School of War - Ep 257: Elliott Abrams on the Venezuela Crisis

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

Elliott Abrams, senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and U.S. Special Representative for Venezuela and Iran from 2019 to 2021, joins the show to discuss events in the Caribbean. ▪️ Times 01:56 Venezuela Through Multiple Administrations  06:05 Maduro 11:53 Trump to Biden 17:56 U.S. Military Capabilities  24:05 Political Justifications  30:11 The Venezuelan Opposition 35:56 Machado in Hiding 41:27 Worst Case Scenarios Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more content on our School of War Substack

There's a lot going on in the neighborhood of Venezuela, where the Navy's fourth fleet is enjoying an unprecedented renaissance, and we are all wondering what's going to happen. Next, Elliot Abrams joins us to discuss. Let's get into it. It is a for war. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in history. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the rain. situation is a brand.

People are not to speak on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Elliot Abrams.

He's a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He's the chairman of the Vandenberg Coalition, also of the Tikva Fund. He's had a long career in public service very relevantly for our discussion today. He was special representative for Venezuela. and Iran, the State Department in President Trump's first term. He was Deputy National Security Advisor in the administration of George W. Bush. He's been an assistant secretary of state, other senior roles before that. Elliot Abrams. Thank you so much for joining School of War. Sure. Happy to be here, Aaron. I thought I would start us with your direct experience or perhaps your

most sustained direct experience on this issue, which was in the first Trump term when you were special representative. Tell us a bit about what the situation looked like. What was the nature of the Venezuela challenge when you came on the job? And forgive me, I don't know if that was 2017 or 18 or when precisely that was. So tell us what it was. And what was going on? I'll take a minute to just go back and say my first exposure was as the assistant secretary state for Latin America in the Reagan administration, when Venezuela was a rich democracy. And this is at a time in which most South American countries are military dictatorships. Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, etc., Chile, but not Venezuela.

Fast forward, actually, to January 2019. In 2018, Maduro had stolen an election. His new term as president was to begin on January 5, 2019. And the Trump administration decided that's a fraud. He didn't win that election. So on January 5th, he was fraudulently inaugurated. But we toward the end, January 24th, I remember right, or 19th, that week anyway, we recognized the Speaker of the National Assembly, Juan Guaido, as the legitimate interim president of Venezuela.

And that was the real confrontation with Maduro regime. In 2017 and 18, there had been plenty of sanctions. And the president was interested in Venezuela, I'm told, from the very beginning, had conversations about it with H.R. McMaster, when he was the first national security advisor and Trump won. But the real confrontation came in January 2019 and not very long thereafter. I would say about a month, six weeks later, we actually closed the U.S. Embassy and removed all of our diplomats to Bogota.

And we began to really ratchet up the sanctions starting in 2019. So tell us, if you would, about Nicola. Maduro. I mean, what is his background? What is his deal, if you will? Yeah. That is, you know, for as much as is, for as much as Venezuela is in the news right now, there's not a ton of discussion about who he actually is. He succeeded Hugo Chavez as the president or I would say dictator of Venezuela. It's not 10 years ago when Chavez died. He had been, Maduro, had been a labor leader of sorts in the Chavista labor union. Chavez had been a military man. Maduro had been a bus driver and then, you know, rose up in the transportation unions and in the party

and was selected by Chavez to be his successor and has been there now for a decade. And the cupola, the leadership has been reasonably stable during that period. What has not been stable is that they've just destroyed in this decade. They've destroyed the economy even more than Chavez had done. And this is the period in which you get eight million than as well as leaving their country. That's a fourth of what had been the population and certainly the largest refugee flow in Latin American history. That's extraordinary. And it's a big part of the rationale that the Trump administration seems to be articulating for

