From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitchela.
This is The Daily.
For months, President Trump has been ratcheting up the pressure on Venezuela with increasingly aggressive military actions that the administration claims are about targeting drug traffickers.
But behind the scenes, some U.S. officials are pushing toward a very different goal, regime change.
Today, my colleague Anatoly Kermeneyev explains the battle being waged within the White House over whether to topple the government of Nicolas Maduro.
It's Thursday, October 23rd.
Anatoly, welcome back to the Americas.
You're in your old stomping ground in Caracas.
That's right, yeah.
It's strange to be back after eight years of reporting from here.
Just tell me how many times, over the course of your career as a foreign correspondent, you've been in Venezuela awaiting the theoretical end of this longstanding regime, now led by Maduro.
Oh God.
I arrived in the country just a few weeks after Maduro took power in 2013.
And I think I've seen at least six times six moments when it looked like his government might collapse.
You know, I've seen it all.
It was mass protests, you know, millions of people in the streets.
It was, you know, military coups.
It was economic chaos, you know, the deepest reception in the world outside of war zone and in modern history.
There was a national blackout for a week, and it just looked like the entire country might collapse.
There was a stolen election last year, and it's still the same government and power.
But what we haven't had before is the specter of military action, and military action from the most powerful country on earth.
So a lot of people here believe that this time it could be different.
Okay, let's get into this moment that we're in right now.
There have been so many boats that have been bombed in the Caribbean Sea at this point by the Trump administration that it's been hard to keep it straight.
We've seen more than two dozen people killed.
What's the latest on the ground in Venezuela?
So, so far, the US has destroyed seven boats off the Venezuelan coast, killing about 30 people.
It has amassed a substantial military force in the Caribbean.
And last week, the Trump administration has authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations inside Venezuela.
And Trump has explicitly said that he is considering launching operations on Venezuelan land.
Basically, the threat of military boots on the ground.
Basically meaning the involvement of US servicemen, US operatives, in military violent actions inside Venezuela.
But it's the sense of siege that it has created in Venezuela, I think, and the expectation that this is just the first phase of a prolonged military campaign against the Maduro government.
You said that the expectation is that this is the first phase of what we're seeing.
So what's the next phase?
Like, what's the sense of what the eventual endgame is here?
So it's hard to know what is legitimate planning for next military steps and what is part of psychological warfare.
We have to keep in mind that part of administration's strategy, I suppose, is to create this atmosphere and fear and tension and paranoia among the government of Nicolas Maduro and create a sort of split in his power structure.
But no matter who you speak to here in Venezuela, whether it's a street seller, business people, officials in Maduro government, it's clear to everyone that the final goal is to topple Maduro.
And this dovetails with what my colleagues in Washington are hearing from the sources that they are talking to that the endgame of this pressure campaign is to bring a different government in power in Venezuela.
Right, ending a regime that the U.S. has opposed for a very long time.
Just explain why that's been the case.
So the standoff goes back to the time of Maduro's predecessor and mentor, Hugo Chavez.
He was a left-wing nationalist leader who became increasingly undemocratic.
Hugo Chavez has packed the Supreme Court and the army with his supporters and introduced a new penal code that criminalizes dissent.
These movements became increasingly antagonistic towards the U.S.
After Venezuela forced the U.S. ambassador out of the country...
The United States is expelling its ambassador.
And used the country's oil wealth to challenge U.S. dominance in the region.
George W. Bush.
You are a donkey, Mr. Bush.
Chavez struck new alliances with U.S. adversaries.
Iranian President Ahmadinejad is visiting Venezuela.
Chavez said that he's searching for a strategic relationship with Russia.
With China, with Russia, with Iran, he repressed pro-American opposition parties.
And, over time, the US has responded with gradual sanctions which were aimed at creating conditions for the opposition to win in a democratic way and change the course.
But then... A new day is coming in Latin America.
It's coming.
This all changes during Trump's first term in power.
