Global News Podcast - The US ran a war game on the aftermath of Maduro’s fall – it predicted chaos

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

When the US government captured Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, on Saturday, most of the world was shocked. But US officials had for years been gaming out different scenarios, including predicting what would happen if Maduro was ousted. According to one man who took part, each ended in disaster. On today’s episode, we speak to the former Washington Post journalist Douglas Farah, who participated in war games on Venezuela during Donald Trump’s first term, as well as during the Obama and Biden administrations. The Global Story brings clarity to politics, business and foreign policy in a time of connection and disruption. For more episodes, just search 'The Global Story' wherever you get your BBC Podcasts.

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Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, I'm Asma Khalid. And I'm Tristan Redmond, and we're here with a bonus episode for you from the Global Story podcast. The world order is shifting. Old alliances are fraying and new ones are emerging. Some of this turbulence can be traced to decisions made in the United States. But the U.S. isn't just a cause of the upheaval. Its politics are also a symptom of it.

Every day we focus on one story, looking at how America and the world shape each other. So we hope you enjoy this episode. And to find more of our show, just search for the global story wherever you get your BBC podcasts. When the U.S. government captured Venezuela's president Nicholas Maduro over the weekend, much of the world was shocked. But behind closed doors, U.S. officials had been gaming out what would happen if Maduro was ousted. Even during President Trump's first term, the government ran simulations, almost like immersive theater, with teams playing the U.S. and its adversaries, each of them trying to win the game. And we're told by one man who was in one of those rooms that every scenario had the same result.

Disaster. From the BBC, Amos Mahalid in Washington, D.C. And today on the global story, why did the U.S. capture Maduro if it had already foreseen the risk of chaos? Douglas Farah is a former journalist who covered Latin America for years for the Washington Post. Since then, he's used his expertise in the region to advise the U.S. government. He's worked with the U.S. government across the Obama, Biden, and First Trump administrations. and he's participated in several so-called war games exercises.

So I started off by asking him to explain what these games are and why governments use them. It's where you sit down and you look at, okay, this is the situation in the case of Venezuela, okay, this is what we have now, what happens if the regime changes and how would that regime change? And then you bring in a group of people who theoretically know what they're talking about and you look at all the different economic data, the different military scenarios, the different social scenarios, and say, if this happened, this is what would likely happen. So this is really elementary, but can you talk us through how a war game plays out? What actually happens?

Well, in a war game, and I've done multiple on other issues as well, you go into a room and you're given scenarios, okay, this is Venezuela now, okay? What do we know about Venezuela now? So you say, okay, so if in the case of Venezuela, if you decapitate the regime, what happens? Usually it's a full day, at least, sometimes two days, where you then go through the scenarios. And then different people, you might have State Department people in the room. You might have National Security Council. You'd have DOD people in the room.

You might have intelligence community people in the room. There are some that are just military, depending on those are usually smaller and more focused on specific actions. War games are very frequent in the Pentagon because you want to be. map out scenarios of different things where action might be required. And are you discussing this in the abstract or are you role playing? Is there a sense of theater behind this? In some there is, you're assigned to a team. So you're the red team, which is the team that's trying to be the bad guys in the scenario from whatever. Bad guys being. Being the Bolivarian army and how they would react, let's say, in Venezuela. How would their

intelligence structure react? Okay, so there's a red team and then there's also a And then with a blue team and then... The blue team is the U.S.? The blue team is the U.S. And then what about Brazil? Brazil is not red or blue. How would they react to what do you see going on? What would they do with their borders?

Would they support the Maduro regime? Would they withdraw support from the Maduro regime? Are you all taking on the role of one of these actors? You're supposed to be acting as if you were those actors. Okay. You're the Venezuelan military. So did you take on a role for example? Sure, yeah.

Usually not the blue team because I spent many years in Latin America around guerrilla groups and stuff. So my expertise, I think, is more valuable in saying, I think, this is what this group would do. Quote the bad guys. And your job is to sort of embody and act out how they would behave in real time. Right. Exactly. You try to think through what the United States would have to think about. Got it. Why was Venezuela such a focus of the United States for so many years that they, that you all, the government was giving out these contingency plans for years, you say, dating back to the Obama White House. There are a lot of contingency planning for probably almost every country in the world.

