The U.S. political strategy in Venezuela appears chaotic and improvised, with conflicting statements from Trump and Rubio on involvement. This unpredictability may unsettle world leaders, as Trump uses unconventional military tactics without traditional constraints.
The political takeover of Venezuela does not appear to be going according to plan, if there ever was a plan. A day after the raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump used the phrase “run the country.” A day later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio watered it down to “running policy” and made the next phase sound more like a series of strong suggestions. Trump also publicly suggested that Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez might cooperate with the United States. But then Rodríguez gave a televised address saying Venezuela “will never return to being the colony of another empire.” Trump followed that up with a threat, delivered through an interview with The Atlantic: “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”
Unlike the precise military operation that whisked Maduro out of Venezuela, the political follow-up seems like improvisation and chaos, but maybe chaos is the point. In this episode of Radio Atlantic we talk with staff writers Michael Scherer, who talked with President Trump on Sunday, and Vivian Salama, who writes about the administration and Venezuela. They talk about Trump’s evolving vision of his role in the world and how it might be unsettling other world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin. Salama notes that world leaders now may “think twice about crossing the U.S. when President Trump is so unpredictable and uses the U.S. military in very unconventional ways, and shuns the guardrails that keep a U.S. president in check.”
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: By all accounts, the U.S. military’s raid in Venezuela on Saturday was efficient, clean, meticulously planned. President Trump, who watched it unfold in Mar-a-Lago, said it was like a TV show. Dead of night, Delta Force troops burst into Nicolás Maduro’s compound and captured him and his wife. Soon after, Trump posted a picture of the Venezuelan dictator on social media, blindfolded, wearing headphones, and with his hands apart, like he just dropped the controls.
But since that military operation, everything about the U.S. government’s entanglement with Venezuela is murky and messy.
I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.
If the goal of the Venezuelan raid was to capture a defendant wanted in U.S. courts for suspected narco-terrorism, then mission accomplished. Maduro should be showing up in a New York courtroom today.
But in subsequent interviews—including with Atlantic staff writer Michael Scherer—the president sounds like he’s constantly shifting the goalposts. Is the U.S. going to “run” Venezuela, as Trump suggested on Saturday? Are U.S. companies going to take over the country’s oil reserves? And why is Trump now also talking about Greenland?
The answers to all these questions have massive implications for U.S. foreign policyand for signals the US is sending to other powerful countries about how to act in their own regions.
To help us know what to watch out for in the days ahead, we have staff writers Michael Scherer and Vivian Salama.
Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael Scherer: Thank you for having me.
Rosin: Vivian, welcome.
Vivian Salama: Always great to be with you.
Rosin: So, Michael, you talked to Trump this weekend. How did he sound and what did he tell you?
Scherer: Jovial as always. I called him a little after 9:30 [a.m.] on Sunday. He had just arrived at his West Palm Beach Golf Course, very happily took the call. We talked for a few minutes, and he was very happy to take my questions. You know, I had called mainly because I was curious how to square the two very different messages we’d gotten Saturday about what was going on in Venezuela. He said in a press conference midday that the vice president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, who’s now the acting president, was going to work with the U.S. and had a very productive conversation with Marco Rubio.
And then a few hours later, she went on national television in Venezuela and rather forcefully rebutted that, saying that Nicolás Maduro was still the president, that the government was still in place, that it would follow out his wishes, that it would vigorously reject colonialism in any form, and that American actions were basically an effort to steal resources from Venezuela.
And so I asked him, does he still think Delcy Rodríguez is working with the U.S. government, willing to do everything? And his answer was, “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” Which was an outright threat—not a specific threat, but clearly a threat, and indicated that this is still very much an unresolved situation.
Rosin: Vivian, how did you interpret that contradiction? Was she calling his bluff? How does this actually play out? How does this evolve?
Salama: Well, one of the interesting things that I noticed very soon after the Department of Justice unsealed the indictment against Maduro on Saturday was that Delcy Rodríguez was not named in that indictment.
A number of other officials were named in the indictment, but she was notably left out, and that suggested immediately that there was probably some sort of cooperation or understanding between her and the U.S., at least for the time being. And so we were really trying to dig in. Amazingly, Michael was able to eventually just ask Trump himself about what the understanding was.
And of course, later on, Trump came out to the podium and acknowledged that Secretary Rubio was speaking with her. And they basically described her in not these exact words, but said she was basically the best of the worst options until something can be sorted out for the country. And so it does seem that there is some sort of an understanding between them.
