485. Trump Says America will Run Venezuela

Trump has announced that Venezuela will now be run by Washington as US forces have captured Nicolás Maduro and taken him to stand trial in New York. After months of escalating tension, Trump launched strikes on the capital and deposed a foreign leader - something the US has not done in Latin America for nearly 40 years. But how will this administration work? Was this attack legal? And what are the broader geopolitical consequences of this move? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer these questions and more in this emergency podcast. __________ The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away FREE TRIP+ membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP+ gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit fuseenergy.com/politics ⚡ Get more from The Rest Is Politics with TRIP+. Enjoy bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access, live show ticket priority, our members’ newsletter, and private Discord community – plus a range of exclusive members-only series. Start your 7-day free trial today at therestispolitics.com __________ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to goalhanger.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles, Harry Balden Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green, India Dunkley Senior Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:41Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to an emergency podcast from The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 2:47Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 2:49Alastair Campbell?

  And the reason, I'm sure you are all aware, is because of what's been happening in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, where President Nicolas Maduro was the subject, along with his wife, of a pretty remarkable military operation overseen from Mar-a-Lago in Florida by President Trump, who is certainly starting out the year very much in the style that we suggested he might when we spoke on the podcast on New Year's Day. Maduro has been in power for some time. He was, he followed Hugo Chavez, who has been something in the thorn of successive, the side of successive American administrations.

• 3:32Alastair Campbell?

  Trump has been building up military options in the Caribbean. And frankly, as he said in a press conference he just finished now, Maduro knew that he was coming for him. I don't think he could have known he was coming last night. And one thing that was absolutely key to this was the element of absolute surprise. So Rory, how surprised were you when you heard that Maduro was on his way to an American warship, from there to travel to a court in New York?

• 4:03Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think astonished that he managed to catch him because Maduro has been expecting this to happen for months. As we've been reporting on the podcast, the US has massed an aircraft carrier, an enormous number of Marines, some of its top stealth fighters, all off the coast. In fact, you can almost see them in the Caribbean from the mountain next to Caracas. So Maduro has been expecting an American invasion, expecting an American abduction, and yet they managed to do it. And they did it with Americans wounded, but apparently no casualties. It looks as though the logistics of the operation is that the US seemed to have switched off electricity, or at least this is the early story about how they did this, took out the

• 4:45Rory Stewart?

  air defenses, flew in helicopters, including one man that we're told by the admiral overseeing the operation was 49 years old, which is an encouragement to me, as I have my 53rd birthday today.

• 4:56Alastair Campbell?

  Happy birthday.

• 4:57Rory Stewart?

  And thank you. And have us extracted Maduro. The big question, of course, which we need to get into is, is this remotely legal? To which the answer is not. What does this mean for international relations around the world? And what's the future of Venezuela after the removal of Maduro? Where do you want to start with any of this?

• 5:19Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think let's start, let's start with legality. And it's interesting how, what, Rory, you know, America better than I do. What does PSA mean?

• 5:28Rory Stewart?

  I don't know.

• 5:29Alastair Campbell?

  Well, J D Vance has put out a social media post saying PSA to all those who are saying this wasn't legal. I just, I don't know what PSA means, but I'm saying, please.

• 5:40Rory Stewart?

  It's a terrible revelation. I'll have to, I'll have to look up on my phone. It's a revelation, obviously, of our complete tech incompetence.

• 5:47Alastair Campbell?

  Well, no, it's, I think it means, I'm guessing, please stay away or please shut up.

• 5:52Rory Stewart?

  Public service, public service.

• 5:54Alastair Campbell?

  Sorry, what about TV? Okay, public service announcement. Basically, he was saying, shut up if you think it's illegal because it's not. Why? Their definition of legality in relation to this is that they are, they, America, are under threat from a terrorist narco state and a cartel led by Maduro. Now, what a Supreme Court would say about that, I have no idea. Most of the international lawyers I've heard on the airwaves today have said there's no legal basis of this at all. Because under the United Nations, you either have to have a resolution with the United Nations, well, that didn't happen. Or there has to be a sense of an imminent threat.

• 6:36Alastair Campbell?

  Now, the reason for this big military buildup, I guess, has been to indicate, to give a sense of some kind of threat. Otherwise, why are you sending your biggest aircraft carrier down there? But I think that is frankly for the birds. I think what this says, we've said this so many times in recent months, in particular when we were bringing the end of the year together. Is that so far as Trump is concerned, the rules just don't count. There are no, there is no international law that he's going to kind of put this through the lens of. There has been no contact with the United Nations. There has been no sort of understanding that other voices might want to have a say before he does this.

• 7:16Rory Stewart?

  And more fundamentally, for a US domestic audience, no consultation with Congress. So people would point out that President Bush, of course, went to war in Iraq without a UN resolution, but he did get a vote in Congress authorizing that intervention. Congress is feeling particularly bruised. You've got senators coming out saying they were effectively lied to. Congressional committees called in the administration and said, are you planning regime change? And were apparently told no regime change was planned. And Trump's and Rubio's defense of this in the press conference that you were watching appeared to be that they thought Congress was leaky and couldn't be relied upon to keep a secret.

• 7:53Alastair Campbell?

  Well, and the other thing that Rubio said was that this was, because this was, and the operation, I think we should hand it to the American as a military operation. This is, this was absolutely extraordinary. And Dan Cain, who's the head of the, you know, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he did a presentation at the end of the press conference after we'd had Trump's kind of often, he's one of his weaves, which went from sort of, you know, what happened to how bad Maduro is, to how they're bringing down crime in New Orleans and all sorts of crazy stuff. Then Hexeth doing one of his kind of, you know, pumping his chest, Fox News type things. But then the, Dan Cain did a, I mean, genuinely interesting presentation about what, how

• 8:38Alastair Campbell?

  the preparation went. And the point he made was that they'd prepared for this, they'd rehearsed it. They obviously had somebody very, very close to Maduro. They knew where he was moving, they knew where he was planning to be. But they said that the weather was key and essentially they'd been waiting for several days to do this. So I guess that's why they do have a point in saying, the minute you start talking to anybody about this kind of thing, you've got to keep it reasonably tight. But no congressional law, no congressional authority. No international discussion or consultation. Keir Starmer's just in an interview with the BBC where he said he had no idea, hadn't had a discussion, which, you know, fair enough, you might expect that.