So it's not unique to Venezuela. I think when things began to really heat up in the early mid-administration, Obama administration, when we saw the Cartel de Los Solis really sort of forming into different power structures. And this is the cartel that the U.S. government says that Maduro is the head of. Right. And that it's a terrorist organization now that Trump is dead. designated it. When we saw the FARC guerrillas in Colombia really moving aggressively... And the FARC can you define that as well?

The FARC is the guerrilla group in Colombia that was founded in 1964 and had been fighting the Colombian government since then until they signed a peace agreement in 2016. So they were armed and financed by the Maduro regime. We had other terrorist organizations. Iran was becoming much more involved. At the time, Russia was making a big push and China was just coming in. So that was a national security concern was what is the FARC guerrilla group doing, and how are they tied to the Venezuela regime? So let's talk about the different scenarios that you gamed out. And I want to speak about this chronologically to the degree that we can. So what was the primary scenario you mapped out during the Obama years? So we looked a lot at the economic

situation because they were in a constant state of crisis. During the Obama years, there is hyperinflation of several thousand percent a year. So people had nothing to eat. They couldn't buy anything. So was that going to bring down the regime? So you began with kind of the economic pressure. And then where did your war game scenario move on from there? Our basic determination in thinking was that the regime would probably not fall. And then what we saw and what we were talked about a lot, which then did come to pass, was the massive migration out of Venezuela due to the economic hardship. You did. You game that out. We did not expect it to be. I don't think, at least I didn't, as massive as it was.

You see millions of people. Eight million people. We thought that people start leaving because of hunger. We did not factor in the fact that Maduro did, in fact, let a lot of people out of prison and sort of orchestrate then a lot of people leaving that have wreaked havoc across the region. But when people get hungry and their children are sick, they're going to look for a better place to move to. And that was clear that that was going to happen.

And that was where you saw that story sort of ending. The outcome was that Maduro would take. stay in power, there would be a mass exodus of people. Let's move to Donald Trump's first term in the White House. You continued to map out different scenarios. You say with the Pentagon during that time period. And to be clear, you had said earlier, you didn't look at removing Maduro from power, but you did look at a day after plan. What happens next? Did you do that under the first Trump term? And can you play out the scenario how it unfolded? Well, we were looking at because there were a lot of internal fissures within the Maduro regime. So what happens if Maduro is removed? Could you then,

what we're, I think we're trying to do now, move the remaining regime toward a democratic transition? Removed by whom? An internal coup. So if there is an internal coup and Maduro is no longer there, what become the power centers? What was the context in 2019 that made the Trump administration consider gaming out Venezuela and gaming out a possible day after plan. Well, at the time you had an elected government from the opposition. This weekend, massive crowd supporting this man. Opposition leader Wang Guido, who's declared himself Venezuela's legitimate president, accusing Nicolas Maduro of claiming victory in a sham election.

It seemed as though Maduro might be forced to recognize him. And you had a broad coalition of Latin. American countries behind the opposition, publicly behind the opposition. We are strongly urging the National Armed Forces of Venezuela to recognize their commander-in-chief, Wang Guido, the acting president of Venezuela. So in 2019, on the border, the United States and a bunch of countries decided they would send in massive, massive humanitarian aid from Colombia into Venezuela, and they lined it all up on the border.

President Nicolas Maduro is closing the border with Brazil, as opposition leaders plan to bring in foreign humanitarian aid from neighboring nations. Essentially, Maduro said, you're not coming in, burned a bunch of the food, and walked away. Obstructing the access of humanitarian aid is a crime against humanity. And I think that was part of Maduro's misthinking was that nothing could happen because he had already outlasted this type of threat before. But at that time, you had Chile, Colombia, Brazil,

very important Latin American countries also on board with putting the humanitarian aid. and saying we can help you with your humanitarian problem and recognize the elections. And Maduro was looking very vulnerable. You were invited to map out a scenario, you say, if Maduro was removed from power. Right. What happened in those scenarios? So our primary scenario then was likely continuity, which is you saw for the next six years,

because there was no credible threat to the regime at that point. It would likely just state, which it did. the least likely scenario was a popular uprising. There was no structure for the opposition to achieve enough in terms of weapons and legitimacy and actual power on the streets to topple the regime. They have a very strong repressive apparatus. They had identified the opposition leaders. So that didn't seem likely. And then the one that I'm going back and reading what I wrote at the time, one of them was the decapitation of the regime or the regime disband. We did not. certainly predict in this way, but that Maduro is no longer in power.

