The Trump administration is barely bothering to pretend that its increasingly belligerent stance toward Venezuela is just about tackling narcotics. President Donald Trumpwants Nicolas Maduro out of power — and the only question is how much pressure the United States is prepared to deliver to make it so.
There have been successive U.S. strikes against alleged drug trafficking boats in the international waters off Venezuela, a buildup of military assets in the Caribbean and even an admission from Trump that he had authorized covert CIA action on the ground in Venezuela. Still, Trump claims he’s not pursuing “regime change.”
To untangle what’s really going on in the region, POLITICO Magazine sat down with James B. Story, who served as the top diplomat to Venezuela during the first Trump administration and stayed on into some of the Biden administration. Story was also a senior diplomat in Colombia and led the Venezuelan Affairs Unit in the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá after the U.S. suspended diplomatic relations with Caracas.
Story argues that in a shift from Trump’s first administration, U.S. policy is now being calibrated to rattle Venezuelan elites close to Maduro such that they move to oust the long-time leftist leader. It also provides Trump with the necessary firepower should he choose to actually conduct some kind of U.S. military operation in Venezuela, even if that’s not the administration’s first choice.
“There are not enough assets for an invasion,” he said. “But there are enough ‘exquisite assets’ on site that could overwhelm the air defenses of the country, take out the Air Force, take out the navy, potentially decapitate the government if that were a decision that he decided to take.” Then comes the fallout — and it could get messy.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
So, Ambassador, is the Trump administration headed to war with Venezuela?
President Trump has been quite clear that he’s willing to use all of the tools at his disposal in order to stop narcotics trafficking flowing north, but as is evident as far as the first Trump administration, he’s always been very concerned about the lack of democracy in the country, the human rights abuses that’s led to migration, the illegality and criminality coming out of the country.
Certainly the assets are there that would enable the president to make a decision. There are not enough assets for an invasion but there are enough “exquisite assets” on site that could overwhelm the air defenses of the country, take out the Air Force, take out the Navy, potentially decapitate the government if that were a decision that he decided to take.
Is that a decision that’s been taken? I don’t know. But I can say that there are more assets in the region over the course of the last several weeks. They’ve increased the number of assets in their region. And that’s leading me to the conclusion that something may happen. Now that something could be everywhere from a counternarcotics operation within the 12 nautical mile limit of the country, something that’s on land focused on narcotics, or something broader.
You were ambassador to Venezuela and led the Venezuelan Affairs Unit in Bogotá during both the first Trump and Biden presidencies. How has the Trump administration’s views of Venezuela changed since the first administration when you served there?
What he’s doing right now when it comes to counter-narcotics is different. The president ran on a platform that included concerns as regards to migration, in particular organizations such as Tren de Aragua, which is a well-known criminal organization in Venezuela that’s transnational in nature.
So all of that is new compared to where the first Trump administration was. In the first Trump administration, we were the first country to recognize President Juan Guaido as a legitimate leader of the country in the beginning of the interim government. Interim President Guaido was invited to the State of the Union address. There was significant focus on pressure to compel the regime to change. I’m not talking about regime change, I’m talking about pressure on the regime, support to democracy via the interim government and Juan Guaido. And while there was some bellicose language, all options were on the table, it pales in comparison to what’s currently happening.
What do you make of Trump’s campaign to try to destabilize Maduro with the strikes against boats, a military buildup at sea and authorization of covert CIA action on land?
I believe the intent of the administration is for someone close to Maduro to invite him into exile, extradite him to the United States or encourage his departure through other means. And I think that’s the preferred outcome. If you look at the pressure that’s been put, it’s significantly more than was under the first Trump administration, including certainly the attack against these alleged narcotics trafficking vessels. But then also talking about a covert action program in an overt way certainly is something that that should be read as, this is a decision made to put additional pressure on those around Maduro to encourage him to leave.
Under the first Trump administration, there was a framework for a democratic transition that came out in March of 2020, almost concurrent to the indictment against Maduro and also to the spread of Covid-19, that laid out a future for Venezuela: an interim government that would lead to elections, that kind of path. And one of the things that you don’t see today is the same, that same path being laid out. So there’s a lot of pressure. I think the administration is hopeful for a transition by other means and not having to deploy force itself in order to get there.
Why do those actions put more pressure on Venezuelan elites, versus other measures like sanctions?
It’s the threat of force. Sanctions certainly put pressure on the regime, but they’ve been under sanctions for so long that they’ve certainly learned to live with the sanctions. And the ghost ships carrying oil to China, laundering through Malaysia, and the role of Iran, Cuba, Russia, China and Venezuela. Inside of the regime, it doesn’t really matter to them if people go hungry, if there’s not enough medicine. This isn’t something that they’ve concerned themselves with. Because their existence is what concerns themselves. So they’ve learned to live with sanctions over time. Now this is the real possibility of use of force. That is intended, I’m certain, to rattle those closest to Maduro, encourage them to make the decision to make a change within the government.