• 9:18Alastair Campbell?

  But I think it goes to the heart of this, that Donald Trump now thinks that he, when he says he's the leader of the free world, that is how he sees himself. He was very, and I think this goes back to, we had that discussion not long ago about the national security strategy. He mentioned it specifically. He mentioned the Monroe Doctrine specifically, this idea that the United States kind of owns that part of the world, owns that hemisphere. He even said at one point, they, some people are now calling it the Don Roche doctrine, you know, bringing himself right into the heart of it. And, and this is what it feels like to me, is that, that they are basically saying, we do what we want here. And likewise, there was a question at the press conference just before we, we came

• 10:02Alastair Campbell?

  on, where he was asked about Colombia, because the, and he has basically said that the Colombian guy, to use Trump's phrase, needs to watch his ass, because they're, in his words, flooding drugs into the United States as well. And he repeated that today. He said, you know, yeah, he does need to watch his ass. He's also been talking about Claudia Scheinbaum in, in Mexico and saying that, you know, we've given her the chance to say, she says she runs Mexico, but actually the cartels run Mexico. So he's, he's kind of indicating, do what we say now, and then maybe we won't get too aggressive with the rest of you.

• 10:40Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, let's, let's, let's, um, let's hit the next thing, which is of course, the, the problem here, which is Maduro was undoubtedly a profoundly unpleasant evil man.

• 10:54Alastair Campbell?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:55Rory Stewart?

  This is a guy that clearly lost the election, as we said in 2024. He's a guy associated with murdering and torturing opponents. He's taken the Venezuelan economy to a fifth of its former size. It's a recession of 80%. It was the wealthiest country in Latin America. It's now the, one of the very, very poorest. And we now have a situation in which there are maybe eight million refugees outside the country, in which the oil infrastructure is destroyed, the water infrastructure is destroyed, the electricity is destroyed. It's a truly miserable place. And again, as we had these arguments around the toppling of Saddam Hussein, or Gaddafi,

• 11:36Rory Stewart?

  or indeed the Taliban in Afghanistan, we have to find a way of balancing three different things. Number one, is this an evil guy? Yeah, absolutely, he's an evil guy, and people are very, very relieved that he's gone. Number two, is this legal? Is this the right way to do it? I think our conclusion here is no. Third final thing, I think the question is what then happens? And I think what's grossly irresponsible about this, as so often, is the question of the day after. And whatever you, you know, at least with these other interventions, there was some attempts at planning, there were months of papers being put together. This really does feel as though he's standing up, making it up at a podium.

• 12:18Alastair Campbell?

  Well, on that very point, he was asked, I mean, the, we came on air just as the press conference was coming towards its conclusion, but up until that point, virtually every single question was, what do you mean you're going to run it? How long are you going to run it for? Who's going to run it? And he basically said, well, these guys standing behind me. Well, that was Pete Hexeth, the Secretary for War, Marco Rubio, the Foreign Secretary, I think it was Ratcliffe who was there, the head of the CIA, Stephen Miller, your friend who makes those wonderful speeches that draw on Goebbels, and this guy, Dan Kane. They're not going to be sitting in caracas, sort of, you know, organising the

• 13:00Alastair Campbell?

  public infrastructure and so forth. The other thing that came through loud and clear, and actually Rubio said something very, very interesting. Rubio, I think, was allowed to speak because Hexeth had been allowed to speak. You know, these guys like, you know, they've got egos. But he didn't have a script. And so he just went up and did this kind of rather rumpety-tumpty, you know, you've got to understand, you're now dealing with a president, when he says something, he means it, and what have you, and doing the usual sort of praise of Trump. But I actually think that there was something in the way that he was describing Trump, which was essentially saying, take this guy his word. And when he said that, and said, you know, so we've been going after Maduro, I was sitting there thinking, I wonder what Mark Carney...

• 13:42Alastair Campbell?

  And Mette Frederiksen, the Prime Minister of Denmark, is thinking of their sitting watching this now, because that was, they basically kept saying, no, America is the only military power that can do this kind of thing. We are the greatest country in the world. Anybody who threatens us in any way, anywhere in the world, we're going to go after them. Now, that was a pretty, pretty heavy message.

• 14:05Rory Stewart?

  Well, on that, let's, let's look at the, the day after problem. So, uh, this is not Panama. The, the most optimistic scenario when people are talking, they, they talk about the removal by George Bush Senior of the general in Panama. But Panama is 1989.

• 14:24Alastair Campbell?

  By the way, by the way, Rory, that was exactly the same day. It was January the third when Noriega got the

• 14:31Rory Stewart?

  My birthday, again and again.

• 14:33Alastair Campbell?

  I know.

• 14:34Rory Stewart?

  It always happens on my birthday. Yeah, always happens on my birthday. Um, so Noriega is, is the optimistic scenario, which is the US got involved in Panama, they toppled the general, put in a new government, and broadly speaking, things worked out. I mean, Panamanians will say, wait a second, 300 people were killed, 27 Americans were killed. But in the great legacy of international catastrophes, Panama went pretty well comparatively. But, but, but Panama is tiny compared to Venezuela. You know, three million people compared to 30 million people. There was a massive

• 15:06Alastair Campbell?