The people of Venezuela are standing for freedom and democracy, and the United States of America is standing right by their side.
Trump's starting a so-called maximum pressure campaign to drive Maduro from power.
We have many options for Venezuela.
This is our neighbor.
This is, you know, we're all over the world.
And we have troops all over the world in places that are very, very far away.
So he recognized the country's opposition leader as the legitimate president of the country.
He bans Venezuelan oil from the U.S.
He makes it extremely difficult for Venezuelan governments to make any financial transactions and precipitating an economic crisis in the country which made life very difficult for ordinary people.
Which led Maduro to dig further in, to rely more on repression, to deepen his alliances with China and Russia, to hold on to power.
Right.
The push to oust Maduro just did not work.
And the question for a long time now has been how far is the US willing to go to get rid of Maduro?
For the Trump administration now, it seems as though that threshold is changing.
They seem much more willing to do something that they weren't back in 2019, which is use military force.
And that's why you're saying that things seem so much different in this moment.
That's right.
What was missing in the past was the threat of U.S. military action.
And so how did we get here to the point where now, the threat of military force is very much on the table?
So from a Venezuelan side, last year was a point of no return for Venezuelan democracy because Maduro went from making it very difficult for the opposition to campaign to outright making up numbers.
There was a presidential election last year.
Huge outswell of support for the opposition led by Maria Corina Machado.
And her candidates get 70 of the votes and her activists are able to provide proof of those numbers, are able to provide evidence of real election results.
En este momento tenemos el 73.20% de las actas.
This political campaign, organized by Maria Corina Machado, was the reason she received Nobel Peace Prize.
But Maduro ignores them, produces completely different results.
I am Nicolás Maduro Moro, President of the Republic of Maduro Moro, and uses repression to stay in power, basically challenging the opposition, the world, to do anything about them.
And that's the state of play, basically, right, when Trump comes into office in January.
Maduro has held on to power, even though, at this point, the whole world basically believes that he has stolen this election.
So what does Trump do?
So initially he tries negotiating with Maduro.
He sends his envoy to Caracas to start working on a deal that would, in effect, deliver all of Venezuela's natural resources to the US and keep Maduro in power, at least for the time being.
Did you say deliver all the natural resources of Venezuela to the U.S.?
That's right, Natalie.
The reporting that we have shows that it was arguably the most far-reaching attempt at resource diplomacy of Trump's term in power.
It involved shipping all Venezuelan oil to the United States.
It involved opening up all of Venezuela's oil fields and mines to US companies.
And, very importantly, it involved Maduro basically breaking off the existing contracts with Chinese, Russian and Iranian companies, basically sabotaging his existing alliances in order to rebuild his relationship with the United States.
That would essentially be Venezuela doing a complete 180 on its foreign policy and ceding control over its most valuable resources to the US.
Can you just explain why Maduro and his government would agree to that?
The biggest reason is survival.
In return for these economic riches, Maduro would stay in power or, at the very least, his movements would be able to stay in power or to be able to contest elections in the future.
So it created an off-ramp for Maduro and his top officials.
This does seem like exactly the kind of transactional extractive deal that Trump has favored in the past.
You know, pay me and we'll help you out.
So I assume that this seems like a pretty good offer.
That's right, early this year, the momentum was definitely heading towards a deal.
Venezuela started accepting deportation flights from the United States.
It started releasing Americans held in Venezuela.
And it seemed like we are cruising towards normalization of relations.
But then, Trump's Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, takes center stage.
And everything changes.
We'll be right back.
Anatoly, you told us this deal seemed like a go, but then Secretary of State Marco Rubio took control.
So how did Rubio get in the middle of these negotiations exactly?
So he starts undermining it behind the scene.
First, in late March, he exerts pressure to cancel permits for US companies operating in Venezuela.
He scraps these licenses, dealing a major blow to the Venezuelan economy.
