The Case for Trump’s Venezuela Plan

The argument against the White House’s actions in Venezuela has been aired out extensively in these pages. Critics contend that the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro broke international law and that U.S. President Donald Trump snubbed Venezuela’s democratic opposition in favor of a regime crony, among several other arguments.

On the latest episode of FP Live, I turned to a commentator who has been defending Trump’s actions. FP columnist Matthew Kroenig, who served in the Department of Defense in Trump’s first term and who advised presidential candidate Marco Rubio in 2016, has written that the White House “is clearly prioritizing hard national security and economic interests and is reluctant to over-promise on democracy promotion.” Kroenig is the vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.

RA: Let’s start with Venezuela. You have argued that U.S. President Donald Trump was right to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Why?

MK: Yes. Maduro was a bad guy, and it’s good that he’s gone. He provided an outpost to the axis of aggressors—Russia, China, and Iran—in the Western Hemisphere. He’s a narco-trafficker, and he so badly mismanaged his country that roughly one-quarter of the population fled, contributing to a refugee crisis and pressure on the U.S. southern border. It’s good that he’s gone, for U.S. security and also for the welfare of the Venezuelan people. There are a lot of questions about what comes next, but it’s hard to imagine that whoever comes next will be worse than Maduro.

RA: I want to push back on a few things you’ve just said there. First, there are many bad leaders around the world, and it’s not like the United States should be deposing all of them. Second, most people are not seeing anything changing in Caracas so far, other than the fact that Maduro is gone. Delcy Rodríguez was his longtime deputy, not an opposition leader, and by all accounts, government repression and the silencing of journalists have grown after Maduro’s fall in the last few days.

Third, there’s the question of international law. While the White House has been framing this move as righteous, any leader of any country in the future can run a similar operation and frame it as such. How do you address these critiques?

MK: First, I think Maduro is a special case. He was not recognized by either of the Trump administrations, the Biden administration, or the European Union. By all accounts, he stole an election in 2024. So this isn’t a legitimate leader. As I pointed out, he posed a direct national security threat to the United States in the access he provided to U.S. adversaries. Hezbollah’s Western Hemisphere headquarters was in Venezuela. And there was a viable military option. Those conditions are not all in place with other bad leaders around the world.

Second, we’re about a week in, so it’s too early to assess the effectiveness. But I do see signs that Rodríguez is willing to play ball. She’s released a bunch of political prisoners, for example, and it seems like she’s willing to cooperate in terms of releasing barrels of oil to the United States. I don’t think she wants what happened to Maduro to happen to her, and she realizes that cooperating with Washington is the only way to avoid that.

Rubio has laid out this three-part plan, and the final part is a transition to a new democratic government. I suspect you’d see wholesale changes there in terms of foreign-policy orientation.

On the legal aspect, in a way, international law doesn’t really exist. It’s up to nation-states to negotiate, interpret, and adjudicate the law. We don’t have a world government, and leaders find justifications for the use of force all the time. Russian President Vladimir Putin has already invaded Ukraine. Chinese President Xi Jinping already has his excuse for invading Taiwan by saying that Taiwan is already part of China. So I don’t see them needing this precedent to justify their own use of force abroad.

RA: On the question of international law, a few days ago on CNN, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said, look, these are “international niceties,” not quite law. You were just making a similar point, but the fear is that other countries will just have more ballast with which to justify involvement in other terrains and territories. It gets harder and harder to stop countries from doing as they please, especially bigger, stronger countries.

You’re right in saying that these things have always happened—law didn’t stop Putin from invading Ukraine. But inasmuch as the United States has always spoken about rules and laws and democracy, doesn’t this make it harder to do so in the future?

MK: I’ll half agree and half disagree. I do think the United States should continue to uphold principles in international politics. I would have talked about it differently than Stephen Miller, but it is notable that, other than in that interview, the administration is not saying it violated international law; it is saying its actions are consistent with legal principles, citing the Panama precedent and other things. Removing a bad dictator who’s alleged to have been trafficking narcotics, and trying him in U.S. courts, is consistent with the legal approach.