for taking more aggressive action against Venezuela. Another part of the rationale, of course, relates to drugs and trafficking. Tell us about that. What is the fact and what is the fiction of that as far as Venezuela is concerned? I'm also fascinated by this entity, the Cartel de los Solas, am I if I'm pronouncing? I don't know if you're a 30-rock fan, Elliot, that Tina Fey show from about 15 years ago, but the main character of the show, Liz Lemon, is addicted to these semi-publices. poisonous off-brand Mexican chipped, and they're called Sabor de Soled. So every time this comes up,

this is what I think of. I realize that's pretty niche, but there's probably one or two listeners out there who will appreciate that. Could even be five. But one thing that the Trump administration is saying that that is unrelated to Venezuela is the fentanyl problem. Fentanyl comes across the Mexican border. They have nothing to do with Venezuela. But cocaine comes through Venezuela. Cocaine is grown primarily in this hemisphere of Colombia, and some of it goes from Colombia, north or east, that is, Atlantic or Caribbean, but a lot of it goes east into Venezuela and is trafficked out of Venezuela into the Caribbean and either goes to the United States or goes to Europe. The Trump administration claims that the Maduro regime,

is much involved in that trafficking. And I think there's a lot of evidence proving that point. This is really a criminal regime, and it sustains itself in part through sanctions, busting, oil exports. We should talk about that. But also through drug trafficking, gold trafficking, human trafficking. And the administration claims that, well, they're not just taking, you know, five or 10% off the top, allowing Colombian drug traffickers, for example, to operate in Venezuela. It's also more deeply involved. And again, I think there's a lot of evidence suggesting that that's correct.

Certainly, it's correct about a lot of people in the Venezuelan army. Because of the condition of the economy, one of the ways in which Maduro keeps the army loyal is to say to a general, for example, okay, you're in charge of this state or that state, do what you want there when it comes to drug trafficking, make whatever money you can. So if we are concerned about these migrant flows

and we are concerned about drug flows, that's not going to change while Nicholas Maduro is running then as well, because his regime is deeply involved in creating both of those flows. And this all came to a point of focus in 2020, right? There was an indictment. There's a legal aspect to all of this that you worked on.

What was the situation? What is the situation for Maduro in American court? Maduro was under indictment for drug trafficking, as are a number of other people at the top of the regime. In that sense, it is reminiscent of what happened in Panama. when Manuel Noriega was indicted. What we did, I was in the Reagan administration, this is 2008 when he was indicted. And what we did then was to make him, I'm sorry, 1980. 1980.

Time passes quickly when you're having fun. 1988. He was indicted in Florida, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. and we offered him a deal. That is, President Reagan offered him a deal. Leave. Leave Panama. No jail. No vengeance. Keep your money. Just leave power and leave Panama. And we negotiated for a while. He turned the deal down and came, of course, to regret it because he ended up in federal prison. And I think it's fair to say that President Trump has made the same offer to Maduro, maybe in that phone call they had, went indirectly as well. You just have to go and all will be easier for you. But so far, like Noriega Maduro is saying no.

And your invocation of Noriega reminds me of a thought I've had a number of times over the course of last month, two months, whatever, that for as much as the way that events are transpiring and causing commentators to say this is somehow unprecedented, or the Trump administration itself, sort of grandly announcing a Trump court. Larry to the Monroe Doctrine. Actually, this is pretty standard, a lot of this, at least, maybe not all of it, is pretty standard GOP, Western Hemisphereic Policy, you know, back to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. I don't know if you'd agree with that, or maybe you'd like to highlight some differences, but the parallels to 1988 are hard to ignore.

