powers that were designed for wartime, and they were, in any case, only been used to impose sanctions. Ordering people killed in the high seas without any type of judicial justification. It's labeling whole migrant populations as alien enemies and deporting them and denying them of due process. And all of this comes back to the same place. All of these are executive level decisions. There are things that before, you had Congress doing it, or you had different arms of the bureaucracy. Now they're all being decided by the president.

And I think that the other part is just the generation of spectacle. I mean, really, I think that we have to start viewing public policy in the Trump administration partly as performance. What's important for them is to blow up things and to generate the image that they're combating the “bad guys” by blowing up things. Those five minutes of attention are enough for them to convince the people that they want to convince that they're doing something. Then they can move on.

LV: When you were first saying this is the executive, they're doing these things that haven't been done before…I mean, you know, right? You are from Latin America, you know full well that the United States has definitely been engaged historically in fomenting coups and all sorts of things in Latin America. The difference you've just hit on is that now you're right. It does seem to be that it's almost for public consumption. But he is trying to create some sense that there's a legal basis, that there is a legal justification. He is not saying, “I don't care what the law is, I'm just doing it because I'm president.” So it's not a completely norm-free zone in which he's trying to operate. Are you surprised by that?

FR: I tend to view it a bit differently. I actually think that it is largely norm-free. Except that when you have a government that's doing this type of thing, of course, there are lawyers working for the administration who are going to have to come up with pretext. Because what's their legal justification? Quite frankly, they wrote a letter to Congress under the War Powers Resolution, claiming that these killings in the Caribbean were acts of self defense. Now that explanation doesn't hold water in any sense. There's no imminent threat from these boats to any American.

You've had regimes commit atrocities in many different ways, and most of them have had lawyers on their side coming with justifications. But I don't think that there's any reasonable person who believes that there is a legal basis with which you can simply decide to kill people in international waters because you allege that they're drug traffickers. When two of those persons survive the attacks are sent back to their home countries, and in their home countries they're actually liberated because there's no proof that they were involved in drug trafficking, that tells you the quality of the underlying legal argument that is being made.

LV: There is a whole story about President Trump and what he's doing for domestic political effect to kind of consolidate his base of power. He also has a broader geopolitical agenda that you've hinted at. But there's also this question of Venezuela, and I want to kind of conclude our conversation by getting your perspective. How do you anticipate this unfolding over the next few years? And what would you concretely recommend?

Francisco Rodriguez: First thing that I would start with is, the Venezuelan regime is a very unpleasant one. It's a dictatorship. It's authoritarian. It steals elections. It violates human rights. It does a lot of things that we don't like, and in fact, nearly 80% of the world's population lives under authoritarian regimes. We don't think that it's a wise policy idea to decide that we're going to change all of those. Most reasonable people would recognize that the US needs to have relations with authoritarian governments, including China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and some which are pretty nasty dictatorships. So however we got to Venezuela, the reality is it's an authoritarian government. Thinking that you can impose democracy from outside much more so through an explicit intervention is not typically a good idea.

So the first thing that I would say to a policymaker is, look, you can't necessarily solve all the problems in the world, and let's at least try to do no harm. Don't make the lives of Venezuelans even worse by imposing economic sanctions, whose cost is going to be paid by Venezuelans. If the government calls the bluff, what you're going to do is just help consolidate an authoritarian regime. You want to ask, how can we support a process of negotiations that leads to institutional reforms in Venezuela where the conversation with Maduro is not, “Hey, give power to the opposition or otherwise we throw you in jail”? Can the international community support a process of negotiations that leads institutional power sharing in Venezuela and gradual reforms that can open up the avenues for democratic change. Understanding that a negotiated transition is going to happen slowly in Venezuela, if it happens.

LV: I’ve got to ask you one more question. Sanctions aren't helping, and we can't really change this, so buy Venezuelan oil? I mean, for many people, like buy Russian oil? Buy Venezuelan oil? What is the consequence of our action? They also often take a kind of humanitarian, sort of an absolute moral conviction, that it's not right to buy oil from dictators who brutalize their people. So what do you do so that people don't just think, “why am I buying Venezuelan oil from a dictator”?

FR: Well if you want to have a workable economy today, you're going to have to engage with countries whose political regimes you don't like. Why are we buying t-shirts in Walmart from a communist dictatorship in China? There's so many things that we buy from countries whose political regimes we don't like. Saudi Arabian oil? Saudi Arabia's in the hands of a dictator who calls himself king that actually has journalists cut up in pieces in his embassy. So you want to buy Iranian oil? You want to buy Russian oil? 96% of Venezuelan exports come from oil revenue. The Venezuelan economy runs on oil. When you are targeting Venezuelan oil, you're targeting the economy. Not buying Venezuelan oil to punish Nicolas Maduro would be the same as if Europe said we're not going to buy products produced by Apple because we want to punish Donald Trump. The reality is that if your decision is not to buy Venezuelan oil, that is effectively the same thing as sanctioning Venezuelan oil sales and sanctioning the Venezuelan economy. The cost of that is going to be paid by ordinary Venezuelans.

LV: Francisco Rodriguez, thank you so much for joining us.

FR: Thank you very much for the invitation. It's a pleasure.

LV: And thank you for listening to this episode of Deep Dish on Global Affairs. I'm your host, Leslie Vinjamuri. Talk to you next week.

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