Disappeared? Well, it could have been, in most cases, in those regime changes, they're arrested and then put on trial for being traitors to the revolution or something. And this was being carried out in your scenario that you war-gamed out by the military. By the rest of the Maduro regime. And what we, the conclusion of that in which I'm afraid you can see now coming into play in the current situation is that, the regime can probably control Caracas and maybe main airports. But you have so many armed groups that are so fragmented in a very large country that is jungle, mountains, and ocean front, that no one could come in and control the interior of the country without an enormous amount

of troops and effort. And I think that that remains true today. So you mapped out a scenario in which Maduro is gone, his regime remains in power. But, even his regime you're saying is unable to fully control the country. Yes, I think that what we were predicting is not civil war because there's too fragmented to have, there's no two sides to have a civil war, just general chaos. Because if you have a military that begins disbanding and they just take their guns with them, you have the police who have no command and control structure left and you walk off the job with your revolver. If you have a non-functioning intelligence structure, but they know where their enemies are,

It's then you can carry out personal vendettas as opposed to strategic repression. All of those things will lead to a very chaotic situation. And in the interior of the country where different armed groups control large chunks of territory, they will probably hunker down and protect their interests there. They're not going to go to war with Caracas, but if anyone comes into attack them, they'll fight back or they may try to expand their territory. So you're looking, I think, at a very chaotic, weaponized situation in which going in and taking control of that territory would be enormously costly.

Is there a role for an opposition movement that you mapped out within that scenario? It depended a bit on what the U.S. was going to do, which at that point we didn't have this Trump administration. You didn't have this Trump administration, but you mapped this out during Trump one, right? Right, but they were not as aggressive in Trump one as this administration turned out. Various officials were different. Right, yeah. Yeah, they had, that was an entire, the different cast of characters and much more institutionally and traditionally oriented toward what the role of the military would be and how chains of command would work and all that things, which seemed to be very different now.

So I think that the idea then was to say, okay, what will the power centers be? What are the interplays of these different groups? But you didn't see a scenario where an opposition leader would eventually control the country or take over in leadership? Not more than controlling the capital. Not more than controlling the capital. Because if the opposition comes in, you have no army that's loyal to you. You have no police force that's loyal to you. And your intelligence structure has been largely moved to Havana.

How are you going to govern a country that is well-armed and has enormous amounts of non-state armed actors controlling vast amounts of territory? And during the game itself, were you on the red team, the quote-unquote, bad guys team during that time? I was almost always on the red team. Okay. presumably trying to retain power. Right, right. How did you all do so at that time period? Do you recall?

Our assessment in the end was that the repressive apparatus was so well entrenched and that there was no trust at all built with the opposition trying to come in, that they could keep control of territory and social scenarios if they could keep enough food and other things flowing to the population. So your team won.

Well, your team. The group of us that predicted the survival of the regime under almost any circumstance turns out to have been right so far. So after that war game in 2019, you wrote a report for the Pentagon about the possible consequences of removing Maduro. What did your report say?

Well, we essentially thought you would end up with widespread chaos for a long period of time because again you wouldn't have a central government you wouldn't have a command and control structure i think what's different in what we're seeing now from what we wrote about at the time was that so far the military has not fractured i think that over time it may well still fracture which would lead to essentially a creation of a series of almost many states within venezuela where you had a central government that's a husk of government that controls the capital not too distinct from what Syria became in the end, where the Assad regime could control Damascus and not a whole

lot outside of Damascus. They could control Caracas. Douglas, I just want to make sure I understand what you're saying, though, is in these various scenarios that you mapped out, no successor of Maduro's, even if it came from within his orbit, could successfully control the country. This was in 2019 time period, you're saying. And yet Maduro was. why would he have been able to continue control of the country? That's a really good question. We didn't say no success. We thought the most likely successor who had a chance would be the Ostado Cabero.

Maduro was essentially a really good traffic cop at keeping everyone's interests close enough together so they didn't fly apart. We did not think that any of the other players had the capacity to unite and keep the sort of corporate board functioning. I want to jump ahead to your work during the Biden administration days. You also mapped out different scenarios of what might happen then. What was the principal scenario that you gamed out during that period? Did you also look at the day after Maduro plans during that time period?