I think that's right. And I think you can go even back further that the sense that we're not going to allow hostile governments in this hemisphere. And for Monroe and afterward, that meant European-dominated governments and monarchies. More recently it meant Soviet-aligned countries. Of course, the great exception was Cuba. We then fought during the Reagan years, in 1980s, to prevent a replication of what happened in Nicaragua in El Salvador or Honduras or Guatemala. Today, what are the hostile countries, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua. And Venezuela is a key partly because it has a relationship with Iran and China and Russia, and partly because its subsidies of the Cuban

regime, which it gives free or heavily discounted oil, are really important to the survival of the regime in Cuba. If I were trying to persuade President Trump, you got to do this. I'd say to him, if Maduro goes and that regime falls and the subsidies of Cuba end, then you've got a shot over the next three years of the Cuban regime falling and with something which, you know, John Kennedy couldn't do. And we're moving toward freeing this hemisphere of any regime that's really hostile to the U.S. Things like that seem to matter to presidents. I think it mattered a lot to Joe Biden that Barack Obama could not.

out of Afghanistan and he Joe Biden could. Speaking of Joe Biden, where did things stand during the Biden administration in terms of Venezuela policy? So you had this strategy of diplomatic economic pressure in Trump won. Trump leaves office. Maduro is still there. What's Biden's take on the problem? You know, hostile to this terribly repressive anti-American government worried about ties to QO,

Iran, Russia, China, and sanctions, economic sanctions. But not as, what word do I want, energetic, let's say, as President Trump, particularly in this term, there was never any sense, I think, of danger to the survival of the Maduro regime. I should say that in Trump, one, we tried diplomatic and political pressure and, of course, those heavy economic sanctions in an effort at, I would call it regime change, at restoring democracy in Venezuela, and it failed. And in a sense, Biden then kept on with that effort, but didn't change it. We were still supporting Juan Guaido as interim president.

We still had sanctions, but there was nothing new there. In a sense, what President Trump is doing this year is logical. That failed. It failed for him in 2019 and 20. It failed for Joe Biden. Nothing changed. So if you want change, you need to do more. I want to bring us up to the present.

And let me ask you to speculate a bit about President Trump's motivations or general framework here. You know, he's not a guy who seems to embrace, maybe you'll correct me here and remind me of things I'm forgetting, but who seems to embrace the banner of regime change in a lot of situations. So he did have a maximum pressure campaign against Iran in the first term. And certainly as far as it goes with Maduro right now, I mean, he's made, comments to the effect that Maduro's time is up, whether or not that's actually the objective of everything that's going on, and we can discuss that. However, in other regards, you know, you think Donald Trump regime change is not necessarily the first banner that comes to your mind.

Also, of all the foreign policy challenges that the United States has, to include in the region, to include in Central South America, you consider sort of, we've had a number of discussions on the show about the real instability that's emerged in Mexico. have major problems in places like Colombia. There's, of course, Cuba, this longstanding thorn in the side of American regional security. Why the Trump focus on Venezuela and what appear to be, you know, the possibility of quite maximalist goals there? I don't know. And I think it's one of the most interesting questions. As you say, regime change is a phrase is really out in this administration. One could argue that he's making an exception because it's our hemisphere, the new national security strategy, talks about a focus on the Western Hemisphere.

One could argue that it's less about regime change in the sense of moving from dictatorship to democracy than it is about eliminating a regime that is in league with countries that are hostile to the United States, that do things we do not want, allow a law. Chinese and Russian military to be present or an example of the kind of thing this regime in Venezuela does, give blank Venezuelan passports to Hispola, obviously to make it easier for their people to move around the world. That may be it. I don't think it is a view that this is going to be very easy. Trump complained, I don't know if it was a reasonable complaint, but he complained that John Bolton had sold him in the first term that this was going to be easy. Just put a little pressure on. The regime will collapse.

It's a great victory. So I don't think it's that. I'm inclined to think the fact that it's Western Hemisphere is critical here. And it does, you know, get into drugs and migration, which are big issues. But as you've said, there is so much on the table from the president around the world. it is a little odd to me that he has made this such a priority that we've got, pick a number, 10, 15 percent of the Navy in the Caribbean. Well, yeah, I think this is a point you made in your foreign affairs piece from a few weeks ago

that this is a renaissance for the U.S. Navy's fourth fleet, the likes of, maybe Renaissance is the wrong word, because it's sort of the likes of which it's not seen maybe since the foundations of the fourth fleet. I don't know. We would have to consult the fleet historian. But, okay, so this moves us into the present. As you just pointed out, there's, a very impressive concentration of American military might in the region. Certainly way more than you need to interdict drug boats that we are doing that. I mean, ways that seem sort of related in some ways, but in other ways separate from the Venezuela challenge.