  Eight million, eight million, as you say, who are living outside, many of whom may want now to come back.

• 15:11Rory Stewart?

  Panama had a massive military base, and of course, it was vital to US national security interests because of the Panama Canal.

• 15:19Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 15:20Rory Stewart?

  And so this is a completely different context. There are no American boots on the ground. Trump says he's not worried about boots on the ground, but there aren't currently any boots on the ground. This is a country which has, as I say, gone through an 80% economic recession, where there's barely often electricity or water supply for two, three days in a week. Where people are in such dire poverty, as you say, eight and a half million people have left. So now let's think about what reconstruction is like. And the big story is going to be about the the regime itself.

• 15:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 15:54Rory Stewart?

  Which is still there. I mean, as you've pointed out, the Defence Minister, Maduro's Defence Minister, has been on television attacking these strikes.

• 16:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 16:02Rory Stewart?

  The Defence Minister, the Interior Minister, the Vice President, who reportedly is on their way to Mexico, to Russia, all these people are still in place.

• 16:11Alastair Campbell?

  Well, is that, is that, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. The Vice President on the way to Russia, is that just a kind of a fake news thing? Or because Rubio, Trump said, Rubio didn't say, but Trump said that Rubio had had a conversation with her.

• 16:25Rory Stewart?

  With Dottor Rodriguez, yeah.

• 16:27Alastair Campbell?

  With, with, with the Vice President. And then the other thing is that one of the the names that's been added to the indictment, this is an old, this is a rolled over indictment because there was an indictment against Maduro in 2020, narco-terrorism, cocaine, guns, et cetera. One of the names that's been added is actually the very, very powerful Interior Minister, and, and also Maduro's wife and son. So I'd be very, very surprised if she's on her way to Russia. Anyway.

• 16:56Rory Stewart?

  Let's, let's, let's see, let's see. And just, just to sort of, I mean, to give people a little bit of a glimpse behind the scenes of how we're trying to pull this podcast together and who we've been talking to. I've been talking quite a lot to Andres Velasco, who was the Finance Minister of Chile.

• 17:11Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 17:11Rory Stewart?

  I've been talking to Michael Reed, who's was the Economist correspondent in Latin America. I've been reading a lot by a man called Javier Corales, who's from Amherst, who has done an amazing analysis to the regime. And I, on that latter point, the military is the key here. So there is something like, you know, multiples more generals compared to the average soldier in Venezuela compared to anywhere else on earth, like 20 times as many generals as you would expect. And every general has a monopoly somewhere in the economy. They, they control the economy. They control the ports, they control mining, they control oil, as well as doing illegal stuff. The judiciary is also tied in. So he's also, Maduro has also corrupted judiciary,

• 17:55Rory Stewart?

  which is one of the reasons why when he stole that election, the judges still voted for him. So the first question is, what are all these senior people, interior minister, defence minister, and all these generals who actually run the country, what are they going to make of what's happened? Let's say the Nobel Prize winning leader appears and says, okay, I'm coming in.

• 18:20Alastair Campbell?

  Maria Corina Machado.

• 18:23Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. Machado comes in and she says, I'm going to bring transitional justice. I'm going to prosecute people who are connected with the Maduro regime, only at the very top. I won't go down below the top, I'll go this way. They're going to be thinking, hold a second, I own a large mining concession, I don't trust Donald Trump, I don't trust this amnesty, why on earth am I going to take any risks on this at all? And it seems to me either they will try to cling on to power and do some kind of deal with Grinnell, who's Trump's envoy, and do some oil deal, in which case you have basically a regime even worse than Maduro's, run potentially by the former defence minister, or current defence minister. So, because Maduro

• 19:05Rory Stewart?

  is not like Stalin, he's not even like Saddam Hussein. This was not a personalist dictatorship, this was a big system, a Hugo Chavez system. And Maduro was a relatively kind of introverted figure who rose up within this big system. So just taking him out doesn't remove the structure of the whole state.

• 19:26Alastair Campbell?

  And just on that, you see Chavez, I think Chavez, whatever people think about him, and like Maduro, a terrible man, and used power for its own ends, et cetera, et cetera. But he did genuinely have a kind of charisma and a force and a power and a personality. Maduro didn't didn't have that in in the same way. And one of the reasons I think he was put there in the first place is precisely because of that. Chavez, who was dying, like a lot of people when they're on the way out, they don't really want to be followed necessarily by somebody who's, you know, going to immediately take over and be absolutely brilliant. So Maduro, as you say, is the leader of, and this is where the Americans do have a point. He's the leader of a a pretty criminal

• 20:07Alastair Campbell?

  organisation where he's he's got hold of the government and he's kept hold of the government. And he uses it for his own his own ends and his own power. And this guy, uh, Diosdado Cabello, who's the one who's been added to the indictment. He is like he's really big in forces, right hand guy. Now, all of these people, his vice president, the defence minister, the interior minister. They've all been on the airwaves, basically saying, this is outrageous. America is a is is an empire out of control. People need to take to the streets in defence of us. They've got these things called collectivos, which are these sort of, you know, civilian groups that are go that go around and keep control. They're now out on the streets, basically saying, you do not come out and celebrate this.

• 20:52Alastair Campbell?

  Leave the celebrations to those that are happening in Chile, where they're being organised to say, this is marvellous because the new president's friend in in the in the White House is doing this great thing. And then the other thing which I think lends itself to your theory, they're slightly making this up as they go along. Military success notwithstanding, is that Trump looked genuinely surprised by some of these questions coming at him. So then to sort of say, these guys are going to run it, basically means these guys are now going to start to work out how it might be run. And the other thing he did, Rory, he said that, and this may be clever, I don't know. He kept talking about there was a second wave ready to go.

• 21:34Alastair Campbell?