And then in June, Ruber uses his connections in the South Florida Republican Party to convince Trump that Cuban-American congressmen from South Florida will not support his big spending bill if the deal with Maduro goes forward.
The BBB, the big, beautiful bill.
Correct.
The big, beautiful bill.
It's interesting.
While one side of the Trump administration is trying to negotiate this deal with Maduro, here you have Marco Rubio actively undermining the strategy at every turn.
Why?
That's right.
For Rubio, it's personal.
Marco Rubio is the son of Cuban immigrants who became part of this large community of Cuban Americans in South Florida who view Latin America through the prism of Cuban influence in the region.
And they see getting rid of Maduro as a crucial step towards ending dictatorship in the country that they left, in the country that their parents or grandparents have left.
And throughout his political career, Rubio has rejected negotiations with Chavez, with Maduro, and for him the main goal has always been to see Maduro gone.
And this time Rubio has a plan that he can present as the moral imperative.
And so what is the plan that he presents?
He is supporting Maria Corina Machado, the opposition politician who won elections in Venezuela last year.
In the view of Marco Rubio and his supporters, they are working to restore democracy in Venezuela and to put legitimate presidents in power.
But throughout Trump's terms it's been very clear that the issues of democracy and human rights do not carry much cachet with him.
So Rubio had to look for another weapon.
He needed to present something to Trump that would catch his ear and would outweigh the economic benefits of working with Maduro.
And he found the answer in drugs.
Trump has, you know, spoke repeatedly about the drug epidemic.
You know the fentanyl crisis in the US.
He has threatened Mexican cartels.
He has threatened military actions against cartels in Mexico.
So Marco Rubio changes tack.
Maduro, they call him a dictator because he is and all that.
He's not a government official.
What he is is the head of a drug trafficking logistics organization, a cartel, the cartel of the sun.
He starts to frame Venezuelan governments as a drug cartel.
And I've seen a lot of this reporting, and it's fake reporting, and I'll tell you why.
It says that somehow Venezuela is not involved in the drug trade because the UN says they're not involved.
I don't care what the UN says.
The UN doesn't know what they're talking about, flips the Venezuelan issue from being a struggle over democracy and human rights towards it being a struggle against drugs.
Nicolas Maduro is an indicted drug trafficker in the United States and he's a fugitive of American justice.
He makes Maduro government part of America's war against drugs.
And this leads to an escalation.
Rubio designates basically Maduro's entire regime as a narco-terrorist cartel.
And he supports sending all this military hardware into the region to threaten Maduro.
And ultimately this leads to the strikes on the boats of alleged drug traffickers off Venezuela's coast.
And we've covered this on the show.
You know, it's still the case that the Trump administration has not actually presented any strong evidence that Maduro is a cartel leader.
That's not something the intelligence agencies have agreed with.
You're saying that Rubio goes forward with this strategy anyway.
That's right, Natalie.
It is accepted that some cocaine ships through Venezuela, that Venezuela is a location for drug smuggling.
But there has not been any convincing evidence that this is a hierarchical, organized endeavor from the top levels of Venezuelan government.
But Rubio knows that this is a compelling political narrative.
And, at the same time, Mario Corina Machado is pitching an economic reconstruction plan which, in spirit, is very similar to the deal that Maduro has been negotiating with Trump earlier this year.
So in effect, Rubio is promising to Trump that he can kill two birds with one stone.
He can topple Maduro and proclaim a victory in this fight against drugs and, at the same time, obtain the same economic deals that Maduro is offering him.
And is that actually true, that Maria Karina Machado would give up the same things that Maduro is offering?
Like, Trump could just get the economic deal he wants and oust Maduro at the same time?
So Maria Karina has held very consistent views throughout her political career and she is a firm believer in American-style free market economy.
She is a firm supporter of American businesses, American economic interest, and she was willing to tailor her message in order to keep Trump on her side.
After Trump came to power, she has stopped talking about the plight of Venezuelan migrants, which was a major element of her election campaign.