I mean, I think we're hitting boats out in the Pacific as well. But so more than enough to do that kind of thing, not enough to, you know, do regime change in the 2003 Iraq sense of the phrase. Well, the Panama. Or the Panama sense. What was, I actually don't, I'm embarrassed, apologies to put you on the spot here, but do you sort of off the top of your head know,

what was the ground order of battle roughly for Panama? I actually don't, I should know that. Yeah, if I remember correctly, I may not, because I was not in the George H.W. Bush administration. But my memory is, of course, we had roughly 10,000 troops on the ground in the canal zone, and I think the invasion added about 20,000 more. Okay.

Which is twice the number or more that we have in the Caribbean today. And I would say I don't think that's on the table. So that raises the obvious question then. What is on the table based on your analysis of this order of battle that we have out there, everything that you're hearing and seeing? Well, I guess it's actually, I can unspool that into two questions. What do you think is likely to happen and what do you think should happen? It is conceivable to me that in a month, two months, the president says, this is ridiculous,

that let's walk away from this, declares victory on the grounds that maritime drug trafficking is way, way down. And it is way, way down. I think the administration said 92% down. It'll be way, way down, obviously. Now, it'll come back as soon as the fleet leaves. but declare victory and walk away. I don't think he will do that because no one will be fooled.

This is a confrontation now between Maduro and Trump. And if Maduro survives, Trump walks away, he's lost. And it's a big defeat. Again, this is our hemisphere. And Trump chose to do this. He chose, in a sense, to create this crisis. So what is he likely to do? I think there are two options,

and we're seeing one of them already beyond those small boats where I agree with you. That doesn't hurt the regime much. A blockade. A blockade of the export of Venezuelan oil. And the goal there would be to eliminate that source of revenue for the regime. Already, if you are the owner of a ship carrying sanctioned oil out of Venezuela, or carrying some ingredient, they have very thick crude, so they use diluance to dilute it so that, for example, it can move through pipelines.

If you're bringing that to Venezuela, you're not going to do that now. I mean, you're not crazy. You're going to try to wait this out. Oddly enough, and it is ironic, we're getting into a situation where the only oil leaving Venezuela is that of Chevron, which is an exception to the sanctions and which delivers that crewed to the Gulf Coast. But it's way, way down. And any oil they do manage to sell

because of the risk to the buyer will be heavily, heavily, heavily discounted. So again, the revenue of the regime is going to drop a lot. We're already doing that, and I think we're going to be doing it a good deal more. And for that, you do need, maybe not exactly this fleet,

but you need significant forces around Venezuela and the Caribbean. The second step, which he might have taken first, but obviously didn't, is to hit land targets in Venezuela. To prove to Maduro, to prove to the Venezuelan army, to prove to the people around Maduro, I am serious. I'm going to go ahead with this. So you'd hit, there are drug targets you could hit, certainly. Air scripts in western Venezuela that are used by island hopping planes that go from Venezuela to any number of islands in the, in the, in the Caribbean on the way to the United States, you could hit Venezuelan military targets,

and particularly targets that are, say, naval targets. You could hit air defenses without disclosing, you know, what the next step is. You could start hitting Venezuelan air defenses. All of this is, in good part, a Psiop, a psychological operation meant to crack the regime, meant to lead somebody in the military to rise up, meant to leave Maduro the conclusion, I better get out of here now. The rumors I hear are that his wife is already thinking that way,

and he may go down with his ship, or he may leave tomorrow morning, but the pressure is certainly building. I know you weren't in the H.W. Bush administration, but you were there, obviously, to build some of the predicates for what would happen in that administration. How did the United States, how did the H.W. Bush administration talk about what was going on in Panama. How did it message it to the American people, to the world?