  He talked about, and you know, we we keep saying he's, you've got to think of it as a kind of TV presenter. He actually said in an earlier interview today, you know, I I was watching it like the most amazing TV show. I was watching it as it was happening. These guys were moving so fast. And then he said at the press conference, you're probably, you guys are probably never going to get to see what I saw last night. It was amazing, right? But he then said, we had a second wave of attacks ready to go. And he was very explicit that, I think, when I say explicit, the message he was putting out to these people, you know, Delsi Rodriguez and her brother who runs the parliament and all this stuff, was unless you come on board, you are going to be hit by the second wave.

• 22:17Alastair Campbell?

  I think that's what he was saying. And meanwhile, the other thing I think we should probably talk about, Rory, is how other international leaders are meant to react to this. Because what happens now, if, let's just say that the Venezuelan military don't cave, that these Venezuelans who are part of Maduro's clique and who are up to their necking and no good as well, that they just decide to assume power and take power. She gets sworn in as the president because that's the way the constitution works, and on they go. If that happens, then Trump has signaled, and Rubio says, take him at his word, then the second wave comes. Surely now, the only thing that might even begin to stop that is if

• 23:01Alastair Campbell?

  world leaders somehow coalesce to say, hold on, Donald, is this really, really, really sensible? And there is very, very, very little sign of that.

• 23:11Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. I mean, and of course, the real key here is Latin America itself. So when he stole the election, 2024, or most blatantly stole the election, the Biden administration signaled very, very strongly to Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, that they were not going to intervene. They weren't going to topple him. But if Brazil, Mexico and Colombia did it, Biden's administration would be standing behind them with financial support and all forms of reconstruction support. And Biden, in fact, recognized the guy that won the election as the proper leader of Venezuela.

• 23:50Rory Stewart?

  And nobody did it. Nobody actually did anything. In fact, Brazil is rather interesting here. Lula, who's now out there saying, this is absolutely terrible, this is a challenge to international law and state sovereignty, is the same Lula, of course, who turned up to visit Putin and watched his big military parades and hasn't called him out for the invasion of Ukraine. So there's a lot of weird double talk here. But it has to be ultimately not Britain, but Latin America that decides how to come behind this and what to do. I don't think they're going to want to put troops in on the ground. Very, very unlikely that Brazil or Mexico or Colombia is going to want to put in troops.

• 24:32Rory Stewart?

  Argentina, maybe he could try to lean on Millet, but it's the last thing that Millet feels that he can afford to do, I would have thought at the moment. So then we get to the question of all this stuff that has been talked about again and again. People have obviously been talking about regime change in Venezuela for more than a decade. So there are all these think tank papers, we can put in the links if people are interested. I looked at 10 of them, right, all the way from Brookings to AEI, War Games, et cetera. And they keep coming back to the stuff that will be very familiar to you and to listeners who remember the stuff from the Balkans and Iraq and Afghanistan, which is firstly, you need to think about what do you do about the former regime elements, right? So in Iraq, those were the Baath Party.

• 25:18Rory Stewart?

  You know, how many of you of them do you prosecute? Well, if you prosecute too many and sack too many, then you have a massive resistance movement moving against you. If, on the other hand, you forgive them all and say it's all great and you can all keep your mining concessions, 80% of the country says, what the hell is this? We didn't sign up for a revolution to have these corrupt generals keep 80% of the mining concessions.

• 25:40Rory Stewart?

  Secondly, what do you do with your colictivos, who you just mentioned? So, we don't know, 200,000, 300,000 of these people who control all the food distribution, they're not in the jungle, they're in the burrows, they're in the urban centres, and they've been armed, they're paramilitary groups. So again, the story needs to be demobilisation, disarming of these groups, guns to jobs. There's this horrible slogan, DDR. But in Colombia, you were doing it with 14,000 people. Here, you're talking about doing it with 300,000 people. Now, again, people say Venezuela has all this oil, so we, you know, we've got to get the economy going and that will pay for all this stuff. Well, Venezuela has got oil, but oil production is now about a fifth of what it was at its peak.

• 26:25Rory Stewart?

  Because basically, there's been no investment in any of it. It's much worse than Iraq. You remember in Iraq, everybody was struggling two thousand three, four, five to get the production up to million, two million barrels, because it turned out that the whole thing was welded with rust. But in Venezuela, it seems, at least on the basis of professional energy economists, even worse, that sorting out the electricity system, the oil system, could take five, 10 years before you get decent revenue coming in.

• 26:51Alastair Campbell?

  But this was the other thing that, again, back to Rubio's point, take Trump at his word. When, if you remember, the time of Iraq, and there was a whole sort of thing run against George Bush, oh, it's all about the oil. Okay. And Bush would be at pains to say, no, no, no, no, it's not. Trump is very close to saying it's all about the oil. And he was basically saying that, you know, he actually said at one point, I mean, you know, it's pathetic. They've got all these reserves. It's pathetic how much they've been pumping. Well, of course, there is a sort of massive oil embargo against Venezuela, but they do have massive oil reserves. We said this on the podcast a few weeks ago, that America has been producing a lot of oil, but because through fracking and the shale gas stuff, it's very, very

• 27:34Alastair Campbell?

  thin, weedy oil, whereas Venezuela has lots of the, the black stuff. And what Trump was saying today is that American oil companies will go in there, they will help make Venezuela great again, they will help Venezuelans get rich. But of course, the oil companies, they're not going to do it because they're a charity, because they're not charities. So this is, I think, he's been very, very clear that the Venezuela, getting the Venezuelan oil industry working properly, presumably then, if they do manage to get some sort of governance going, then getting sanctions lifted, getting the embargo lifted, et cetera. But it seems so, that is such a big thing to try to do, that unless you've actually planned that through, there's a lot that can go wrong.

• 28:18Rory Stewart?