She has stayed largely silent when Trump sent hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador in prison without any due process.
And she has unequivocally supported Trump's campaign against drug smuggling in Venezuela, without mentioning the fact that some of her countrymen are being killed at high seas without any evidence of due process.
So Machado, it sounds like, is not being a purist in an effort to not alienate the Trump administration because, above all else, what she wants is political change in her country.
I'm wondering how regular Venezuelans view her pitch, Rubio's pitch, for US intervention to achieve that goal.
They obviously overwhelmingly voted against Maduro, as you said.
But do they agree with the argument that getting Maduro out is worth it?
The potential upheaval of US military action in their country?
This is a crucial question, Natalie.
Machado has presented her overwhelming victory in last year's election as a mandate for change at any cost.
Whether Venezuelans agree has been difficult to gauge because of the scale of repression in the country.
But the polling that I have seen shows that only a minority of Venezuelans support military intervention in Venezuela.
Overwhelmingly, Venezuelans support political change.
They want Maduro gone.
And they want... international community to help them achieve that change.
But a minority believe that a military intervention would be a justified cause to achieve that goal.
But despite the fact that intervention doesn't necessarily have broad-based support in Venezuela, we are at what feels like the precipice of something.
And I'm just wondering if you can lay out what the paths forward are now.
Is the diplomatic route that leaves Maduro in power still even an option?
Have we moved so far in the other direction that it's just not on the table anymore?
So diplomacy is off the table for now.
Trump has told his envoy to basically cut off contacts with Maduro for the time being and appears to have given Rubio green light to achieve results through military pressure.
And supporters of negotiation approach, they acknowledge that they lost this battle.
They acknowledge that they have been outplayed, outmaneuvered by Rubio at this stage.
But they don't believe that this is the end.
They point to Trump's behavior towards Ukraine, where he has repeatedly changed his positions since returning to power.
So just because negotiations are off the table now, that does not mean that will be off the table forever.
And Rubio's opponents.
They're biding their time for Rubio to make a mistake, for him to fail to produce clear results in a span of next several months, in order for them to then redouble their pitch of economic bounties that could be had in the short term straight away under the current government in Venezuela.
On the side of those who are advocating intervention.
It does seem as though a lot of people in that camp may be hoping for, fantasizing about a kind of painless, surgical extraction of Maduro from Venezuela, you know, by Marines or whoever.
And then the arrival of a new government led by Machado, that everybody wants, that functions smoothly.
But Anatoly, you know this better than me.
The US has a long history of this kind of intervention in Latin America.
Has it ever worked that way?
Seamless?
Smooth?
I mean.
History shows that only rarely do military interventions produce the kind of sustained democracy that Machado is advocating for.
There's not much track record for this sort of outcome.
Machado believes that the country overwhelmingly supports her and would just welcome her with open arms for her candidate to assume the presidency and take over armed forces, state bureaucracy, state infrastructure and just usher this new era of democracy prosperity.
But there's all sorts of outcomes that are likely, even more likely, to occur.
Maduro could lose power, but be replaced by someone even more hard-line within his own coalition, but someone even more oppressive and someone more antagonistic towards the United States.
You know, the power vacuum could create all sorts of chaos maybe, perhaps not necessarily, in Caracas, but in the periphery of a country, areas where you have all sorts of armed groups, ranging from criminal gangs to Colombian insurgents.
We could see the violence that this could create, could unleash a whole new wave of migration towards Colombia, the neighboring country to Venezuela, which could destabilize that country further.
You know, the military interventions could have all sorts of unexpected, lasting outcomes that go far beyond the sort of clean, elegant transition to democracy under a democratically elected government.
Yeah, and one of those outcomes right is that you could end up destabilizing this country and potentially spurring a new wave of migration, which is exactly what this administration wants to avoid.
I mean, if you end up creating all this instability that could potentially spread to neighboring countries, that's obviously not in the US interest either.
And it's also, by the way, the opposite of the America first agenda that Trump campaigned on.
