School of War - Ep 263: Elliott Abrams on the Venezuela Raid and Risks Ahead

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

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 Venezuela and what might happen next. ▪️ Times 02:04 Snatch and Grab 05:50 Intelligence Operations 12:04 Oil 16:50 Holding the Country Together  24:16 Risks & Mistakes 30:48 Blockade 33:54 Hard To Leave    39:11 Not Iraq 41:48 Cuba 42:21 The Iranian Regime Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more content on our School of War Substack

Elliot Abrams is back on School of War today to discuss last weekend's extraordinary raid into Venezuela, the status of the Venezuelan opposition, and what might come next. Let's get into it. It is for a war with Iraqi invasion of November 7, 1941, a date which will live in him. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the rain situation in France. People are not there's a fight on the beaches, we'll fight on the landing grounds,

we'll fight in the fields and in those streets, which will never have no rest. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today, Elliot Abrams, who joined us, it seems like just moments ago, it was a few weeks ago,

to talk about the future of the Trump administration's efforts concerning Venezuela. Elliot is the senior fellow, or a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He also has, helmed both Venezuela and Iran policy for the State Department in the first Trump administration, in addition to a long career in government.

Elliot, thank you so much for coming back. Sure. Glad to do it. So let me ask you about the raid first. We'll start focused in on that and then kind of zoom out to everything else that's happened and what the road ahead might involve. When you were on the show a few weeks ago, you correctly predicted, by the way, that there would be a partial blockade of Venezuela focused on its oil shipments.

and just for those who want to use school of war to know what's around corners, I just want to point out that you did that several days before it actually came to pass. We discussed, you brought up and we discussed the potential for some kind of ground strike or ground action in Venezuela,

but neither of us saw this coming precisely. Were you surprised, A, that it happened, and B, how successful and casualty-free it was? I did not think we could do a statute-and-grab of Maduro. We knew that he had Cuban security. We thought they were very good. Cuban intelligence is very good or was very good. And I thought that we might like to do a statutory, great, very dramatic. I thought it was probably impossible or much too risky. It raises for me a number of questions. One, it shows you what CIA can do or can contribute when it wants to. In Trump one,

they want to desperately to do nothing. Two, it shows you that, or it suggests, that the Cubans aren't as good as we thought they were, and they used to be. They used to be terrific, and they tied us in knots. I mean, every spy we had in Cuba turned out to be a double agent, working for the Cubans. The person who headed the Cuba section at the Defense Intelligence Agency

was a Cuban spy, Anna Monta. So they were great. at this. And now, as part of the general decline in debilitation of the Cuban regime, maybe they're not so great. And that helped us. But I was surprised that we were able to do it and do it so well. Say a bit more, if you would, about the Cuban security arrangements that existed, very much past tense now, around Maduro. I mean, it's an unusual and sort of literary touch that the man has an extensive foreign bodyguard, and that obviously tells us something about the Cuban-V-V-N-Arilein relationship up to this weekend. The future, obviously, very much TBD right now. Why did he have

that bodyguard, and what does that all mean? He had it because he was mistrustful of Venezuelans, both with respect to loyalty and with respect to quality of work. The Cubans had two jobs. One was to coup-proof the military, and the other was to protect him, his own personal security. And it's really striking that if the numbers that are being broadcast today are correct, 32 Cuban security guards were killed by the United States and this. I mean, that's been announced by the government of Cuba. So he really was surrounded by Cuban guards, and they, that's a lot of guards, and they were useless. It does speak just to linger on it for a moment because we're going to talk about strategic and diplomatic concerns here in a moment that are pretty complicated, but as a pure

operational matter, just taking that number as facts, we flew into an enormous South American city, Caracas, or at least it's outskirts. We threw a combination of the president, the president himself said there was a cyber dimension to this, but also traditional suppression of enemy air defense, various other things, got our our heloes onto the objective. We then killed a platoon of Cuban guards, report the Cubans, and pulled this guy and his wife away unharmed and apparently mostly unharmed. I've seen some reports of injuries. It's not totally clear how serious, apparently not too serious. We got every helicopter away, better than we did in the bin Laden raid, by the way, where we lost a helicopter.