  And the big, the big question, did you get a sense from the press conference, who, who it is that they're proposing is going to be the government of Venezuela? I mean, is it going to be the Maduro regime without Maduro? Or are there going to be elections and then some new democratic government comes in? Um, because you could imagine the former, couldn't you? You could imagine Trump in full cynical realpolitik thinking, I don't care, I'll get rid of Maduro and I'll cut a deal with the next general in line. We'll put in the oil companies, doesn't matter, it's an autocratic dictatorship, in which case you're just going from bad to worse.

• 28:53Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I, I, a part of me was thinking that, you know, I even had this weird thought that Donald Trump had actually persuaded the Nobel Prize committee, listen, don't give it to me. Give it to Maria Corina Masado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, because then she'll become the legitimate, such a powerful legitimate force. But actually, I don't think she even came up in the press conference. And when he was, when he mentioned it earlier, it was quite sort of cool. He wasn't sort of, you know, buying into it at all. And that's why I thought it was fascinating that he dropped in that Rubio had been talking to Delcy Rodriguez, who's the the number two in the regime. So I think it's not impossible, he'll try to cut some sort of deal with the

• 29:38Alastair Campbell?

  the sort of, you know, those who are left of the Maduro regime. Couple of things already from our eagle eyed listeners. Colin Jones has told us that Russia has denied the report that she's um heading to Moscow. And then maybe there's another thing to hear that that's worth is going into Flame Flame Bazilisk two five three three. Really interesting question. In legal terms, how does the US try foreign nationals in their courts? How do their laws apply? And can you explain the twenty twenty indictment? I mean, there is a precedent for this, of course. And this is if I'd have been at the press conference, this is the question I think I would have asked. That is Juan Orlando Hernandez. This is the president of Honduras.

• 30:21Alastair Campbell?

  Who was sentenced to forty five years in an American prison, in an American court, because of similar offences, narco-terrorism, running drugs as the elected head of a foreign government. And there was no

• 30:38Rory Stewart?

  But after he stepped down, I think that the important thing is that he was not actually he was not actually taken from his presidential palace while he was the serving president.

• 30:48Alastair Campbell?

  No, my point is, though, he was a foreign politician whose crimes conducted in his own country because of the impact in America, an American court felt it had jurisdiction, and it didn't, and there was no question about that within the debate in the American system. So the Supreme Court would let him away with that. But the point might, because the big point is that Donald Trump, who says this is all about drugs, and this is all about these terrible Latin American leaders bringing in drugs, this guy who got forty five years for doing exactly that, and what has Donald Trump done? He's pardoned him. So, you know, I think the thing with Maduro, what is extraordinary about Trump, and you

• 31:31Alastair Campbell?

  said when we did our kind of New Year's Day, and we were both sort of discussing, well, what might we be looking forward to in the year ahead? And you actually said, well, the thing to watch out for are the black swan moments, the things that we don't expect, but then suddenly they came along. Now, did any of us go to bed on January the second thinking we were going to wake up on January third and this has happened? And this, by the way, has been planned for months, months and months and months.

• 31:59Rory Stewart?

  And this is also why your point about Rubio repeatedly saying Trump does what he says matters. Because, of course, we didn't go to bed thinking that. But equally, now that it's happened, we think, well, okay, you know, we've been doing a lot of podcasts about this massive American build-up around Venezuela and the taking out of Venezuelan boats, and Trump making his normal ambiguous comments, where he's frequently said his

• 32:24Rory Stewart?

  Objective was to get rid of Maduro and then sometimes he said it wasn't and then sometimes it was and back and forth, which is why Congress got them in and said, are you trying to do regime change and was flatly told they weren't and then they went ahead and did it. But that's exactly why one now needs to think about Trump saying, I'm going to help myself to Greenland, or Trump saying Canada should be part of the United States or the Panama Canal is going to come back. And this is also relates to your reality TV point. I mean, what is Trump really trying to do? He's trying to make sure that he dominates the headlines every week, or ideally every day with another spectacular operation. So if you really wanted to try to predict the next year, you could look at some of the

• 33:05Rory Stewart?

  things Trump says, but more than that, what you have to ask yourself every week is if the only thing you care about is creating headlines and you don't care about international law, you don't care about consequences. I mean, let's sort of, and let me just lean into that for a second. What he has done here, essentially to say, I don't like this regime and I don't like this leader, so I'm just toppling him, could be exactly done by China against Taiwan, could be done by Russia against Zelensky, presumably could be done by Europe against Belarus, could be done in Uganda, Congo, Chad, Niger. And

• 33:49Rory Stewart?

  there are very, very good reasons why we created an international system to do that. One of them is protecting small countries, but it's big. But there's another one, which you'll be aware of. The one country I didn't mention, of course, is North Korea. Why don't we do it in North Korea? Because they have nukes. What do we create? A world that encourages everybody to develop these horrendous weapons because the only protection they have from lawless activity by these sovereigns is to have nukes.