Whether or not she was condemning the U.S., calling for—you know, initially she was calling for proof of life of Maduro, and then she was saying he was the legitimate president and pushing back on a lot of the claims that the U.S. was putting out there. Whether or not she was doing so to save face or whether she’s a true believer in these: That’s really hard to tell at the moment.
Things are so chaotic and so fluid. She is probably, to a degree, very nervous for what will happen to her either way, either in Venezuela or if the U.S. were to come after her. And so she has to kind of play this game a little bit. And so there’s definitely a number of contradictions, and I don’t think that we should take her word as an absolute guarantee of what her position is.
It is obvious, though, that the U.S. did spare her, at least in the indictment, for the time being because they feel that she may be the most malleable person within Maduro’s inner circle to deal with. And so that’s kind of where we were on Sunday when Michael then reached President Trump himself to figure out what was happening.
Rosin: Right. So what you’re both saying is, this is playing out, and we can’t take exactly the words they’re saying at face value. So I’m curious what you will be watching. Michael, did you get the sense that they were surprised? I mean, the military operation was so meticulously planned. They’d been researching and prepping. Was there a plan for the day one, day two, day three, as you saw it? Like, did they expect her to resist?
Scherer: I think what is remarkable is how much of a victory lap they took Saturday. It was a pretty well-executed operation. But they all, basically, in the senior ranks of leadership, declared victory at that point. You know, This is an example of Trump’s leadership. You know, Pete Hegseth, his defense secretary, went on television to say, This is totally unlike Iraq because we basically already won. And what that leaves out, obviously, is that we don’t know what the outcome is. We don’t know yet what’s happened. And it’s gonna take some time before that sorts itself out.
I mean, there are scenarios here that we reported before all this happened where the military splits up and heads up into the woods and the mountains and you have a bunch of different moneymaking groups that are armed, that operate independently in the country that, you know, the country kind of falls apart. That’s probably not gonna happen, but it could happen.
There are scenarios where the U.S. actually does try and directly run Venezuela, like President Trump said yesterday, and it goes very badly because history says that often goes very badly. You know, the local population resists, and things don’t go as well as they should.
It’s also possible that things go pretty well. So I think there’s just a big open question about what is gonna come next.
Rosin: Vivian, as you are tracking this evolution, what are you gonna be watching for? Like, are you gonna be watching for what Delcy Rodríguez says? How the White House responds? What should we be keeping our eye on to see how this unfolds? What comes out of this chaos?
Salama: Well, one of the classic questions that we have starting this new week is who is actually running Venezuela. Now, of course, Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as the interim president, but President Trump came out to the podium on Saturday and said that the U.S. now runs Venezuela, which in my opinion was probably even more shocking than the arrest of Maduro itself and the operation that they had staged earlier.
This is exactly what President Trump had, dating back to his first campaign, condemned. These nation-building exercises where America spends billions of dollars going into countries and taking them over and trying to, kind of, build these democratic societies. And so it seemed, when he went to the podium, that that was what he was suggesting, although he made it very clear that the U.S. was doing so largely to capitalize on the enormous oil resources in Venezuela.
But then Secretary Rubio came out on Sunday and kind of backtracked that and didn’t explicitly say the U.S. isn’t running Venezuela, but he essentially said that, calling it instead a military quarantine where the U.S. is basically trying to just help the country go in the right direction.
And so the big question we really have is: What is the plan? Which was the question that we’ve had now for weeks and weeks. In fact, I wrote a rather lengthy article in The Atlantic about this very question: Does the U.S. have a plan for the day after Maduro?
They talk about a number of options, but whether or not they really charted out a course by shoring up loyalty in the military, it does seem to an extent that was happening within the CIA, that they were working covertly over the past few weeks to shore up some loyalty within the military, because the military was going to be key to the success.
But who comes in afterwards, how it plays out, whether or not the opposition is able to successfully, then, succeed this transition—that is the big question, and that is something that we have not been able to get answers from the administration about. They say, Of course there’s a plan. We say, What is it? And they brush us off.
Now, folks I’ve spoken to in the administration say it’s options, not so much a plan. And others say, There’s a plan; it’s just being kept very secret.
Rosin: What about María Machado? She’s the Venezuelan opposition leader who won the Nobel Prize, but surprisingly, Trump dismissed her, calling her a nice woman who lacks respect. Is she part of this plan?
Salama: So she is definitely one of the most prominent figures within the opposition. But what ended up happening was Maduro—at the time when the elections happened and she had gained popular support—he issued a warrant for her arrest and declared it illegitimate. And so another figure, Edmundo González, ended up running in her place, and he won an election. Now, he’s been in exile in Spain since winning that election, but he is viewed, including here in the U.S., as the legitimate president of Venezuela because of the fact that back in 2024, he won the popular vote.