And obviously, more importantly, every single trooper away. Say whatever else you will, and we're going to say a lot more here in the next 30 minutes or so. But it is just an extraordinary testament to the quality of the U.S. military. And as you point out, when it wants to play the intelligence community. Yes. I mean, I've heard in the last couple of days that CIA started sending teams in in August to start collecting information about where Maduro is, the places he frequented the nature of his personal security. It's really interesting to me because in the, The first term, 2019 and 2020 when I was doing this, of course, we dealt with the CIA all the time, and they worked very hard at doing nothing. I mean, this were the orders coming down from Gina Haspel.

And my CIA colleagues were essentially case officers making sure that these guys working for Pompeo didn't get out of hand. And so they did nothing, really. and I can tell you that the people who were in charge of doing nothing were then promoted. So this was really policy. And I've struck by this also because it wasn't clear to us what capabilities they would have in Venezuela if they tried. And I think now we know that they had substantial capabilities. So that leads to two obvious follow-ups. The first is, what do you think changed for the CIA between the first term and the second term?

And everyone could see the pictures of John Ratcliffe, the CIA director there in the, you know, the ops center as the operation proceeded. So that's question one. And question two is setting aside the deaths of all those Cubans, you know, clearly some sort of inside job was likely, I'll go, I'll say likely, it was likely at work here. That is to say, it was more than just we had, I'm going to, I'm going to speculate. It's more than just we had exquisite information. it seems as though we also had some degree of cooperation. It wouldn't be crazy to speculate. So question one, what changed with the CIA?

Question two, what do you think the nature of the CIA operation on the ground? Well, on question two, I don't know. I mean, we hear they've been in the place for about six months. I have read also that at least one person in the Maduro entourage was turned and was supplying information. And if it was the right person, then, by the way, if it was a Venezuelan, then he was right not to trust Venezuela and to trust Cuba more. But you only need one if it's the right person.

So I don't know what CIA was doing, but presumably was trying to find out with the help of the opposition, I would assume, whether there were any people in the intelligence services or Venezuelan intelligence or military who might be helpful. What changed? The director changed. The Gina Haspel didn't want to do anything. Ratcliffe obviously did and was following the president's direction to do more. So I would say what changed was the president and the CIA director. The president back in those days, that is Trump obviously, in the first term, didn't want to do this kind of thing. John Bolton, among others, was pressing to do more in Venezuela, and the president didn't want to do it.

To me, one of the great mysteries here is what made him change his mind. You know, he's busy, Gaza, Ukraine, Taiwan. It's not as if this crisis arose and presented itself to him as one that he had to deal with. He made a decision. The reason it's a little mysterious to me is that if you look at the oil question, migration question, and the drug question, none of them really explain. why this has to come to the top of his agenda. So I don't know, I don't really know the answer to that.

Just very briefly, we're not going to get a tremendous amount of additional oil out of Venezuela. I think that's illusory. We've closed the southern border. So if more Venezuelans leave their country, they're not going to be able to cross from Mexico into the United States. And on the drug question, yes, for the moment we have suppressed maritime and I would imagine air the drug trafficking in the Caribbean. But that only works as long as we stay there. And I don't think this giant flotilla can stay there. Will they be there this summer, for example?

I doubt it. So I don't think the explanations fully explain what led the president to change his mind. and that, you know, I'll look for people's memoirs to find out. So on the oil question, I'm curious your view, and this will start to shift us in the direction of what's to come, I'm curious why you think the potential gains are illusory. This is obviously to set aside the sort of even more interesting fact that here in the second Trump term, we have a president who's just very frank about access to natural resources as a goal of American policy in a way that critics have clobes.

claimed, you know, this has driven American policy for decades and decades past. I'm not sure that's as true as the critics thought it was true. In some cases, I know it was basically false, the invasion of Iraq, for one. That said, it's absolutely the case that no one really ever talked about it as a goal of American policy. And here you have a president for whom it actually seems to be close to the top of the list of the goal. And he's sort of out and proud about it. His claim, the administration's claim seems to be there's been underinvestment in the energy industry in Venezuela, investments going to come in as a consequence of this somehow. And so these natural resources that exist there, they'll just be better business, more efficient production, etc.