• 34:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. By the way, Roy, just as I said to you that Donald Trump had said that Rubio was, had spoken to the Venezuelan Vice President, the reason I was looking at my phone was because someone just messaged me that at that very moment, she was on Venezuelan television denouncing the whole thing as an absolute sort of scandal and the Venezuelans must rise up against it. So I think the other thing, you mentioned their consequences. And the other thing we have to just figure and calculate into this is this, so Ukraine, let's just take Ukraine and Gaza. Yet again, over the kind of short break that we've had from this,

• 34:55Alastair Campbell?

  yet again, we've had Trump having meetings at the out of which he announces, we're very, very close to a peace deal in Ukraine. And then two days later, Netanyahu was at Mar-a-Lago and he said, we're days away from the second phase of the peace plan being implemented. And I think we're now probably going to add Venezuela to this. You know, we're going to be days away from the new administration taking shape. Now, the danger of that, this goes back to, you know, what happened, say, in Libya, what happened in all sorts of places when governments have been toppled,

• 35:35Alastair Campbell?

  is that any vacuum can get filled with any kind of badness and madness. And Venezuela is not, without Maduro there, and by the way, I think he's a truly terrible human being, but the potential for instability is pretty enormous. So I think that the worry I have in this is that Trump has, I think the psychology of this, yes, he's clearly been, this has been on the cards for a long time, but I think a part of him just loves the idea of being at Mar-a-Lago, people think he's having a holiday, and guess, guess what he's about to do? And then he does it, and then all around the world, every television screen in the

• 36:17Alastair Campbell?

  world has got, we're sitting, watching a blank screen, waiting for Donald Trump to come and tell us what he's just done. And because that is what, that's what rocks his boat, floats his boat.

• 36:29Rory Stewart?

  So, I mean, yeah, so I think, let's take that as the central insight into Trump, which is that it's about spectacular news creation, it's about reality TV. But there's a possibility that this is, for some time, almost the end of it.

• 36:46Rory Stewart?

  And we could have a repeat here of what we saw in Iran, which is that he sends in strikes, he makes great claims, and then he just leaves the regime in place, having hit it. So it's possible that what we'll see here is that he thinks he's done his job, taking out Maduro, hopes that the new generals will cut deals with American oilmen, and all the hope from Venezuelans for a new chapter and a new democracy may turn out to be completely false, and Trump may not be trying to do boots on the ground. That's one possibility. Second possibility, which I think is, is, would be very, very strange, but he could be drawn into it, is that he actually does try to put boots on the ground, and America really does try to run Venezuela. That's certainly what he was talking about

• 37:31Rory Stewart?

  at the press conference. It makes no sense to me, because everything he's ever said about international intervention around the world suggests the last thing he wants to do is that, but it's possible. Maybe the Trump corollary of the Monroe Doctrine is genuine American boots on the ground in its hemisphere and nowhere else. In which case, that is one of the most difficult things that you can take on. Now, here also I'm getting, when I talk to, I talked to a couple of Venezuelans this morning, and I was getting real flashbacks to Iraq and Afghanistan, because of course, the optimistic story is, no, no, no, you know, I remember when we went into Iraq, everyone was like,

• 38:13Rory Stewart?

  oh, this is not Afghanistan, this is a much more wealthy country, it's got amazing oil reserves, they'll make a lot of money, we're very educated people. And of course, Venezuelans are saying, no, this is not Iraq, we're a very educated people, you know, Ricardo Hausmann is a Harvard professor, we've got this, it's not going to be easy, but a democratic transition, all these wonderful technocrats will come back, they'll rebuild the country, there's incredible revenue, this is not a, it's not a primitive place, this is, you know, it doesn't have religious problems or sectarian problems, right?

• 38:44Rory Stewart?

  But what I think is underestimated in this analysis is what twenty five years of smashing up a state does when people like Chavez and Maduro take your economy down by eighty percent, when nothing works in the infrastructure, where everything in the military and judiciary is completely hollowed out, where there's no civil society, where there's two hundred thousand people in a paramilitary with drugs, where FARC and the Colombia guerrillas are on the border, right? Come into that situation as an American administration, you're completely finished. But even as a Venezuelan administration, you have a problem, which is that you're coming in as a result of an American intervention. It's not like Ahmad al-Shara in Syria, who

• 39:26Rory Stewart?

  did it on his own, who however much people hate him and however difficult that situation is, that was not an international intervention, he took that. This is a situation where whoever comes in will be accused of being an American puppet.

• 39:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, there's a very interesting point here from Spring in Paris. Just for the record, it's unbelievable that one country just invades another country and captures the leader and nobody really blinks an eye. I've got to say, Spring in Paris, I think a lot of eyes are being blinked at this. I don't think you can say this is just sort of happening. Now, what I think people are struggling to deal with is what can you actually do about it? Donald Trump has just managed to establish himself. Look at the way that we, it seems we can't have a discussion about how you might end the Ukraine war without Donald Trump being central to it. Where's the United Nations? I saw, I saw Antonio Guterres quote about this today, and it was just, it just felt bleak. It was like, there was no power

• 40:22Alastair Campbell?

  in it. Keir Starmer, when he was interviewed, asked about it, he basically started, well, we will be, you know, let's wait to find out what's happened. Let's get the details, you know, that nobody wants to upset this guy because they know that he can turn on them. And so I go back to the point I made earlier. I honestly think if you're the Danish Prime Minister, looking at this thing, oh Christ, if they can do this, Greenland's a piece of cake for them.

• 40:49Rory Stewart?

  Let me add to this. Imagine you're Zelensky. How do you know there isn't a sealed indictment against Zelensky for institutional corruption and goodness knows what within the Ukrainian state where some secret part of the Department of Justice has prepared it under wraps? He's abducted, he's taken back, he's put on trial?

• 41:08Alastair Campbell?

  I'll tell you what, if I was Zelensky watching that press conference, what I would be thinking is, God, I wish they'd bring this level of military might and expertise to my side against Russia. Because they keep saying they've got the most powerful military in the world, no other country on earth could have done this. But when they want to, they can do it. And the fact is that in relation to Ukraine, I think you were one of the first people to say this, and I think you're right, that Trump is basically on Putin's side. And I think this plays into the thing we talked about in relation to Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, had said about these three, the world moving into these three blocks.

• 41:53Alastair Campbell?

  What America is saying in relation to the Western Bloc, US-led, is that when they say US-led, they mean that, they mean they can lead anybody within their team, as it were. And when Hexus was at the press conference, he went up, and I mean, I find the guy ridiculous, and I think most American military people find him ridiculous, but he stood there and he basically said, what this is, this is America first.