The focus on Venezuela, and increasingly Colombia, has been striking because there was a certain expectation that the focus would be on Mexico. Why do you think Mexico is getting less attention from the White House, even as its role in drug trafficking remains unchanged?
Mexico is our largest trading partner. We have fully integrated economies there on the border. I’m certain they’re having discussions with President Sheinbaum. And President Sheinbaum has reacted. She’s been proactive, putting troops on the border, doing some of the things that the president wanted her to do, and allowing some more intelligence gathering inside of Mexico.
The source country for cocaine and heroin — most of the heroin, not all of it but nearly all of the cocaine that’s northbound to the United States — is Colombia. At least 5 percent, potentially up to 10 or 15 percent, of that cocaine travels through Venezuela. It comes up to the Eastern Caribbean into Haiti and the Dominican Republic and to some extent to Puerto Rico directly. Once it gets to Puerto Rico, it’s inside the United States, it can travel freely around the country.
The president was quite clear that he believes that Tren de Aragua is in league with Maduro. I don’t know to what extent we could say that Maduro is running Tren de Aragua. Their interests may overlap on occasion, but they’re separate entities.
The decision to go after Venezuela is not just one of drugs, but it’s also one of hemispheric stability. Because you have criminality happening in Venezuela and from Venezuela, in addition to nearly nine million immigrants that have fled the country seeking a better life, that in and of itself is destabilizing. Not just to the United States. If you look at a country like Aruba, it’s something like 10 or 15 percent of the people that live there are actually from Venezuela. It’s a small number globally, but an astonishing statistic when you think about the percentages.
If you look at a place like Colombia coming out of the 50-year war with the [Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia], they’re trying to provide health and education, housing, food and opportunity for their own citizens. And now they have to deal with three million Venezuelans who come across the border. I want to be very clear: There’s very few Venezuelans involved in the illegality. Being Venezuelan is not a crime. Being an immigrant is not a crime. But it is destabilizing.
So why is the president making this decision? There are lots of reasons. There’s a drug reason, there’s a stability reason, there’s the migration reason, the human rights reason and there’s the democracy reason.
Neighboring Colombia is also facing scrutiny from the administration. How much should we link the tensions with Colombia to our current policy with Venezuela?
There is a direct link insofar as President [Gustavo] Petro took umbrage at what he defined as the extrajudicial killing of a Colombian citizen in “a fishing boat.” And coming on the heels of his decision to stand on a street corner in New York during the UN General Assembly and make a bunch of pronouncements, he was already on the president’s radar in a negative way. And then he had some ad-hominem attacks against the president on this counternarcotics policy.
I’m not here to debate the legality of this policy. I will say historically we’ve gotten more intelligence from Colombia on counternarcotics than we’ve given to the Colombians. That intel allows us to go and take a boat down with the Coast Guard. Then we obtain the drugs. We’re able to then know where the drugs came from. We try, in a court of law, these people. We use their phones and we try to take down the organizations.
My expectation is that the intelligence from Colombia, if it hasn’t already dried up completely, will do so soon because of the spat between the two presidents. And I also believe that others in the region — and that would include the Brits, the Dutch, the French, plus all the countries around the region — may also hold back actionable intelligence from us if they believe it will lead to us having a kinetic action that they may define as an extrajudicial killing.
We’re going to have less support in the region for counter-narcotics. We’re going to have less of an idea of what’s happening. In the short term, we will see fewer boats in the Caribbean going north, but without even hardly thinking about it, I can give you five ways [drug traffickers] can move joints north without using that vector. They could put them on pleasure craft. They can put them on airplanes. They could put it in container ships. They put it into smaller loads inside at the 12 nautical mile limit of each country. They can put it on people’s backs and be able to cross the border. There’s a number of different ways they can get drugs north. Because there’s such a huge incentive to this.
So what’s happening in Venezuela has definitely discomfited Petro. Petro is known as a person who sometimes will say things without thinking them through, and taking those things through completely. And I was living there when he was mayor, and I see it now that he’s president. I don’t know what the intentions of our president are, but I can tell you that the end result would be less cooperation on counternarcotics.
Let’s talk about Petro. It seems like neither Trump nor Biden managed to win him over or build a good relationship with him. Is it because Petro is uniquely hard to work with?
This is the first time we’ve had a leader in Colombia from [the left] of the ideological spectrum. And President Petro comes with what he believes to be well-formed ideas on how politics and economics and society should run that aren’t necessarily shared by the United States. He believes he’s right. And that makes for a difficult relationship, not impossible, but a difficult relationship.
We were very seamlessly integrated. We’ve gone from 20 years of Plan Colombia, where we can always get to “yes” with each other very quickly, to a relationship that’s a little more nuanced, a little more difficult, and a little harder to get to “yes” sometimes. And that creates a bit of a drag on the relationship.
The security situation in Colombia has indeed worsened over the last few years. How much of what Trump has done to Colombia — placing Colombia on the majors list, cutting off U.S. assistance, threatening tariffs — is warranted? Does it make sense to you to put Petro to the fire more?