What's wrong with that argument? Before Hugo Chavez took over, so we're talking 20 years ago, they were producing three million barrels a day. It's now under a million. And as the president correctly says, the whole oil sector is completely debilitated. They could probably by the end of this year increased production by about 500,000 barrels a day. The world oil market is 105 million barrels a day. So this is trivial. This is marginal and is not going to lower the price of the pump for American citizens. Could you get it up to 2 million barrels a day, 3 million barrels a day? Yeah, over years and with tens of billion dollars of investment. Now, President says, American oil companies are desperate to get in there.

Blown it. I think what you're going to hear from American oil companies because the president is president, and they want other things from him, is, this is great. This is wonderful. We can't wait. And we've got a team ready, but they're not going to invest. Why not?

If you are an international oil company, when you make a capital allocation decision, when the board makes a capital allocation decision, First of all, they're not going to do it overnight. They're going to do it after months of study. And they're going to look at the risks, the opportunities in Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Texas, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria. I could go on. Is Venezuela at the top of that list?

Venezuela with uncertain political stability and very, very sour, that is to say, thick, crude? I don't think so. And the president cannot direct them to do it. And anyway, he's only there for three years. So I think we will get some more oil. I mean, Chevron, for example, is the one exception because they're in Venezuela. And they're producing, I think, roughly 250,000 barrels a day. Could they increase that?

Yes. And they're the one company that is, I think, more likely to invest because they know what they've got. They know how much they need to spend. But for the oil sector as a whole, really, 10 years from now, will the world need a lot more Venezuelan thick, sour, crude? Not so clear of me. So I do not expect this to be a kind of great bonanza. Paranthetically, I'd have written a different speech for the president, which talked about critical minerals. There is in southern Venezuela, I think, called the Arco Minero, the Mineral Arc.

You've got a lot of critical minerals. And if I were here, he had a made a speech saying, we want them. We're going to let China get them. I think that's more realistic, frankly, than the oil part of this. Yeah, I saw there was a semi-viral on the street, man on the street interview with some guy in Caracas being interviewed by, I guess, somebody's television station. And they challenged him with, you know, don't you think Donald Trump's just here because he wants the oil? He responded without missing a beat in Spanish. Like, what do you think the Chinese and the Russians were here for?

our recipes for, and then it was some Venezuelan delicacy that I'm not, a rapist, something like that. It was a good line. It was a good line. It's going to take a long time also for, even if you're an optimist, we're talking about years from now. We're not really talking about significant increase in, I would think, under about five years. Certainly not, well, president is president. So let's switch to politics, Venezuelan politics, that is. The opposition is not in charge here following this, dramatic raid to get Maduro and bring him to face American justice in New York City, which is where he is as we speak.

Right now, in charge of Venezuela, appears to be Maduro's vice president, Delci Rodriguez. She is aided. You might refine that word or that verb by somebody we talked about the last time you were on the show, this guy, diastado Cabello, who you described as the regime's chief thug. He's still there running the interior ministry. And then I'm also, I'm going to mention the defense minister just because of his name. Vladimir Padreno Lopez, named Vladimir by his parents in honor of Vladimir Lenin, which, you know, we could tell similar stories for all three of these guys. They are committed

socialists. So tell us what's going on here, what the plan appears to be from the Trump administration, and then we can get into how you think it might actually go. The best, I think, most logical explanation of what the administration is doing is they've decided that the Democratic opposition forces, led by Maria Carina Machado, the Nobel Prize winner, is not able, would not be able to hold the country together. There would be some kind of chaos, whereas the current regime can hold the place together and give us what we want on oil. And so they're being left in place, but of course, we'll ask him to do things for us.

and at some point, a year from now, who knows, there will be an election, but the transition will take place under these people. I think that's the theory, and I think it's a highly flawed theory. I mean, the president, for me, the low point of his press conference over the weekend was the gratuitous deprecation of Maria Corina Machado, saying that she lacked the necessary respect in Venezuela. Miller, this is somebody whose ticket won just under 70% of the vote in the presidential election.