I know you published dual perspectives on this, and I agree with the perspective that’s more skeptical. The reason other countries aren’t going around invading each other is not because they’re looking at the U.S. precedent primarily; it’s that they’re looking at the balance of power and the possibility that the United States could intervene militarily to stop them, like in a Taiwan scenario. So yes, the principles are important, but hard power is an important consideration as well.

RA: I should add—even critics of the White House’s actions will agree that Maduro was a bad leader. He ruined his country’s economy; he was an incredibly repressive, brutal, illegitimate dictator.

In the short term, yes, he’s gone. But on the longer-term question, a lot of your defense of the White House’s actions hinges to a degree on the idea that over time, things will get better. What do we need to see in the coming weeks and months?

MK: As I mentioned, Rubio has laid out this three-part plan. First is to stabilize, second is to recover, and third is to transition. The focus right now is on making sure that there is stability in the country, even after the ousting of their leader. As I wrote in my column for Foreign Policy, in part, the administration is trying to learn from the experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, not wanting to repeat the mistake of going in, demolishing the existing state structures, and chaos ensuing. Second is recovery: the economic development portion, the focus on getting Venezuela’s energy industry back online for the benefit of the global market, the United States, and the people of Venezuela. Third and finally is the transition to a more democratic government. Those are the indicators we’re going to want to look at.

Is there still stability inside Venezuela? I think there is. Contrary to the predictions that many have made that this is going to be the next Afghanistan or Libya, the country is hanging together. On the recovery piece, we see discussions underway about reforming the energy sector, although that is going to be months or years in the making before transition at the end. I don’t think this is something that’s going to be resolved in the coming weeks—this is going to be a yearslong project.

RA: There have been reports that people who were celebrating Maduro’s fall were silenced and journalists have been kicked out, and there are many reasons for civil society to be quite concerned about what they’re seeing in Venezuela right now.

On the transition to democracy point, Trump seemingly dismissed María Corina Machado when he was announcing Maduro’s capture, saying that she’s not quite ready and doesn’t have the respect of the people. Doesn’t a comment like that ultimately damage the opposition and the democratic movement, making it much harder to envision a transition longer term?

MK: This is another area where they’re trying to not repeat the mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan: over-promising on democracy and human rights in situations where it isn’t quite realistic. They’re being more cautious here, although President Trump said at the Saturday press conference right after Maduro was captured that he hopes elections happen quickly.

Rubio has also talked about the transition, but he pointed out it’s not realistic right now. The opposition, including Machado, is not even in the country, and there was reporting that the administration got briefings suggesting that the remnants of the Maduro regime had the support of the security services in the military and would be better able to hold the country together than bringing in the opposition.

So there was an assessment that dismantling the country and parachuting the opposition in wouldn’t really work. Instead, there’s this more cautious, gradual approach, using the significant leverage they have over the remnants of the Maduro regime to stabilize, recover, and then eventually force them to hold free and fair elections.

RA: In part because of comments by members of the Trump administration and Trump himself, there is a sense in the international community that this was never really about democracy, and it clearly wasn’t about fentanyl. It was about oil. Trump had a meeting with all of the oil principals last weekend. There are critics who will point out that it would cost tens of billions of dollars to eventually get Venezuela’s oil infrastructure back online. Before you even do that, you need a degree of stability and to clear out cartels and criminality to enable infrastructure to actually be built up. Then you need to bring back the hundreds of engineers and oil executives who fled over the last 20 or 30 years.

There’s a lot that would have to go right for Venezuela to get anywhere near to previous production levels, and it seems like many American companies are not very willing to go back in. One major oil executive said that Venezuela is “uninvestable.” How will this emphasis on oil end up in a good outcome?