President Petro hasn’t lustily prosecuted the counternarcotics agenda in Colombia. He’ll point to seizures and these kinds of things, but the eradication part of the work — when I was running counter-narcotics in Colombia, there was a point under President [Juan Manuel] Santos in which Colombia had fewer hectares under cultivation than either Bolivia or Peru. It was down to 50,000 hectares and today we’re at about 220,000.
A lot of that started under President Santos with the belief that the peace deal would lead to payouts for people who would then plow under their fields or what have you, but Petro just really hasn’t prosecuted this agenda item with any kind of passion. The idea that we’re going to sit down with these major drug trafficking organizations and work out separate peace deals with each of them was his “total peace” idea and it really didn’t go anywhere.
And what he’s done is he’s taken his foot off the gas a little bit when it comes to going after these criminal organizations in the hopes that somehow all of Colombia will grow and the result is that you have increased illegality. What’s upsetting to me is that there are a lot of people who blame the Venezuelans for this increase in illegality because they’re coming across [the border]. Certainly there are some Venezuelans that come across that are involved in criminal activity. But that’s not the real story in Colombia. Criminality was increasing because at some level, there was less focus on security as a topic for governance.
One more question about Venezuela. Maria Corina Machado recently won the Nobel Prize and it’s put a lot of wind under the sails of a Venezuelan opposition that’s struggled given Maduro’s resilience. Do you think she could still lead a democratic transition in her country?
Maduro is an extraordinarily unpopular figure. Maria Corina Machado is a very capable politician. She’s captured the imagination of the vast majority of Venezuelans, as was evidenced by her victory in the primary and then having her second substitute, Edmundo Gonzalez, win an overwhelming electoral victory in July of last year. So the first question is, well, how does that happen?
If the theory of change is that we want somebody around Maduro to either exile him, extradite him, or send him to meet his maker, that person must know that their life after Maduro is not going to be in prison themselves. Which is why the first Trump administration’s framework for a democratic transition kind of laid out what it would look like. I think it’s important to lay that out. What does the transitional government look like? The biggest problem is that for 25 years, they’ve de-institutionalized the country. So there’s not one decision that Attorney General Tarik William Saab has made that runs counter to what Maduro wanted him to do. There’s not one decision the Supreme Court has taken which is not a decision that he wanted. There’s no one decision this National Assembly has taken that is not what he wanted.
Every institution in that country has been set up to support a vanishingly small number of people who actually believe in [Maduro’s political party]. They’re not popular, but if you want to get your free food, you have to go to these marches. You have to register. You want a job, you want a loan, you want a car, you want a passport, you want the ability to travel? You have to be part of the inner circle.
Let’s say Maduro and the main colonels around him were gone tomorrow. Now the question is, how do you re-institutionalize a country quickly so that you can have free and fair elections and then usher in a new democratic period for the country? That’s going to be really hard. Maria Corina has the juice to get it started, but there’s a lot of work to be done because not only has the country been laid bare — there’s no money — all of the institutions have been wrecked. You have to fix them all. Education. They had a medical system that was really the envy of the region.
All that stuff can be rebuilt. At the end of World War II when you actually had a Marshall Plan, that’s because you rebuilt something that existed. Something existed in Venezuela and there are plans to get that up and running. But first steps, institutions. Then you’ve got to get people health care, food, electricity, air conditioning in places like Maracaibo. It’s going to be a really hard job. Though I will say, a lot of people are saying that if Maduro and company are removed, there’s going to be generalized chaos and Venezuela becomes either Haiti or Libya or Iraq. And that’s not going to happen.
Why not?
It’s not going to become Haiti because they have a ton of natural resources and they’ll be able to pay for their own development. They have an educated population, some of whom will definitely come back, especially the middle and upper middle class.
There’s also a Venezuelan patriotic ethos that exists in the country. It is the land of Bolivar. Even Maria Corina Machado and Maduro agree on two things, at least. The best arepas on the planet come from Venezuela, not Colombia And the second is that the Essequibo is part of Venezuela. They both agree on that point. I disagree with them on that. I agree on the arepas, I disagree on the Essequibo.
There’s not going to be sectarian violence à la Iraq or Libya. So you have resources, you have an educated population. It’s not to say that there won’t be problems. You have FARC-D, ELN, Tren de Aragua, and any other number of criminal groups operating inside the country. I used to call Maduro the mayor of Fuerte Tuna, the military base that he lives on, because he doesn’t control the entirety of the country. You have a lot of criminality and illegality happening all over the place.
Those actors are going to have to be dealt with. So the smart play is not de-Baathification. Let’s learn a lesson from Iraq here. People who committed human rights abuses, tortured or murdered people, they’re not going to be able to be rehabilitated. But certainly there should be room for captains, majors, lieutenant colonels in the military to keep their jobs, to pledge an oath to the constitution and to help provide for stability and security. So if you got rid of all of them, you’d have a mess. It wouldn’t be Haiti, it wouldn’t be Iraq, it wouldn’t be Libya, but you would have a mess.