No.
And the way this campaign is unfolding so far gives indications of the risks ahead.
The way the strikes against boats seems to be spreading to countries neighboring Venezuela.
Colombian president has accused U.S. of murdering a Colombian fisherman.
Trump has responded by cutting off AIDS and threatening Colombian governments.
So this has already escalated beyond the sort of narrow surgical approach towards removing Maduro.
And we are just in the beginning.
So I think The risk of plunging the region into uncharted territory are very great.
And this is the line that Maduro's government and his allies in Washington have exploited.
They present themselves as this bastion of stability and relative peace against the anarchy and chaos that Machado experienced is about to unleash on the country.
Just to pull back, to take a longer view of all of this.
If the Trump administration goes through with this, it wouldn't just be right.
A return to an older, more aggressive approach to the Americas, a more aggressive foreign policy.
In many ways, it would be a test of how far the US can push the limits of that policy in 2025.
The latest phase of all of this started, as you said, with bombing boats in international waters and treating alleged criminals as if they're enemy combatants in a war, which many experts see is a complete violation of international law.
So I'm wondering how you are thinking about the larger stakes of what we're seeing play out here.
What worries me the most here Natalie, is the potential precedent that it sets to me.
This is beyond Venezuela, a country that I know and care deeply about.
This is beyond Latin America.
This is about what happens when the most powerful country on earth chooses to designate a sovereign government yes, a repressive illegitimate, but a government of a sovereign nation, a criminal organization, a terrorist group, and then deal with it in any manner that it sees fit.
It becomes a precedent for how the US deals with other nations around the world.
To me, there's a risk of this conflict giving rise to something larger.
And, of course, you could argue that what we see in Venezuela is just a continuation of years, perhaps decades, of US interventionism.
You know, the drone strikes on presumed terrorists in the Middle East, at least since the time of Barack Obama, be very little legal oversight because it has sent alleged terrorists to Guantanamo Bay.
But I think what we see in Venezuela is a massive escalation of a trend right where you see, perhaps in broad daylight, the killing of people accused of certain crime without the least amount of evidence or due process presented.
And The risk that many legal experts see is that this becomes the new normal, that this will become the way US and perhaps other global powers treat their adversaries, by designating sovereign nations as criminals and then treating them as such.
Anatoly, thank you.
Thank you for having me as always.
On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the military had attacked a boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean for the first time, an expansion of the attacks the administration has been carrying out on vessels in the Caribbean.
Hegseth said in a social media post that the strike killed two people on the boat, which he said was carrying drugs.
It was the eighth known boat attack since September, bringing the officially acknowledged death toll of the strikes to 34.
We'll be right back.
Here's what else you should know today.
On Wednesday, President Trump announced that he was imposing new sanctions on Russia for the first time in his second term, underscoring his frustration with President Vladimir Putin after a plan for the two leaders to meet fell apart.
Trump made his irritation with Putin clear on Wednesday, saying his conversations with the Russian leader were always good, but never went anywhere.
The sanctions targeted Russia's two largest oil companies, and they're some of the most significant measures that the US has taken against the Russian energy sector since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.
And President Trump acknowledged on Wednesday that he was having the entire East Wing demolished to make way for his 90000 square foot ballroom, an expansion of a project that is remaking the profile of one of the nation's most iconic buildings.
Trump also said the ballroom would cost 300 million 100 million more than the original cost estimate given less than three months ago.
The president has said that he's raising tens of millions of dollars in private donations to fund the construction, sparking concerns from ethics experts who warn that it may just be another way for the wealthy to buy access to the president.
Today's episode was produced by Carlos Prieto and Michael Simon Johnson.
It was edited by M.J.
Davis-Lynn and Paige Cowett.
Contains music by Diane Wong, Alicia Betitup, and Marion Lozano.
And was engineered by Chris Wood.
That's it for The Daily.
I'm Natalie Kittroweth.
See you tomorrow.