MK: I agree with all your facts, but let me put a more positive spin on it. You’re right that oil is of a very high interest to Trump. He mentioned oil around 20 times in the Saturday press conference right after the raid. As a businessman, he probably sees this as a waste—this amazing resource that’s being underutilized. One of his top priorities is energy dominance and getting the energy we need for the artificial intelligence revolution. We are going to need to be able to bring much more energy online, and bringing Venezuelan oil to international and U.S. markets is one way to do that.

The president has also talked about his interest in lowering costs for the American people. Energy costs are a big driver of costs, and more supply means lower cost and would help him achieve that goal. This also denies Russia’s, China’s, and Iran’s special energy relationships with Venezuela. So I do think oil is an important part of the equation.

To your other points, I think it is going to take time. The president had the meeting with energy executives last week, and they were skeptical, saying they need legal and other reassurances that Venezuela is investable. On her show this weekend, Margaret Brennan quoted a study that suggested it would take 18 to 24 months to increase Venezuelan oil production by 50 percent, and that seems plausible to me. If in 18 or 24 months the energy industry in Venezuela is recovering, that would be a good thing. There are a lot of criticisms about Trump trying to do something about this problem. But previous administrations weren’t really doing anything, and here we see a forward-leaning plan to make Venezuela a better place.

RA: Building on what you said about doing something in Venezuela, I’m curious how this then ripples on to Cuba. Secretary of State Rubio has said that if he lived in Havana and was in the government, he would be concerned. Do you think Cuba’s next in some way?

MK: Cuba may be next. The Cuban government is already under a lot of pressure because of economic mismanagement, but there is additional pressure now that Venezuelan oil is being cut off. That was one of their major economic lifelines.

Marc Thiessen, who writes a column for the Washington Post, tweeted the other day that, after every presidential administration since Eisenhower struggled with the communist regime in Cuba, wouldn’t it be remarkable if Trump is the one to finally solve this? And Trump retweeted his tweet. So I do think there’s a focus on bringing the Venezuela model to Havana.

RA: Let me broaden this out a little bit more. Columbia, Mexico, and Greenland have received implicit and sometimes explicit threats against them by members of the Trump administration—should we take those threats seriously?

MK: They’re all different cases. Colombia, for instance, has been a good security partner with the United States over the decades, including working together to counter the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia and narcotics trafficking. Colombian President Gustavo Petro has been at odds with Trump publicly. Secretary Rubio has said he doesn’t want to let this personal spat get in the way of a good country-to-country relationship. And then just in the past few days, it was reported that Trump and Petro had a phone call and apparently patched things up.

RA: If I may, the idea that Venezuela was this great source of drugs to the United States is not true. But inasmuch as that was one of the factors that was used to justify what happened, Colombia is, in fact, the world’s primary producer of cocaine. And next door, Mexico is the primary source of fentanyl to the United States. So once you’ve done what you’ve done in Venezuela, you’ve now created serious grounds for Mexico and Colombia.

MK: I don’t think so. That’s one of the justifications for Venezuela, but the other justification was that this was an illegitimate leader who stole an election. It’s been an anti-American dictatorship for more than a decade now, whereas in Colombia and Mexico, there has been a stronger partnership with the United States. These are legitimate leaders, democratically elected. The president seems to have a rapport with the Mexican president and seemed to patch things up with Petro.

To your point earlier, there are a lot of bad leaders, but we’re not removing them all. That applies here as well. There are a lot of countries involved in drug trafficking, but military action isn’t justified against all of them. There was a confluence of factors in the Venezuela case.

RA: The irony here is that the Trump administration routinely refers to the 2020 election in the United States as stolen. So it’s a bit rich to be talking about illegitimate and legitimate leaders abroad.

MK: Interesting point—although again, with Maduro, it’s not just the Trump administration saying he was illegitimate, it’s former President Joe Biden and the European Union and the Venezuelan people as well.

I did want to come back to Greenland, which is the other case that people have mentioned as maybe next. The Trump administration is saying that military options are on the table. My read is that this is Trump’s negotiating style: asking for 100when he wants 10. I don’t see the United States taking military action against Greenland, a NATO ally. You are already seeing splits within the Republican Party over this, whereas there was unanimous support for the Venezuela operation.