Because one of the striking things about what's going on right now, to me, is, you know, what in strategic terms makes a lot of sense. As I say, the administration just doesn't really seem to want to show its hand. And I get from why a point of view of potential military operations or intelligence operations, that's not a crazy thing to do. But as a political matter, the administration doesn't seem too concerned with explaining itself either. Does that track with the H.W. Bush administration? What do you remember from those days? President Bush was more concerned about justifying himself, and he did so largely on drug trafficking grounds that Noriega was an indicted drug trafficker. Now, we didn't, you know, Bush was not inaugurated on January 20, 1989 and decided to invade Panama the following week. There were a couple of incidents where Americans were arrested and or slapped around beaten up in Panama.

And Bush, if you're a critic, you'd say that was, he used it as a justification. I think he was genuinely angry and said privately enough is enough. And he did it mostly, as I would call it, on the basis of drugs, rather than the restoration of democracy to Panama. in that sense, President Trump is doing the same thing. He isn't talking about democracy. Now, he isn't talking about much. I mean, he's just doing it. I think he's working on a supposition that I think is probably correct,

which is he's going to have a lot of leeway as long as Americans are not dying. It's the kind of thing that he did in Iran in attacking the Iranian nuclear program. There were plenty of people saying it was going to be. World War III and thousands of Americans would die. And he ignored them, knowing that if Americans did not die, he'd be fine. And I think politically in the case of Venezuela, he will be fine. As long as he avoids an invasion. And that's why I said, I think he is not contemplating an actual invasion. Now, he asked me, what would I have him do? Pretty much what he's doing. I do think we should get rid of that regime. And I think we should ratchet up the pressure.

in the manner in which he's doing. That is cut off the regime's economic resources. I think you'll have to go forward and hit targets on land. And meanwhile, I think there's a lot that the CIA ought to be doing. Part of that, actually the president should be doing this too. And the Secretary of State should be doing it. Messaging, Maduro has to go, but you don't have to go to the Venezuelan military. You don't want them loyal to him.

And you want people to know, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, five. generals at the top. We're not talking about debathification. We're not talking about vengeance. Every Latin American transition has included an amnesty of sorts. You will be fine. I think you need to message that to the military and to at least elements of the power structure. I assume that CIA can do that, that is that they have people's, you know, cell phone numbers and email addresses, and we can get a lot of intelligence of that sort from the Venezuelan opposition. So I hope we're doing that. And in fact, that's what happened in Panama, and Roryega went to jail. He probably three or four other people went to jail, but I don't think there were 10.

there are some people you need to get rid of in this regime. And primarily, I would argue, and did in that Foreign Affairs article, Dio Stalo Cabello, who is now Minister of Security and is the key thug in charge of police and in charge of the brutality that characterizes this regime. So I want to talk a bit more about the opposition, because that is a, seems to me, as a non-expert in the history of the Panama operation, And nevertheless, based on my superficial understanding, a pretty big difference. And in a way, it's important that there is a vibrant opposition in Venezuela because you

and I both agree that the kind of brute application of American ground power as it occurred in Panama is just off the table here. First of all, we obviously don't already have a bunch of troops there. Second of all, Venezuela is Venezuela and Panama is Panama. There's two very, I mean, Caracas and Panama City are two different places. The countries, the cities are just on different scales. it would be kind of, not only do we not have the forces in the region, it would be kind of crazy on some level to do anything more than anything highly targeted.

And even there, there are real risks, real risks you're running. So that all said, the whole thing kind of depends on the successive influence gambits like the ones you just outlined. And, you know, look, I mean, I don't know what's been tried in the Iran scenario over the years, probably, you know, less than we might have tried is my instinct. But the Iranian regime has been, I have to say, impressively resilient through a lot of its own failures, through a tremendous suffering that's imposed on its people, multiple waves of uprisings. Some, you know, some devoted to things like women's rights and democracy, others devoted to commodity prices and the fact that people just can't live their lives. Pretty much every segment of Iranian society, but for the real regime loyalists at some point or another has been in the streets.

