Rahim’s Letter 022: Happy New Regime Change - What’s Going On In Venezuela

I’m talking about the US kidnapping Venezuelan President Maduro early this morning. There’s going to be a lot said about this, and it’s a colossally complicated and important foreign policy move, so I’m going to try and give you a 359 on the situation in this note. 

I say 359, not 360, because I’ll inevitably miss things, so do complement with other sources. A lot of this will be background and shouldn’t change, but this is an evolving situation where new facts/datapoints might come to light, so I’m going to timestamp this piece as starting at 1516 on 3rd Jan, and you can take the time it reaches your inbox as the ending time. I won’t send before President Trump’s presser at c.1600 GMT, although that is likely to be delayed. 

The US are conducting regime change in Venezuela. They’re saying it’s about drugs, but it’s really about a) securing US influence and b) taking control of Venezuelan oil. This is politically quite disturbing, but geopolitically brilliant. As with all regime change, its success will be defined by what happens next. 

Nicolas Maduro has been Venezuela’s President since 2013. He took over after Hugo Chavez, and continued a similar vein of politics i.e., anti-US in pretty much every way. 

Officially, he was President, but practically he was Dictator, having been elected through  controversial elections in 2018 and 2024. Why controversial? Well in 2018 they banned a most of the major opposition parties from running, and then in 2024, he just declared himself as having won without any evidence - the opposition look to have won 67% of the vote. Democracy has not been a highlight of his time in power and the Venezuelan people have suffered because of it. 

The situation on the ground is so bad that the Nobel Peace Prize this year went to Maria Corina Machado, who is a key opponent of Maduro, for her efforts to oust him. 

There’s also been allegations of drug trafficking i.e., that Maduro, his family and some of their officials, were waging a war against the health of the US population through the import of cocaine. This really kicked off in 2015, when two of his wife’s nephews were arrested by the DEA in the US for conspiracy to import cocaine. They were found guilty and went to prison, until they were freed in a prisoner exchange in 2022. 

The US, under the first Trump administration, indicted President Maduro himself in 2020, with a bounty that steadily rose to $50 million over 2025. 

Now, it’s probably true that they were trying to do something like this. But let’s not pretend that Venezuela is the biggest cause of the US’s drug problem. 

In 2024, the DEA reported that 84% of US seized cocaine came from Columbia, with Peru and Bolivia other major producers. Most US-bound cocaine travels through Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, up through to Mexico and over the border into the US. The Venezuela issue is not a drugs problem. Drugs aren’t even a major policy agenda, or Trump wouldn’t have released the former Honduras President in November, who was extradited and sentenced for drug trafficking by the Biden administration in 2022. 

Two things really: a) exerting US influence over Venezuela, and; b) securing access to Venezuelan oil. 

The US sees Latin America as its backyard. This is a long established position, going all the way back to the Monroe Doctrines of 1823, which effectively tried to tell the world that the Americas (North and South) were closed to European colonialism, and in return, the US wouldn’t meddle with European countries. 

This has been interpreted differently by various Presidents over the years, giving the history books a whole host of “corallories”. Trump’s version is that the Americas are a US sphere of influence, and that the US should asset their dominance over its half of the planet to discourage mass migration to the US. To do so, it wants governments in place that cooperate with them against transnational criminal organisations, and it wants to ensure continued access to key strategic locations. If the governments in charge don’t tick these boxes, then regime change is very much on the cards.

I’m not being particularly smart telling you this, it’s not a secret. It’s all in the National Security Strategy released in November - the Monroe Doctrine point is the very first item on the list (p5). 

China, Russia and Iran have all been building interests in Venezuela over time - this is a clear repudiation of those developments. 

The second point is Venezuelan oil. 

The US, particularly the military, is one of the biggest consumers of oil in the world. Climate crisis or not, you can’t move your planes, ships and land vehicles without it, and so ensuring that the US military can get access to oil is critical to maintaining US military dominance. 

Now the US is one of the largest oil producers in the world, thanks to fracking. However, not all oil is made equal, and the oil the US gets from fracking is a less dense “light” oil, whereas the bulk of the US’s oil refineries are set up to refine a denser “heavy” oil, which has meant the bulk of oil imported by the US has been this “heavy” oil.

Which countries have the world’s largest “heavy” oil reserves? Russia, Canada and… Venezuela. 

Now Venezuela holds the world’s largest oil reserves, but hasn’t been very efficient and so haven’t been extracting lots of it. When you’re basically one of two potential suppliers to the US military, that’s a problem. If the US is drawn into a broader global conflict, running out of oil is not really an option, and so securing access to Venezuelan oil reserves suddenly makes a lot more sense. 

Firstly, it was a very impressive military operation. US military forces turning off all the lights in Caracas, moving in and taking the country’s President in about two hours, without a single US casualty or loss of equipment, when the Venezuelans knew something like this was coming, is very impressive. Other Latin American leaders with strained relations with the US will be nervous, particularly in Cuba - who were name-checked in the press conference and is particularly important to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose parents fled the Cuban Batista regime in the 50s. 

Trump’s press conference has just ended - the US are going to run the country, invite in the US oil companies to rebuild the infrastructure, extract and sell the oil and use that money to “Make Venezuela Great Again.” 

He seems to suggest it’ll be directly run by a group of top US government officials, until they can get a new government up and running, working with the Venezuelan Vice President to make that happen. He said that whilst she was on Venezuelan state television denouncing the attack (although it could’ve been a recording) and so I’m not entirely convinced she’s going to be the one, but Venezuelan officials will be involved. 

It’s unlikely to be Maria Machado in the immediate term - he’s already said that she’s not very popular in the country and that he hasn’t spoken to her, but never say never. 

He’s also made a big point around them costing them nothing and having a massive positive impact on the US, so I wouldn’t rule out a prolonged US occupation.

I don’t think this will be the last example of regime change we’ll see under this Trump presidency, but is likely to be one of the most consequential. It’ll be interesting to see how the Iranians, Russians and Chinese react (so far, all pretty poorly) over the longer term. In the event of a broader global conflict (unrelated to this), these oil reserves could prove to be decisive.

There’s a lot of commentary around this being unprecedented. It’s not really. 

The US, famously, does regime change quite a lot. You may not like it or think it’s okay, but this has been a critical part of US foreign policy since 1942. They’re pretty good at making regime change happen - the issues usually come afterwards though, with the new US-backed regimes spectacularly falling apart. 

If we take it back to WW2, that was regime change and then occupation in both Germany and Japan, which have, on the whole, gone pretty well. 

On the flip side, it has famously gone disastrously wrong too. 

The CIA and MI6 overthrew the Iranian government in 1953 to restore the Shah, ultimately leading to the 1979 Iranian revolution that installed the current regime. The CIA helped overthrow the South Vietnamese government in 1963, adding to the country’s instability and the Vietnam war that followed. In 1979, they helped fund the mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets, who then ultimately evolved into Al-Qaeda. And regime change in the Iraq and Afghan wars deeply destabilised the countries and continue to cause issues globally to this day, and in the latter case the Taliban returned as soon as the US left. 

But, sometimes it works. Panama in 1989 is the closest and most prescient example here. 

There, the US invaded to depose the Panamanian President on drug trafficking charges. Ultimately, they were there for a month and installed a US-favoured President who was told the alternative would be an undisguised US occupation. It now has one of the most stable and economically prosperous countries in the region. 

RH