RA: On that idea of Trump asking for 100 when he wants 10—the businessman approach to geopolitics—what is the 10 that they want from Greenland that they’re not already getting?

MK: It seems like the debate is superficial, with the administration saying, we want Greenland, all options are on the table, and the Danes and others saying, we’re an ally, let’s work together. There is a middle space that needs to be filled: What really are the military requirements for securing Greenland in this new security environment? What are the former military bases? The United States had something like 17 military bases in Greenland during the Cold War. Which of those could be brought back online and secured? What critical mineral resources are available in Greenland, and what obstacles are preventing them from being developed?

There does need to be a concrete plan, and if the Danes came forward with something—that is, the Trump plan for securing Greenland—that may be something that the Trump administration would agree to. I suspect there is a plan that can satisfy both the Trump administration and our good allies in Denmark.

RA: I’ll just say here that that’s exactly what Denmark has been calling for: talking to the White House instead of dealing with threats.

Let’s get to what the White House has been calling the “Donroe Doctrine,” the adaptation of the Monroe Doctrine. How seriously do you think major figures in the White House take the interpretations of the Donroe Doctrine, and how do you understand it?

MK: I do think they take it seriously. When the National Security Strategy was published in December, there were many people who dismissed it and said it wouldn’t actually reflect Trump’s policy. But we’re already seeing it reflected in policy. My colleagues who worked in the White House in the first Trump administration said that Trump, as a real estate person, paid a lot of attention to real estate. This is our backyard. Why are our adversaries messing around here? Why don’t we have more influence? They’re serious about having a broader U.S. role in the region, and also about ejecting our adversities like China, Russia, and Iran.

RA: Given how important you believe the National Security Strategy is and should be, what are the things you think it got right?

MK: This is another piece I wrote for Foreign Policy, because the National Security Strategy, like a lot of Trump’s foreign policy, was criticized by many, but it got a lot of things right. There are traditional pillars of U.S. national security that were reaffirmed in the document—nuclear deterrence and free and fair trade, for example. Second, there are new issues that need to be addressed, like the artificial intelligence revolution and AI competition with China; the strategy focused on these.

Another big challenge facing the world and U.S. global leadership are concerns about the excesses of globalization—of outsourcing manufacturing jobs to China and other countries and insecure borders leading to irregular migration, prompting a backlash in the United States and other countries. We also saw a suite of policies to address those legitimate, popular concerns with the excesses of globalization, and the Trump administration is uniquely well-suited to address those issues. So it got a lot right.

RA: There are major protests underway right now in Iran. My understanding is that economic grievances are an important factor. The regime has now responded with a near-complete internet blackout and a brutal crackdown on protesters. It’s hard to verify numbers at this point, but the BBC is saying that nearly 500 protesters have been killed in the last two weeks. [Editor’s note: As of this publishing, the New York Times reports that more than 3,000 people have died.] What should the United States be doing here, if anything at all?

MK: Turning to the protests, the sad reality is that the regime has always been willing to kill to stay in power, and the Iranian people haven’t been willing to rise up and die in large enough numbers to seize power. We’ve seen a series of these protests starting in 2009, and they’ve always ended with a regime cracking down and killing the protesters, putting them in jail, or having people flee into exile. So we’ll see if this time is different. I very much hope it will be, but the regime is starting its brutal crackdown.

So what comes next? President Trump has said he will intervene to protect the protesters. I do think that there are some military options that could make a difference. Some of the things that have been floated in the media, such as cyberattacks against the regime, could make it more difficult for them to coordinate. There could be direct airstrikes on Iranian military bases and security forces that would either hinder their ability to crack down or make them rethink.

There’s also a set of creative options. I don’t think many people saw the capturing of Maduro as an option in Venezuela—there are probably special operations options that the United States or Israel could do that would be more targeted against key leadership to try to affect the outcome.