Yet they're still there and still willing to defend themselves through the use of violence. So that's, you know, it's never something you can really wholly rely on, but that's there. And then there's the opposition. Tell us about the Venezuelan opposition and what role you think they can play in all of this. I think the two questions here. Let's address that first. And then a second one, which is what happens if Maduro does go. When I took the job in January 2019 of special representative for Venezuela, one of the things that many people said to me was,

Bah, wait till you start dealing with the Venezuelan opposition. They're so divided. They're hopeless. Lines that I'd heard about the Nicaragman opposition in the 1980s. And they were all wrong. They've managed, just think of the pressure they're under. Some have been driven into exile. Those who are in Venezuela are open every day to being murdered or tortured and imprisoned.

And that happens all the time. It's still happening. yet they have really stayed together. Not only have they stayed together, but they won the support of the Venezuelan people. Maduro tried to rig the election last year. It was not at all a fair election, in no way access to, for example, to media. And the opposition won 70% of the vote. And that, I mean, that's a number that's accepted by just by every democracy and democratic rights NGO in the world.

70-30 in those circumstances is quite amazing. Who's the leader of the opposition? Are they, you know, are they leader of this? No, they're not. I mean, you have Maria Corina Machado, which is won the Nobel Peace Prize. Edmundo Gonzalez was elected president. If this regime falls, people say,

well, what will happen? There's something, oh, there is. There is somebody who is elected president who will go to Caracas and take over. and the opposition has roots throughout Venezuelan society. So does the Chivisa movement, but it has brought ruin to Venezuela, which is why there was that landslide last year. Many of the political leaders of the opposition have been driven into exile. I know them.

They would like to go home tomorrow and get back into what was supposed to be their life, which was politics. run for office. So I'm pretty high on the Venezuela in opposition. I think they've hung in there against terrible pressures, murderous pressures from this regime. And I think it's worth making the point, and this is a point also about what if Maduro Falls. This is not Iraq.

This is not Libya. This is not Syria. This is not Yemen. We're not in the Middle East here. We're in Latin America. If you think people are sometimes saying, say, oh, it's terrible Civil War, and, you know, 10 billion more people will flee. Where did that happen in Latin America?

Where, when there was a transition to democracy, did anything like that ever happen? The splits you see in the Middle East between, say, eastern and western Libya, more importantly, Sunni, Shia, Kurd, Druze, they don't exist in Venezuela at all. So the model itself is like Iraq, I think is a very foolish analysis. It's not to say that if the Maduro regime falls, you know, it'll be peace and light overnight. I think the critical thing, well, a critical thing will be the security forces in the army and police. Will they stay loyal to the regime? And remember where they are. They are in Latin America.

They are surrounded by democracies on all sides and on the other side of the Caribbean by the largest and most powerful democracy, which under this scenario will have been powerful enough to knock this regime off. I think what we've got to say to the militaries, first of all, again, we're not in favor of vengeance and debathification. You need an army. You need a much better army than you have. You guys need to be paid better. How would you like to be equipped with modern weaponry? How would you like to start going to the Army War College again, the way your father or grandfather used to do? And we have to pay them, and I think that's also critical. What was the significance of the leader of the opposition,