María Machado has basically deferred to González the fact that he would ultimately be the leader, but there’s a number of people who believe that Machado was the original legitimate successor to Maduro and that she should be the one to kind of carry that mantle.
But for now, it seems that the administration has thrown its back behind González. But you will not hear them really saying that explicitly. They support the opposition, but they’ve been very careful not to name names except for President Trump. And it was only because he was asked about her at that press conference that he made those comments. Secretary Rubio and others have sort of tap-danced around naming names because they want the Venezuelan people to be the ones to ultimately figure out who leads them moving forward.
Rosin: So, you are laying out a road map that’s pretty organized. Essentially, the military keeps the peace, and then you usher in an opposition that’s somewhat democratically elected.
Salama: But it’s easier said than done. And you’re talking now about a country that has economically been in shambles for decades now, where corruption is rampant and mismanagement—you’re talking about poor infrastructure everywhere. Not to mention the fact that you have cartels running around in the country and what they call the colectivos, the armed civilian groups, which as of Saturday were reportedly kind of roaming the streets already, trying to seize on any potential chaos that might ensue in the aftermath of Maduro’s arrest.
And so everyone I speak to, especially folks who know Venezuela so well, say, Unfortunately, the likelihood of things getting worse before they get better are very, very high. And the question is, can they sort of keep the train on the tracks and keep moving so that there can be a peaceful transition and things can stay stable long enough for the opposition to then get all of its people and all its ducks in a row, and then finally have a referendum to come into power? That is the question.
Rosin: Michael, do you have a sense of Trump’s patience for this long process that Vivian is describing? You did talk to him about regime change, which as we all know, is a very sticky, complicated process. So what did he say to you about regime change?
Scherer: I was struck by that press conference in which he said, We run Venezuela. Having covered the U.S. involvement in Iraq in the 2000s, and then Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, in which he ran explicitly against these endless wars and nation building abroad and regime-change wars—and so I asked him about that apparent contradiction. And he said, Well, in the case of Venezuela, there is nothing wrong with either regime change or nation building
I don’t think he was referring to a major U.S. taxpayer–led project. He’s talking about bringing in U.S. oil companies to rebuild their oil infrastructure. But it’s a pretty dramatic shift from where he’s been before. In terms of how he’s thinking of this process playing out, I think he sees this as a negotiation, as a deal he’s trying to strike. It’s all about this transaction, and he is trying to project maximum strength, maximum power. And that’s how he does deals. He goes for the maximum to begin with, and then he figures out how much he has to pull back or whether he has to put another stick in there. And I think that was seen in my interview with him on Sunday morning.
Rosin: Oh, I see. So that’s why he said we might attack again, because that’s the place he always starts from.
Scherer: Yes. And that’s why he said that the vice president has to watch herself because she could face an outcome even worse than Maduro.
Salama: Also, just to add to Michael, from the years of covering him, he likes to convey that sense of unpredictability. It’s almost a superpower, if you think about it. This is something I hear from foreign diplomats around the world is that he’s so unpredictable that some of America’s adversaries, even, are a little bit too nervous to be the aggressor in this environment because they don’t know how Trump will react.
And so when Trump throws veiled threats or just very blatant threats, like what he told Michael out there, people take it seriously because they don’t find him to be predictable as maybe some of his predecessors were believed to be.
Rosin: Right. So Michael, then how do you judge things going forward? Like, do you watch what he does and not so much what he says? Or do you just think of it as a long negotiating game? Like, how can you just track what he’s gonna do and not do?
Scherer: I think the biggest X factor here is not in his control. We have to find out what happens in Venezuela and how they react. And I think he is probably in more political peril around this, if things go south, than he would like to let on.
Rosin: Domestic political peril, you mean.
Scherer: Domestic. There was already a pretty stark division within his coalition over the bombing of Iran, over actions he’s taken to continue supporting the Ukrainian military, even though he’s pulled back in other ways. I think a lot of his voters, a lot of people in this country, are not happy with where the country is right now, were very drawn to his message of “America First,” which used to mean we are focused only on domestic issues and we’re gonna leave the rest of the world to the world and we’re gonna have a strong military and they’re not gonna mess with us.
He’s now talking about the “Don-roe Doctrine,” a remake of the Monroe Doctrine, which basically says the Western Hemisphere will be controlled entirely by the United States and that Europe has to stay away, and by extension, China has to stay away. And that’s a pretty dramatic shift from where he was before.