• 42:18Rory Stewart?

  He's also, Trump is also a very lucky. That operation could have gone wrong in any number of ways. Remember, this is basically something that has completely haunted the US. I mean, what was the Bay of Pigs? The Bay of Pigs was an attempt by the CIA to topple Castro. You remember the helicopters crashing on the way in to free the hostages after the Iranian Revolution that brought down Carter?

• 42:50Alastair Campbell?

  He mentioned Trump couldn't stop himself from saying, think of all the operations that had gone under when I wasn't in power that have gone wrong. You're absolutely right. Of course, you say he's lucky, the trouble with luck like that is it then breeds hubris and you then go and do the next thing and stuff does go.

• 43:10Rory Stewart?

  100%, because we could have been talking today.

• 43:15Rory Stewart?

  After a catastrophic operation in which helicopters had gone down, Delta Force personnel had been killed, Maduro had not been captured. And now, maybe that Trump just invents some new thing, some new war and moves on and it doesn't really affect him. I mean, it's interesting to try to work out how much of a risk he was aware he was taking and whether he thought there were big downsides if it did go wrong.

• 43:39Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, well, that's why I think you have to, look, regardless of what you think of him or Maduro, any, the, the, there will be films made decades from now about the, the military operation itself. It is an incredible thing that they did. I mean, Maduro must be one of the most protected people on earth. You know, he knows he's at risk, he's got enemies inside, he's got enemies outside. The whole business of security, I mean, I've seen lots of leaders and the security that, that surrounds them. He would be right up there in the top league of protection, and yet somehow they penetrated it.

• 44:19Rory Stewart?

  And not, not least, of course, the people that run his entire intelligence service are the Cuban intelligence. And the one thing that Cuban intelligence has done since Castro took over is create an entire enterprise that existed for one purpose and one purpose only, which was stopping the Americans assassinating or abducting Castro. So, and they did it very, very effectively. And those are the guys that run Venezuelan intelligence. So it really is astonishing and, and suggests very strongly that they had managed to penetrate right inside the core of Maduro's operation. To be able to pull this off.

• 44:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, the guy, the guy, the military guy, Dan Kane, he said, you know, that we'd been working on intelligence as well. Where he ate, what he ate, who he ate with, what he's, what pets he had. There was like, he's building this picture that they'd been sort of tracking him, but they couldn't have done that given who he is and the extent to which he's protected. They could not have done that without somebody very, very, very close saying where he's going and what he's doing.

• 45:21Rory Stewart?

  Now, this is then an issue for China, Russia and others. So Venezuela was a big, you know, was one of their linchpin countries in Latin America. China made big, big loans to Venezuela. Russia in particular was cooperating with Venezuela and a whole series of things. There have been formal. Criticisms of it, but of course, as with Iran, yet again, Russia and China has demonstrated that they're not really willing to stand up for their allies. Now Venezuela, you know, was a source of oil. Iran was supplying Russia with all those drones in Ukraine, a lot of its transfer of technology, and yet Russia made no attempt really to stand up for it. So it it does raise some very interesting questions about this kind of multipolar world,

• 46:06Rory Stewart?

  which is the US seems to be able to do these operations and the other world powers are not really able to protect their proxies.

• 46:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and I I can't quite work out what I think of the responses, because it was interesting going through some of the international responses.

• 46:22Alastair Campbell?

  You know, China talk about this being a breach of international law and reckless and dangerous and and so forth. And and Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, saying similar things, but they feel quite sotovoce to me. They don't feel like they're kind of really crying out for some sort of, you know, action to be taken against American relations. And the and the calls for the United Nations to convene or whatever, they they're coming from Venezuela, but I've not seen much else apart from that.

• 46:53Rory Stewart?

  Well, so let's imagine China then did decide that the time is ripe to do a strike against Taiwan.

• 47:02Rory Stewart?

  It's pretty difficult to understand how Trump could respond. If he were to send a US aircraft carrier from Guam or a couple of subs, they could be sunk relatively easily because you're very close to the Chinese mainland. China is a nuclear power. China has the ability to disrupt satellites and space. China is, in purchasing power parity terms, the largest economy in the world now. It's completely integrated into the global trading system. I mean, these strikes that Trump are doing at the moment is demonstrating his power against weak states like Venezuela, but at the same time, he's shedding allies and actually scaring a lot of his allies.

• 47:45Rory Stewart?

  As a lot of this conversation has been about the fact that, as you say, if you're Canada or Denmark, you're not very, or Ukraine, there's nothing in this that makes you very keen to create a closer alliance with the United States. I mean, and

• 48:03Rory Stewart?

  It also, there's an element of it, I mean, maybe this is me going too far here, but there's an element of it that just seems childish. When I see Hegseth and Vance celebrating this, they seem like children. It's as though they really don't want to talk about what the long-term consequences are. If you were to try to sit down and say, but what happens in six months' time to the Venezuelan military economy, you know, what are you going to do about these paramilitary groups? How are you going to do a transition? They'd just be like, why can't you celebrate? We took out a bad guy. And if you said, this isn't legal, they would say, why can't you celebrate? We took out a bad guy.

• 48:44Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we talked a while back to Jim Hines, Democrat politician in the States, and he came out and he made some very measured comments, just saying, you know, we have to be clear, we're the United States, we should operate according to international law, da, da, da, da. And this was put to Trump when he phoned up Fox and Friends. And he just said, these are weak, Democrats are weak, stupid people. And we've had enough of weak, stupid people. And like I said, when I didn't know what PSA, but Public Service at US, JD Vance literally was celebrating. And he was also linking it very, very directly to the, he actually said, we can get back our stolen oil. Their claim has always been that when Venezuela nationalized the oil industries, they basically stole American

• 49:29Alastair Campbell?

  oil infrastructure, which is why that gives them the right to say, we're going to send in the oil companies and they're going to, they're going to clean up. It was a, it's a, I don't know, it was a very, it was a very weird press conference as well. I mean, this was like, you know, this is a massive moment. By the way, is that a full moon up there? I think it is.