So instead, we're relying on a woman who is a sanctioned by the United States. And B is part of a retinue, as you just described, that are committed chavistas, followers of Juva, socialists, and people who have been enemies of our country for decades. It's very, it's very striking to me. It is, to me, much like Count. capturing Saddam Hussein and saying, the transitional of the hearts who are going to leave his sons in power.

It's bizarre. I mean, these guys, Padrino and Cabello, are under indictment in the United States as drug traffickers. How could we possibly leave them there? Now, okay, if Delci Rodriguez is willing to do what the president said, which is anything we want, anything we want, I have a very nice list of demands,

that I would hope Secretary Rubio is making now. Fire Cabello. Fire Padrino. They're indicted drug traffickers. Kick the Cubans out. Kick Hezbollah and the Iranians out. Stop supplying oil to Cuba. Free all political prisoners.

That's day one. Then we get to day two. I mean, I don't know what the demands we are making of her consist of. It's striking to me that we heard. For example, yesterday, a number of people on the Sunday shows, including the Secretary Rubio. Nobody talks about being political prisoners. I mean, that ought to be literally day one. That ought to be elementary.

Allow Maria Karina Machado to go home. It ought to be elementary. So I think, now, let's look at the other side of that mirror. What are Padrino and Cabello thinking? I think they're thinking, really not sure about this, Donald Trump. Trump, you know, is he satisfied now? He got his man, he got Maduro, and now we can make any deal we want. Maybe I can stay here. Or should I now do the Noriega deal, which was, I'll leave, if you quash the indictment, give me a kind of amnesty. This is not the typical South American

military dictatorship with which we dealt. We in the Reagan and First Bush administration decades ago, military dictatorship. You negotiate with the generals. They negotiate with the Democratic political forces. You have an election. They go back to the barracks. And there is a transition that takes five or ten years towards civilian control of the military. This is not that. This is a criminal regime whose finances are largely based on drug trafficking, gold trafficking, human trafficking. These are criminals. And they may be. very well resist leaving power because they know what is waiting for them. Even if we were to quash those indictments, there's the international criminal court nowadays. There's the possibility

that after a transition to democracy, then Israel would go after them. So they must be thinking about all of this, but they must be wondering whether Trump is happy now and they can actually stay in power. And it would, if there's going to be some kind of democratic transition at some point, let's just assume that that is the good faith plan or a good faith part of American policy here, it is hard to imagine a fair election, which then brings in the opposition as we would imagine, given how the last election went, where Cabello, so I'm going to, I'll correct my pronunciation. I think I called him Cabello. I'm always hesitant to do the sort of NPR thing where I performatively pronounce. It's always just Latin names, Latin and Arabic names. Yeah, I basically try to

prove. I mean, we don't go around and say, have you been to Mexico? Yeah, exactly, exactly. But I don't want to massacre. It's a balance. Like, you don't want to massacre the names. So it's hard to imagine someone like Cabo or Padrino staying in Venezuela after such an election. People who rule, like they have ruled, tend to end up strung up by their toenails after the other guys come into power, or at least in prison. So, you, you, you know, you know, it's a delicate, it's a delicate thing here. I guess the other element we have to add in is, if you're the Trump administration,

you're also sitting here thinking, we'll see what we just did to your boss. We can totally do it to you too. And that's a bit of a fraught tool of policy as well. If I have one nagging worry about all of this, and I think my view is that the raid is taken as a military operation was good for American security. I mean, what an amazing display of what we can do.

I actually don't think that, there's any other military in the world that could do what we just did. And that's just a good thing to demonstrate that capability, especially when you have a guy like Maduro who, well, you're not going to catch me defending him. That said, the president has now rolled the dice a couple of times on really high stakes military stuff. This, Midnight Hammer back in June.

In both cases, it's gone extraordinarily well, a testament to American military capabilities. Well, you know, you keep on rolling the dice. eventually someone's going to pop out with a man pad and shoot down one of your helicopters, you're going to have American casualties, you could have things go really wrong really quickly. It's just life, and I know General Kane knows that, and I know, you know, the professionals know this, and I do worry that we start to create this sense of invincibility for our special operations. I agree with that, and I would hope that the president would be listening to General Kane, among others.