So assuming things go well, assuming he can deliver on this promise he’s basically made to the American people right now that we’re gonna take their oil, and it’s gonna make us wealthier, and American companies are gonna thrive now that we’ve gotten rid of Maduro, and drug trafficking is going to decline now that we’ve gotten rid of Maduro—that could be fine. But if things go poorly there, and I again think there’s a lot of moving parts that the U.S. government does not control and that can’t be immediately solved with helicopter gunship,s there’s lots of scenarios here that are not ideal for the United States.
[Music]
Rosin: When we come back: Trump once said, “I run the country and the world.” Is he starting to figure out that second part? That’s after the break.
[Break]
Rosin: I wanna talk about oil. Trump talked a surprising amount in his press conference about Venezuela stealing our oil. Vivian, what is the story behind this?
Salama: So back in 2007, Nicolás Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, nationalized the oil industry. And what they essentially said is that any foreign companies, oil companies working in Venezuela needed to team up with the Venezuelan national oil company and give them a 51 percent stake in their projects. Otherwise they needed to pack up and go. And you had, at the time, Exxon, Conoco: They all packed up, they closed their projects, and they came back to the United States. The only one who remained was Chevron. Chevron has managed to get licenses over the course of the past few decades, and it was willing to team up with the Venezuelan oil company, but the others left.
And President Trump essentially has come to the conclusion that the U.S. was robbed of those projects, that it’s only because of U.S. oil companies that Venezuela was able to do any work on its oil industry. And he has taken that to heart. And so in early December, he announced via Truth Social that he was going to impose an oil embargo on Venezuela, which—it wasn’t exactly the right terminology that he was using, but what he was going to do was go after any tankers that were transporting oil illegally from Venezuela to be exported to any Venezuelan allies.
Now, just to give you a sense of what we’re talking about, Venezuela has the largest estimated oil reserves in the world. It’s about 17 percent of the global reserves or roughly 300 billion barrels. But the thing is, it’s only producing about 1 million barrels of oil a day. Its potential has just never really been realized because of a number of factors like poor infrastructure and mismanagement, and not to mention U.S. sanctions that have been imposed over the years. And so the little bit that is produced, because of U.S. sanctions, has to be illegally exported to Venezuelan allies. The vast majority of it goes to China. And you have about 15 percent that does come to the U.S. because Chevron is still operating vis-à-vis waivers. So the U.S. said that it was going to seize any tankers that were transporting Venezuelan oil illegally, and it started doing that, which was pretty, pretty extraordinary.
Now Trump says, because Maduro is out and a lot of those barriers could potentially be lifted, the best use of America’s time and effort in Venezuela at this point is to capitalize on those enormous resources in Venezuela. But I have to tell you, Hanna, just to emphasize—something like this, to rebuild Venezuela’s economy through the development of its oil industry, it needs, minimum, a decade for that to happen and tens of billions of dollars. And so there’s so many obstacles that are involved in even going and trying to do this.
And so President Trump doesn’t get into the details in a lot of these press conferences. He says, We’re there. We’re gonna take the oil. But there are a lot of challenges in place right now.
Rosin: Yeah. What he described is really ambitious, like, way more ambitious than taking over an oil tanker. So what is in the gap here? Either of you can answer this question. Is he just being hopeful, not paying attention to the details? What is the game plan around oil?
Scherer: I think it’s a broader strategic view that he has. He made very clear when he came into office for the second term—and it was sort of a surprise ’cause it wasn’t really talked about in the first term—that he wanted American control of the entire hemisphere. He went after Panama for their Chinese contracts. He started rattling sabers about Greenland. He started talking about Maduro; his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, made clear that Cuba was dependent on Venezuela, so, you know, going after Maduro was a step towards going after Cuba. And I think he sees what Vivian just mentioned: There’s just massive oil reserves. There’s also massive mineral reserves in Venezuela, and he thinks that we should have access to them, that that should be, that is just sort of the right way to do it, and it’s been a mistake of previous administrations not to take advantage of their own neighborhood in the way he wants to take advantage of it.
So I don’t think he thinks of it in that sort of terms. I mean, I think it is pretty clear that his No. 1 interest here—you just listen to him speak—is not the welfare of the average Venezuelan citizen. It’s projecting American power in a way that in the long run benefits the United States.
Rosin: So it’s like a sphere. It’s an old spheres-of-influence foreign-policy idea. Like, The Americas are our sphere of influence, so we should just—we just have interest in anything that happens here.
Scherer: That’s right. And we also had another controversial move he made a few months ago where he guaranteed a number of loans to Argentina to back the sort of right-wing government there in their version of midterm elections because he wanted to make sure that country stays friendly with the United States. So yeah, it’s the entire sphere.
I think he’s taken with Putin’s view of the way great powers should work. You know, Russia has argued for a long time that the former U.S.S.R. countries are properly in the Russian sphere of influence and other great powers should stay out of the way.