Not nearly as much. What we did mostly during the Biden administration was look at how different criminal organizations intersected with the regime because the Biden administration was not focused. on regime change at all. They didn't focus a lot on Latin America. And I think their general view was that Venezuela was not a particularly large threat to the United States when they had Afghanistan and other wars still going on. So we did a lot of analysis of criminal groups and extra-regional groups in Venezuela and the region. Did you look at economic pressure? We did. And we looked at the- sanctions. I know that the administration used quite a bit of around

the world. And we, as I'm glad you said that, because we spent a lot of time looking at what viable sanctions would be like. There were multiple levers of economic sanctions on the elite, not on the general population, that were never used. Because if you buy into the assessment, as I do, that the primary motivation over time was financial, not ideological. For Maduro. For Maduro. Then to cut off the financial flows is what would really damage them. And so you were looking at how to cut off those financial flows. And the primary way to do that was what exactly your say? I have to be careful what I say here. There are ways to identify individuals who were moving money out of Venezuela to European and then Hong Kong and other

safe harbors, the Caribbean safe harbors, and also the United States at safe harbor. For multi-layers of shell companies and ways to move their money that were not immediately detectables coming from the regime. Okay. But for example, we mapped out a process where they moved three point $1.3 billion from the Maduro regime and elements of the FARC through El Salvador. That was one through their oil company, the Venezuelan Petroleum Company. The state oil company. The state oil company. So it's not easy.

I mean, it's a complex system. And the big problem with all that is you have to have a very high level of proof to show that, in fact, is ill-gotten gained as opposed to state activity. If journalism is the first draft of history, What happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories.

I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to ask you about what we have seen transpire over the last few days. The one thing that it sounds like you all never war-gamed out is indeed what just happened. A special operation to capture Maduro in the middle of the night,

fly him to the United States to face trial, and then announce that the United States is, quote, running the country. It seems through some sort of extreme pressure campaign on Maduro's vice president. who is now the new president. Why was that something that was never war-gamed? I think the possibility of kidnapping a sitting head of state in the Western Hemisphere did not cross any of our minds, really. And if you're looking at realistic options of what might happen, a realistic option was, it would be like a star fell out of the sky and hit him on the head. I mean, it just didn't seem. And I think that every administration from

George Bush won forward was very careful to try to make the reestablishment. a democracy and rule of law in Latin America, a primary policy issue. And so no one was talking about taking back the Panama Canal like Trump is not. I was talking about taking over Greenland or wanting Canada to be our 51st day. Like that was not what the discussions were about. Why didn't we think about it? It was like thinking about why don't elephants fly. Like it just didn't, there was no reason to think about it. So what did you think when you woke up on Saturday morning and saw that this news had happened? I was really stunned. I didn't think that even the Trump administration would go that far. And I've worked with around special forces and folks for Longham, the capability to do something

on that, absolutely. So the fact that they could do it didn't surprise me. The fact that they did it surprised me enormously. I think that that will probably be the high water mark of the Venezuela operation. I think it's going to be downhill from here because there's food insecurity is so high in Venezuela. They won't have any gasoline. They have no medicine. If we don't have a plan to come in and meet those felt needs of the population very quickly, everything we've done will lose legitimacy very quickly because people get very hungry, very quickly, and then what they say, almost immediately as well, we were better off before. Why did you take Maduro when we at least could buy bread? And there doesn't appear to be a plan in place with this operation to bring in anything except

one that they seem to be hoping that oil companies will come in and start doing things. That is not a way to legitimize or move people to your side because it's not an ideological thing. It's the life and death existential threat whether you can eat or not and whether your kids can eat, whether they can get to hospital and get medicine. President Trump has accused Venezuela of being a sort of nexus of drug operations. Drugs coming into the United States is one of the reasons that he is justifying his actions. If the United States has a goal to stop drugs from getting into the United States, what would you do? The United States has, particularly through the Coast Guard, an unusual and very well-developed system of interdicting drugs without killing people, without the lethal force

attached. One of the things I found in my years of working around the military was that the Coast Guard it has a unique set of authorities and a unique way to operate with other governments. It allows them great latitude in operating in interdicting in the high seas in ways they're not internationally controversial. And they've always been under resource. So I think if you wanted to cut off that, if that were really your primary goal, you could do that. I think it's important, though, to understand that Venezuela doesn't produce cocaine. It comes from other places.