General Kane for whom he seems to have real respect and affection in measuring what's a reasonable risk and what is not. I do want to go back and just say, I think that once we took Maduro out, the great mistake we are now making is to undermine rather than to rely on the Venezuela and democratic opposition. Had we supported it, you know, it doesn't create magic, but it means that you can then, for example, negotiate with the military about a transition. You can then start talking about an amnesty. There has been an amnesty in every single Latin American democratic transition. And there's going to be one in Venezuela at some point.

You could start talking about elections, really free elections, under a transitional democratic government. I wonder who told the president. I mean, where did you get this information that the opposition is too? weak such that he has to rely on the remnants of the regime. I would imagine, pardon me, some of it came from businessmen in Venezuela and in the U.S., who have been doing business with the regime and want to keep on doing business with the regime and don't want the setup they have overturned. There's been speculation that the president has never forgiven, Maria Corino Machado, for winning quotes his Nobel Peace Prize. Plausible, who knows?

She said he deserved it. She did. She did. Still accepted it, though. I guess from his point, because she should have turned it down or something like that. I don't know. I've also heard him speculated that many analysts at CIA were always deprecating the capabilities of the opposition and continued to do so partly because many of them were against an American intervention.

And that got to the president and he believed it. I would say to you that I think there has been a deprecation. for years and years by American analysts. When I went into the Venezuela job January 2019, a lot of people said to me, oh, wait until you meet the Venezuelan opposition. My God, they were so disunited and they're terrible. Well, I spent years dealing with the Nicaraguan opposition in the 1980s.

You know, when people are under the gun literally, that is, they don't know whether tomorrow morning they're going to be shot or in prison, or sent into exile or when they are in exile, and their families are being held hostage. You have to give them a little slack in their political conduct. I found the Venezuelan opposition to be highly intelligent and united. Look, in the last presidential election, they all united, left, right and center under Maria Carino Machado.

And when she was not permitted by Majority 1, they all got behind Edmundo Gonzalez, And they ran an effective campaign. And they won, I think it was 67% of the vote. So the notion that they have nothing going for themselves in Venezuelaans don't respect them comes out of nowhere for me. How have Machado and other leaders of the opposition been managing all of this for the last 48 or so hours?

Silently, for the most part. I mean, they've lauded the seizure, the capture of Maduro. and bringing him to justice and talked, you know, complimented President Trump and of course the American military for this achievement. On the political questions, they've been near silent and they are trying to figure out how, you know,

how to navigate what's a very uncertain situation. I mean, if the president announced, yeah, we're working with Delcia Rodriguez, but that's a three-month deal. She's out in, you know, March, the end of March, that would be. one thing. But we haven't said that. And there, I think, trying to figure out, well, the things that they want, like the ability to go home, the ability to campaign, the freeing of political

prisoners. What is the way to get that from the Trump administration? And it's a good question, and, you know, they're taking advice from Americans who are on their side. In terms of tools of policy that the administration can bring to bear in attempting to compel, well, to use the president's own words, to run Venezuela, which when he, when he, we said that, you know, it sparked him. We're kind of in the midst of a cycle of outrage with some of the critics of the president who, who fear that, you know, running Venezuela looks like, say, you know, Iraq fall 2003, which does not seem to me to be the president's conception of things. If anything, the president's conceptions of things is, in a way, bolder. He's going to run Venezuela with Rodriguez and Cabello and

hadrino as his proxies. He's going to run it through them. And so to my question, one policy tool is this threat that he could do to them, what he did to Maduro. Another existing tool of pressure is this blockade, which is still theoretically underway. I did see a report this morning that apparently a bunch of tankers, a number of them, are attempting to run it as we speak. And there's been one prominent case in the news playing over the last week or so of this tanker that is reflagged itself apparently as Russian. And the Russians have actually intervened diplomatically to say, No, no, magically, it is our tanker. I wonder, as the man who predicted this before it happened, how you assess the potency of this

blockade. I'm struck by the fact that Russian pseudo-Russian ship seems to, last I saw, be getting away with it. How is this blockade going as a tool of pressure? Is it meaningful against the, it's not really the remnants of the regime, the existing, there has been no regime change, the post-Moduro regime. How do you think it's going? Before I answered that, just it's comical to me to see the crux.

