{"id":166245,"date":"2026-01-04T13:25:36","date_gmt":"2026-01-04T21:25:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=166245"},"modified":"2026-01-04T13:25:36","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T21:25:36","slug":"trumps-plan-for-venezuela","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=166245","title":{"rendered":"Trump’s Plan For Venezuela"},"content":{"rendered":"

Francisco Poleo writes<\/a>: Delcy Rodr\u00edguez and the core of the regime\u2019s leadership are negotiating with the United States as we speak. This is not a sudden pivot. It is the result of a conclusion reached in Washington over months: the U.S. does not believe that Mar\u00eda Corina Machado and the opposition have the operational capacity to seize power in Venezuela because they do not control, or meaningfully fracture, the military. If they did, power would have shifted immediately after the 2024 presidential election. It did not.<\/p>\n

For a long period, U.S. officials, including Marco Rubio, were in constant communication with Machado and her team. They were asked repeatedly for proof of a concrete plan, not just to win power symbolically, but to retain it in practice: chain of command, military alignment, institutional control, day-after governance. The answers were consistently evasive, justified by security concerns, but never substantiated. At that point, from the U.S. government\u2019s perspective, the opposition ceased to look like a viable transition mechanism and began to look like a political wager with no enforcement arm.<\/p>\n

The plan now on the table is for Delcy Rodr\u00edguez to stabilize the country with U.S. backing and then call for general elections. This is not framed as an endorsement of the regime, but as a containment and transition strategy. Washington is explicit about one thing: this is not a partnership of equals. The United States is running the process, the lines are being managed through Rubio, and the leverage is entirely asymmetric. Delcy is the instrument, not the center of gravity.<\/p>\n

U.S. officials also assess that Delcy\u2019s harsh public rhetoric today was aimed inward, at the chavista base, not outward. That messaging is understood as domestic signaling. Nevertheless, as of now, negotiations with the United States are ongoing as we speak.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Francisco Poleo writes: Delcy Rodr\u00edguez and the core of the regime\u2019s leadership are negotiating with the United States as we speak. This is not a sudden pivot. It is the result of a conclusion reached in Washington over months: the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43023],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-166245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-venezuela"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=166245"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":166246,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166245\/revisions\/166246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=166245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=166245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=166245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}