Maria Carina Machado coming out of Venezuela and that harrowing journey that was, I think that was just last week. Time really is flying. There was, you know, sort of going incognito through checkpoints, in Venezuela and then this perilous seaborne journey on the Caribbean. I mean, what was her situation in Venezuela and why did she leave? What's the upshot of all this? She was in hiding. Edmundo Gonzalez, who was elected, she was the opposition candidate for president last year, and the regime refused to allow her to run. They outlawed her candidacy. So, Edmundo Gonzalez became another

opposition figure, but much less well known, was named as a candidate and won the election. She went into hiding because she would otherwise have been jailed and has been in hiding for over a year. And like other people in the opposition managed to get out. I mean, they've all got jail, they've all got indictments against them. And really, every one of them I know has managed somehow to get across the Colombian border. I don't believe anyone has done it quite the way she did it. So what does it mean? Well, first of all, there's a great movie. there, right? I mean, made for Hollywood. She's the voice of the opposition. She's the main figure, the face of the opposition today, and would certainly have been elected president, had she been

allowed to be a candidate. One of the things that this means is they don't really control the country. If Maria Carina Machado, one of the best known people in Venezuela, can get through their army and police and militias and, you know, just go get on our boat, it shows the, you know, the less than perfect control that the regime would wish to claim. And now, of course, she can go to Oslo, and now she can do what Juan Voido did when he was interim president. That is, she can go to London and Paris, and to Santiago, Chile, and to Washington, and keep the opposition's existence and strength in the eyes of people around the world. There's also one other thing that Xi and Gonzalez can do. If we have a blockade that prevents them from exporting oil, I think

most lawyers would say, well, that's an act of war if it's an act against the government of Venezuela. But Nicolas Maduro is not the government of Venezuela, in our view, is a usurper. and Muno Gonzalez was elected last year. He and Maria Corgiore Machado say, this is fine, all you're doing is preventing theft from the people of Venezuela. Then it isn't an act of war. Then it's an act that the legitimate authorities want.

Now, will she go back to Venezuela? None of the people who've left, none of the other political leaders who've gone into exile, have done that. It would be cheeky. Could she go in? and go back into hiding, would the regime risk jailing her or killing her? I think that's very much up in the air. I would certainly hope that she doesn't go back quickly, that she waits a bit,

at least, to see what is President Trump going to do now in December, in January, and how is the situation there going to change? And meanwhile, I mean, it's tough during the Christmas holidays, But meanwhile, she can do this world tour to promote the interest of the Venezuelan people. I just want to clarify what you mean by in hiding because it certainly does it not only does her escape not say much for the quality of the Venezuelan security state, the fact that the regime wanted her and she was able to evade that in hiding for all that time also doesn't. Do you mean that she was literally, you know, being hunted and hiding out or that, you know, she's keeping a low profile and they were nervous about that.

But what was the actual situation for her? She was in hiding. Some of the other exiles had gone into embassies of other democracies, Latin American and other. She was hiding out in a truly undisclosed location. I don't know what that location was, but she was able to get internet access wherever she was. So she could do Zoom appearances and calls. I interviewed her for a Council on Foreign Relations roundtable. Now, you could argue that maybe the regime knew and they were trying to avoid a confrontation.

Maybe, I don't think so. I think that maybe there were sympathizers in the regime, and maybe she wasn't hiding out in one place. Maybe she moved. But no, she was really in hiding, not keeping a low profile. Elliot Abrams, there's a lot going on in this part of the world. And I hope that if things continue to accelerate or if indeed there's some sort of conflict that really breaks out into the open here, you'd consider coming back on

and helping us understand what's going on as it unfolds and I'm grateful to you for your time today. I'd be happy to come back and I do folk things, frankly. I do hope they get hotter in Venezuela because I think it's very much in our interest that that regime fall.

Well, actually, sorry, that was a false finish because that makes me want to ask one last question. What worries you most? What's the worst case scenario here? In my view, the worst case scenario is it, President Trump decides, I don't want to escalate. I'll claim victory because we've reduced the amount of drugs going through the Caribbean and he walks away from it. That would devastate the Venezuelan opposition and Democratic forces not only in Venezuela, but in Nicaragua and Cuba. And I think all

around the world, and it would be dangerous from the point of view of countries like Russia and China, witnessing an American pullback of that kind once a problem became a little bit more difficult. So to me, a Maduro victory in Trump defeat here is the most dangerous outcome. L.A. Daybrams, thank you so much. You're welcome.