criticism from some parts of the right that the president is engaging in regime change, where my criticism is he's not engaging in regime. How's the blockade going? It was going very well. They were really almost unable, other than Chevron, which was shipping to the United States. All of these, this ghost fleet, you know, tankers, essentially shipping oil to China, was tied up. People were afraid. Ship owners, ship captain, ship insurers.

this attempt to run the blockade is a very interesting one. It bespeaks cooperation among them. That is, you know, one tanker can be easily captured, boarded by the U.S. Navy. But what if 30 of us go at once? They're trying it. And I hope you're able to blunt it. I hope it fails because this is a very effective form of pressure on the regime, which has no income if it can't export oil.

well, I have some drug income. But we're also interfering with that because you'd be a very brave drug trafficker now to go out in your boat into the Caribbean where you might not be seized, you might be killed. So I hope the blockade is able to be kept in place. I'll start zooming out in a second about the effects of everything on Cuba.

And if you're willing, I want to ask you a question or two about Iran where you also have long expertise. But just sticking with the regime in Caracas for the moment, you know, I can imagine a scenario where because of the blockade, the threat to revenue, the threat, even if, you know, you and I and the, you know, military professionals know that you keep rolling those dice, eventually you're going to have a bad roll or you risk it at least, that there's a combination of pressures that will get them to at least, as by the way, appears to be the case on some level, even though they seem to be

more hawkish in their public statements to a domestic Venezuelan audience, get them to tow the line or at least try to tow the line or seem to tow the line here and there on various policy asks of the administration. So long as those policy asks do not threaten their own skins, like just putting myself in their shoes, that's that. And so that's for, you know, elections for one, you know, that's a harder ask than can you, can you meet us, you know, at a reasonable place on energy policy? or can you meet us at a reasonable place on your drug trafficking. I could see the possibility of that working. It does run into the fact that these guys, to include Rodriguez, very much, are,

they're just committed chavistas. Like, they are real ideologues in a way that Donald Trump is not. But that's, if I had to paint a picture of where I think things are, that's roughly where it is. I'm curious how you react to that. Yeah, I think that's right. I think it is very hard to them to leave power because there are people. in the Chavista party who are politicians.

There are people, for example, have been elected governors of states and who in a democratic system would win some elections and lose some elections. That is not true of the, let's call a junta that's running the country now. Again, sanctioned people, indicted drug traffickers. What is their future? These are not people who are going to be able to run for office in a democratic Venezuela. What's going to happen to them? Now, if you think, think of the FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador, what happened to them?

We defeated them in a war by supporting the Salvadoran military. And then what happened? Then became a democracy. The FMLN converted itself into a party. It ran for office and very often won. This can happen to the Chavista party again. So the question really isn't the party. It's the people who've run the Maduro regime.

It's the people who have engaged in torturing, imprisoning, killing opposition figures. It's the people who are criminals because they've engaged in drug trafficking. What's the future for them? Again, yeah, you could think of an amnesty. You could think of, I mean, we in 1988, we offered Manuel Noriega in Panama. We will quash the indictment of you.

for drug trafficking. If you will leave, leave power, leave Panama. It's much harder to do that now. I have fun with speaking to idealistic college students on campuses, telling him the problem of the international criminal court. In the Reagan years, you know, we sit to Ferdinand Marcus in the Philippines, and we sit to Baby Dot Duvalier in Haiti, go. Just go.

We want you out. Take the money. Go. And they knew that they could live out the rest of their lives. Yeah, they were not brought to justice, but that was the trade for democracy. You really can't do that now because of the International Criminal Court, among other things. So I think it's going to be very tough to get those guys out. And I hope it becomes a goal of American policy.

Other than oil, it's really not clear what the goal of American policy is. I would like a much clearer statement from President or at least the Secretary of State that we want a transition to a democracy with full respect for human rights. We will help in the negotiation of that transition. But that's the end goal. And our, we see a necessity of working with Rodriguez as a very short-term solution to keep the place together. but it's got to change fundamentally and quickly. Well, we've really not heard that.