Rosin: So, Vivian, then what signal is that sending to other countries? If that is implicit in what he’s doing, what does, say, Russia or China read off of that?
Salama: And that is the big question that a number of people have been asking since the raid in Venezuela took place, is that if the U.S. can go into a sovereign nation and pluck a sitting president out of bed essentially—I mean, he had run to the safe house to be technically correct—but take him with his sweatpants and put him on a helicopter and fly him out of the country and put him on a U.S. carrier and charge him in the U.S., shunning congressional approvals, shunning extradition processes, shunning immunity protections that are recognized internationally, then what’s to stop Vladimir Putin from doing so in Ukraine? Or Xi Jinping from doing so in Taiwan, for example? It raises a lot of concerns.
Now, again, the fact that President Trump tends to be perceived as so unpredictable may be a saving grace. I’ve been talking to people all day today, including a few who are close to the president. And one of them in particular says—and this is a direct quote—told me that Putin is “scared shitless” after what happened to Maduro because, according to this person, and again, someone very close to the president, is that the U.S. military just staged something that is making every adversary terrified.
Rosin: Why?
Salama: It’s not that it would empower him to go and do the same thing in Ukraine; it’s that he would be too afraid to cross the U.S. military and to cross President Trump. And it’s probably noteworthy that at the end of that press conference on Saturday in Mar-a-Lago, a reporter asked President Trump, Are you mad at Putin? And he went into a long discussion about how he was not happy with Putin. Remember that that also is being heard in Moscow, too. The president of the United States just took out a leader of a sovereign nation, arrested him, and brought him to the United States. What’s to stop him from doing that to anyone else, as well?
So yes. Does it empower, potentially empower Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping or any other adversary [to do] that? Any other aggressor? It certainly does, and everyone I’ve spoken to acknowledges that is something to be concerned about. But do they also think twice about crossing the U.S. when President Trump is so unpredictable and uses the U.S. military in very unconventional ways and shuns, sort of, the guardrails that keep a U.S. president in check? Also something that they recognize.
Rosin: Interesting. So it both empowers and frightens leaders. It’s just a way of keeping everything unstable and potentially under his control.
Salama: And there’s the unpredictability element, right?
Rosin: (Laughs.) Yeah. Yeah.
Scherer: The other country that’s paying a lot of attention to this is Denmark. Trump has said the U.S. needs Greenland. Greenland is part of Denmark right now. And this is something, this playbook—I mean, it would not be hard for the U.S. military to seize control of Greenland. There’s not a lot of people there. The Danish military doesn’t have a lot of power. I think there’s probably other ways out of it.
But when the administration was talking this weekend about, The world should take notice. I mean, leaders were saying, The world needs to take notice that you can’t play games with this president. And when he says he is gonna do something, he does it. Trump has been crystal clear since he took office the second time that Greenland will come under American control one way or another.
And I spoke to him on Sunday. I asked what the Danish should be taking away from this military operation in Venezuela. And he said to me, They’re going to have to view it themselves. I really don’t know. But then he went on to say, We do need Greenland. Absolutely. We need it for defense. So he wasn’t backing down at all.
Rosin: Did this newest conversation you had with him, or what happened in Venezuela, color in that view about what Trump meant by that? Like, how he sees himself and his presidency?
Scherer: I think it was a really—you know, when he first said that to me, and this is in the spring, I was sort of struck by the construction. And the construction was, The first time I was president, I was sort of fighting for my life because there were all these investigations of me. And this time, I run the country and the world, and it wasn’t something—I mean, obviously, he was feeling better at that time. But the world?
You know, he had just gone through an election that was entirely focused on domestic issues, almost. I mean, there was very little, other than immigration—which you can read as a domestic issue—there was very little discussion of foreign policy during that last race. And he has, from the moment he came in, sought to remake the global order in a way that he just didn’t have the ambition the first time.
I mean, he was facing a lot of resistance, but also I think when he was elected in 2016, he didn’t really have the theory in place. He didn’t know enough about the world to know how to manipulate it to his desires. And it’s striking how much he has accomplished in the last year. If you include, you know, the military adventures in Yemen and Iran and Israel, and that he supported the remaking of the global trade system through tariffs, the remaking of the Western Hemisphere through pretty aggressive military and diplomatic action. I mean, it’s all been quite stunning. And I think he knew that he wanted to do this very early on.
Rosin: Well, Michael, Vivian, thank you both for joining us today.
Scherer: Thanks.
Salama: Thank you.
[Music]
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes and Jinae West. It was edited by Kevin Townsend and Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered and composed original music.
Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.