• 49:48Rory Stewart?

  Oh yeah, it's a beautiful full moon with us and it's cold and we're both in Scotland, incidentally.

• 49:54Alastair Campbell?

  So but this he was.

• 49:56Rory Stewart?

  Although we are both off to somewhere quite exciting Monday.

• 50:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. We are, we're going to we're going to Moldova and we're going to and you see the Daily Telegraph made her made Maya Sandu their politician overseas politician of the year. Anyway, he kept he kept doing this thing where he had it's really worth watching just for the side of psychology of it because and I mean, I sometimes wonder what the nerves you must go through if you're working for Trump. He was he had a script. He was reading from a script. I think he got through the first sentence before he went off script and did one of his little sort of rambles and weaves. But he did one right in the middle of this thing where he was talking about these these people are sending violence, terror and subversion against us. He went on about Trender, you know, the bag that the Trender Agnia gang.

• 50:44Alastair Campbell?

  He then sort of we went through crime figures, completely made up, by the way. I don't believe that crime in Louisiana is down to almost nothing and likewise in New Orleans. He went through the crime figures for Memphis, Louisiana, New Orleans, Chicago. And they must be sitting there thinking, he has just announced one of the biggest things of his presidency and certainly of his of his second term. And he's suddenly just wandering off into all these different sort of different areas. It was really quite mind blowing to watch and then and and I think they must have been very, very relieved when he sort of he brought it to an end. He also did say, by the way, about the oil thing, he said, this was the largest theft

• 51:27Alastair Campbell?

  of profit property in the history of our country. So that says to me, they're setting things up so that their supporters will will go along with anything that says the Americans just go in now and they do take over the Venezuela North industry, which is potentially a massive, massive industry.

• 51:46Alastair Campbell?

  So there we are, Rory. Do you want to take some questions?

• 51:50Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think I'm almost coming to the end. So yeah, well, Rory Monroe had a good one. He said, you know, what would happen if Argentina tried to take the Falklands? So would Trump take the side of his new friend Javier Millay? Or would he take the side of his older friend, King Charles?

• 52:08Alastair Campbell?

  That presumably is southern hemisphere.

• 52:14Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Or would he pose as a neutral arbitrator? You know, it's all very complicated. There's a lot of history on both sides. And, you know, I've got to try to get them around a table here. And then there's been some good stuff also coming in the talk. Thank you very much. People coming in saying, is this distracting domestic American politics? Absolutely. I mean, this is spectacular way of dealing with the fact that in fact, in many ways, employment figures are not great, cost of living is not great. But you just pull off this spectacular attack. So, but most of all, I think we're in a world where nobody, and maybe this is the way to end, we have no theory for this. We have

• 52:56Rory Stewart?

  no theory of international law for this. We have no theory of post-conflict reconstruction for this, because we can't even begin to see who's doing the post-conflict reconstruction, what they're trying to create. I mean, you know, in Iraq or Afghanistan or the Balkans, at least it was still happening in the old liberal world order, where the idea was supposed to be elections, free market systems, and all this kind of malarkey, right? Who knows what, you know, the Trump vision for a future of Venezuela is, or what he's prepared to do to achieve it? And is it empire? I mean, is he interested in creating a new form of empire? Is he worried about the idea of empire? Is the idea that is his legacy to take Greenland

• 53:40Rory Stewart?

  and maybe help himself to some territory in Latin America? And then how do Latin Americans respond? And how do leftist governments respond? How do more right-wing governments respond? How do European governments respond? Is there a point beyond which Trump goes where finally Keir Starmer, Macron, Mauts come out and say, you are no longer?

• 54:06Rory Stewart?

  A democratic liberal leader, you know, people are pointing out that he's now banned ten people from entering the United States for criticizing him, whereas the British government, which he's saying is clamps down on free speech and isn't really a democracy.

• 54:19Alastair Campbell?

  Never banned anybody.

• 54:20Rory Stewart?

  Never banned anyone, yeah.

• 54:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, well, I'm, I'm, I'm sort of having second thoughts about going to the World Cup. I, I don't particularly want to be turned away at the border and I don't particularly want to be contributing anything to his economy right now. Anyway, we'll, we'll, we'll see you later. I must say, I, I think that I'm glad that we did this. I'm sorry that we interrupted you into your birthday. We've had a few comments pointing out, I mean, I should say that I'm, I'm in the kind of far north, I'm in the Scottish Highlands, Rory's a bit lower down. The wifi is a bit better up here, I think. I think you've, you've got to go, you've got to go. Maybe you're not paying your bills.

• 54:55Rory Stewart?

  It's, it's, it's Elon Musk. It's Starlink.

• 54:58Alastair Campbell?

  Bastard, bastard. By the way, you see the Chinese are very, they, they, they've started to go for Mr. Musk, I noticed about his Starlink use. Anyway, listen, I'm glad we did that because I think it would have been a bit remiss on a day that something so potentially consequential, well, it's very consequential for Venezuela, it's very consequential, obviously, for, for Maduro, but I think it's, I think this could have broader consequences that we'll be talking about for some time to come. But as you say, I will next see you in Moldova, a country I've never been to. So I'm very, very much looking forward to that. And we'll, we'll be interviewing the president, Mayasandu, and we'll also be doing our normal podcast from there, which I suspect we'll be talking about Venezuela again.

• 55:41Rory Stewart?

  Thank you, and thank you to everyone for the happy birthday wishes. Have a great day. Bye bye.

• 55:46Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon, bye.

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