Yeah. No, on the contrary, the emerging picture is we have a variety of policy goals, asks of this remaining, your words, junta. They're on energy, immigration, maybe drugs, etc. We expect those asks to be met. We'll deal with next year, next year. And this is part of a broader assertion of American power in the region, as Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,

which was rolled out, sort of part of the national security strategy last year, and do what we say, and we'll figure it out. Don't do what we say. And we got more coming for you of what came for Maduro. That seems to me to be where we are. Yeah, I would just add one thing. You said a minute ago, you noted that Rodriguez, Delci Rodriguez, had talked tough, but presumably that's mostly for her domestic audience while she's been much more qualified. cooperating on what she said to us. Why not I'd invert that? Why assume she's lying to her domestic

audience and telling the truth to us? Maybe she's lying to us and telling the truth to her domestic audience. Yeah. Yeah, that's the risk. And rather than the risk of sort of another, quote unquote, another Iraq, which I've seen some commentators worry about in the last few days, which I end up for a variety of reasons. I don't see much risk of not least which is there don't appear to be any American boots on the ground right now, save that CIA team. I hope they're doing Okay. The risk rather is... Oh, their shoes on the ground. Shoes on the ground. Loafer's on the ground. Maybe sneakers.

You know, the risk rather is just failure, policy failure. We don't get what we need. And then we attempt to impose more pressure. But something goes wrong militarily. Still not, you know, a multi-year occupation. It's not Iraq. But the risk of policy failure is very real and it's delicate. Yeah. I mean, I think that's right. What do we do? It turns out that what I'm calling this, is recalcitrant. Do we, as you suggested, do we try to seize one or another of them? Is there the second wave that the president has threatened, which I think would be politically unpopular in the United States?

Do we send in troops to seize the oil fields? Yeah, I think troops on the ground for extended periods of time would be unpopular and no one knows that better than the president. I think this could go wrong another way, too, which is that if we try to extend this moment of cooperation, so that what the message to Venezuelans is, you're just going to have to, you know, we want the oil and you're going to have to live with the remnants of the Maduro regime, I think there will be unrest in Venezuela. And we will be, it isn't another Iraq, but we will be seen to be in league with repression. I mean, I'd just give you one example.

Suppose the opposition organizes a rally on Sunday next for democracy in Venezuela, and the police put it down, as they would have two weeks ago. And they beat people up, even shoot people. What happens? What does that do to Trump policy of cooperating with regime? Just after he said that if the regime in Iran shoots demonstrators, we won't let them get away with it. pay a heavy price. So that's another risk that the administration is running. A lot to worry about

that we've covered in the last 30 minutes or so. Before we close, let's focus on the bright side for a moment, Elliot. This is all pretty bad for Cuba. I think it's all pretty bad for Iran as well. Let's take it in turn. We discussed a little bit last time the dependence of the Cubans on subsidies, on energy resources from Venezuela. Obviously, the future for that. looks a lot less bright than it did a few days ago. It has been widely speculated that Secretary of State National Security Advisor, Marco Rubio, who of course comes from a Cuban background, has an enduring interest in the future of Cuba. What's going to happen here?

Well, you're right to ask about the bright side. I begin where you began with this remarkable demonstration of American military prowess, which has got to be on the mind of every opponent, whether it's Iran or China or it's Russia. On Cuba, their economy is in tatters. I mean, you know, news reports throughout 2025 about blackouts, for example, about shortages of food. It's a terrible situation. And they rely heavily on, let's say, 40,000 barrels of oil from Venezuela per day. What happens if that oil is cut off? And I would assume it's on high on the agenda for Secretary Rubio to get it cut on. The economy gets even worse. And so the question is, when does that lead to

significant social unrest? It could. It may well. And that regime may not survive. You know, they've got a completely uninspiring leader in Diaz-Kinell, who's the president now. What happens if there are broad demonstrations? And by the way, if President Trump then threatens, if you start shooting demonstrators, they'll be held to pay. So I think regime collapse is now something that is thinkable, is plausible, and the cutting off of Venezuela oil could be a turning point. I would just add, by the way, if Vladimir Putin wanted to, he could supply the oil.