So if you want to get at that, then you have to be able to have a relationship with the Colombians, which is very good for a very long period of time, now no longer very good. Ecuador is a key player. Panama is a key player. But again, if you just go after Venezuelan drugs, they're just going to leak out through. We're already seeing before this there was already a big move to leaking tons of cocaine out through the Amazon, out of Peru, into Peru, through Brazil, some of different ports. that are now accessible through Ecuador.

So these groups are very creative and very highly adaptable. So if you just do Venezuela, all you've done is kick the ant-hill and move folks to do something a little bit differently. So again, you don't have a comprehensive structure. And there's no indication that I've seen that Venezuela's involved in the fentanyl trade. That's just not accurate. Most of that, the precursor chemicals come from China into Mexico,

and there's three provinces in China that produce 80% of the precursors that come in. So if that is your actual goal, there are other tools to get at it. Under Maduro's time, there have been so many people, millions who have fled Venezuela because of living conditions there, the economy has been failing. By most accounts, he is considered a dictator, someone who has imprisoned many people. And I guess I'm wondering, given all the different scenarios you mapped out, what would have been the best way to handle the situation in Venezuela in your view? I think that's a really good question.

I think part of the reason nothing happened for so long was because there aren't a good options in resolving this dictatorship. I think that's part of the reason why things didn't move forward under previous administration with very smart people who wanted to solve the problem or get out the problem. I think if you had cut the economic lifelines of the elite much more effectively and much more aggressively. You would have broken the cohesion of the regime internally, made it impossible for them to continue to feed at the trough. So you're saying cut off the economic lifeline of the elites. Of the elites. And I think you also, what my argument internally was that you can't just focus on

Venezuela. You have to focus on Ecuador at the time, which is a dollarized economy and a huge center of how they were moving stuff. You had to focus on Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela, the bolivarian structure. Not because of this. It's a lot of it. ideology. There were right-wing kleptocrats who were stealing tons of money too. But in this particular case, you had an alliance of five important countries that were then also aligned with Russia, Iran, and China who were happy to help them move their money around because why not? They were their allies and it was a way to make the U.S. uncomfortable. So I think that we never developed a cohesive, comprehensive financial strategy. And I think that that is what would have broken the backs of the

elites and made it unsustainable for any of them to stay in power. How that played out over time, if you had someone like the opposition, there's one overwhelming of these elections to be able to step in, that would have been the time when you could talk about that with U.S. support, with European support, with Brazilian support, with Peruvian support, then move to elections that would have to be recognized. But that's not, that's a complicated. and not easy scenario to play out. So in all the war games that you've described for us, that you were involved in,

is it correct my understanding that all the scenarios essentially always ended in sort of disaster, even if it was an involvement of doing nothing and the status quo just remaining the same? None of these seem to end well in the scenarios you did? That's exactly right. We didn't have any scenarios or we thought, ah, this is what, you know, this would play out well here.

Because everything requires not only a political alignment and sort of the ability to execute multiple things simultaneously, but in an enormous amount of resources to come in behind. You can't go into a country, as we discovered in Afghanistan and many other places, and then just expect everything to work. You have to make massive investments. You have to have the humanitarian aid package. You have to have the business package. You have to have everything come in. And it seems clear that the United States is not prepared to do that. And maybe it shouldn't be. I'm not saying it should be prepared to do that.

But if you're going to do that, you have to have the ability to make people's lives better. Thanks, Douglas. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much for the opportunity. I appreciate it. That was Douglas Farah, former Washington Post journalist who now works as a national security consultant. Thanks again to him for sharing his expertise. And by the way, folks, we have got something exciting coming up that we would love to ask for your help with.

Well, next week, we are doing crossover episodes with our sister podcasts here at the BBC, shows like Focus on Africa and Ukrainecast. We'll be looking at the new world order, which countries have influence and how are they using it? It would be great to hear your thoughts on this. So any questions or ideas, suggestions, send us an email at The Global Story at BBC.com. And that's it for today's show. This episode was produced by Hannah Moore, Lucy Paul, and James Shield. It was mixed by Travis Evans, and our senior news editor is China Collets. Thanks as always for listening, and we'll talk to you again tomorrow. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed,

hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.