That would be a very interesting crisis between Russia and the United States. I don't imagine he'll do it because he has larger issues to take up with President, Ukraine primarily. So interfering in the Caribbean would be, I think, from the pushing point of view, risky and unwise. And I don't expect it. I do expect that the Cuban economy will get even closer to collapse in the next couple of months. And that's another very good thing. You made reference to the president talking about if you start shooting protesters, there's going to be hell to pay those words or words very much like them.

of course, or what he said about Iran just a few days ago. It's been a busy news weekend. So I lose track of exactly what happened and what was said when. We are in a moment in Iran, which is an issue. I know you've worked on extensively over the years where we have another, there's a way in which everything that's happening right now is sort of more of the same and pretty humdrum. And there's a way in which I wonder if it's not. What's sort of normal is a wave of protests in the streets. Iran has the regime there has weathered many of these over the years. This one began. what about a week ago now with merchants in Tehran. It is now proliferated out all across the country

with students and different kinds of groups protesting. I've seen some harrowing videos of fights on the street between protesters and the regime, the regime security beating people up, protesters taking shots back in one fashion or another. This has all happened before. The way it's ended before is the regime kills a bunch of people and stays in power.

There are, however, some things that are now new under the sun. Iran's failure in the 12-day war this past summer, and it's just general failure vis-a-vis Israel since 2023. The operation in Venezuela. The fact that Trump actually is unpredictable and does things like up and kills Qasem Soleimani one day when he feels that a line has been crossed. Elliot Abrams, what's your estimate of where we stand on Iran and the future of its regime?

I think that the Iranian regime will collapse, just like the Soviet regime collapsed. And the question is, is this a matter of weeks or months? or months or is this 10 years? And obviously I don't know. Thus far, this round of protests has not, I guess I'd say, achieve the critical mass necessary to start talking about regime collapse. Not yet. The regime is in very rough shape and I think we can judge that by the compromises it is making. For example, they've largely stopped enforcing the requirement of women wearing a hijab to cover their hair. They didn't used to do that. I mean, they used to jail you for that. Not now because they're afraid. And I think the regime is rightly afraid of the Iranian

people because they understand full well that people hate the regime and want it gone. So you're seeing the regime, I think, try to balance what it views as the necessary amount of reconciliation and the necessary amount of repression. You see not only Peschke on the president, but even the Supreme Leader saying many of these demands are legitimate, their economic demands, while of course they view the political demands, which are the fundamental demands, as illegitimate. You are beginning to see in the crowds clear attacks on the regime, you know, slogans that say no to Lebanon, no to Hezbollah, no to Gaza, Iran, Iran, Iran. There are new slogans in the last year to ridiculing the Supreme Leader.

And his position is clearly a lot weaker since the 12-day war, when Iran was really bludgeoned by a nation of 10 million people, Israel. So his prestige has really sunk, and he has not been seen much since the 12th day war. You compare appearances in this period with, say, one year ago, two, three, four years ago. I wish I saw a better chance of these demonstrations growing and growing and growing. Thus far, I think we've not seen it. I'm glad that President Trump made the threat he did, because I think a mistake we've made in the past, we, the United States, is not to back protesters. The worst case was really President Obama in 2009, and President Obama has said he made a mistake,

and he wishes he could do that over again, and he would have been much more valuable in support. There are some things we can do. I mean, the president said something they, like there would be hell to pay in Iran. I assume he does not mean a military intervention, but it isn't clear. The right things we can do, like more broadcasting, more help in Iranian. getting on the Internet so they can communicate with each other. More enforcement of the sanctions. You know, they're exporting, I think the November was about 85%, 90% of their oil to China.

And we are not interfering with that, partly as a matter of China policy. But we should interfere with it so as to put more pressure on the Ayatollahs. So, again, I don't think we're there yet in Iran, and we have to see if these demonstrations It's snowball. L.A. Daybrams of the Council on Forum Relations, you had a piece with our friends at the free press over the weekend outlining your views on the opposition, which we discussed here today, and twice in two months, a lot going on in parts of the world that you care deeply about, and thank you so much for coming on the show again.

You're very welcome, Harry.