The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Regime Change for Venezuela || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: November 1, 2025

The Trump administration is sending the USS Ford, America’s most powerful supercarrier, to the waters off Venezuela...Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/47tc44J

Hey all, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Colorado, and it looks like the Americans about to knock off of government. The Trump administration has just ordered the USS Ford Supercarrier to the waters off of Venezuela, from where it currently is in the Mediterranean. The Ford is probably 50% to 100% more powerful than the Nimitz supercarriers that have been the backbone of American power for the last 50 years. It hasn't been bloodied in a real fight yet, so this is going to be interesting from any number of angles. but you don't send a supercarrier somewhere in the Western Hemisphere unless you really have something important to do. The last time an American supercarrier was involved in an operation in the Western Hemisphere was in 1983, the Granada operation where I would argue it was overkill. That was an old forester, forestal class.

This one is much, much, much, much, much, much bigger. Before that, I mean, let's see, carriers were involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but nobody ever shot at anyone there. and that's it. So unprecedented by any number of matters. You could make the argument maybe the Trump administration is just trying to intimidate the government of Venezuela, which is led by President Nicholas Maduro. There are a lot better sticks for that, I would argue. Keep in mind that over the last few weeks, the United States has not just been going after what the government of the United States says are drugboats, but has also said publicly that the CIA has kind of been let loose to,

carry out operations in the country. There is already the USS Iwo Jima, which is a wasp-class amphibious assault vessel, which in any other part of the world would be called a supercarrier. But for the United States, these are our smaller carriers that also just happen to carry a few thousand Marines. So if you have a supercarrier in order to do strategic overwatch and air bombings, and you have the Marine Expeditionary Unit based on the Iogima that is going to do land incursions, this is how you knock off a Latin American government in a weekend, and it probably will only take that amount of time. Now, whether this is a good idea or not, push that to the side. Whether Congress is going to be notified, push that to the side. There's a lot of details here

that under normal circumstances, the American political system would be debating and discussing. We are not going to see that this time around, because Donald Trump, at least at the moment, still has a lock on the Republican Party in Congress, and I really don't see Congress doing anything unless and until we actually see American soldiers and body bags. And this sort of operation, this should not be hard. The government of Nicholas Maduro is really just a couple a dozen dudes, and getting rid of them should be very, very easy with the assets to seem to be steaming into the region. Does that mean the next day will be pretty?

No. This will probably trigger some sort of civil war and state collapse. the few thousand Marines that are on an MEU are nowhere near enough to impose a reality on the ground in Caracas, much less the wider world. We did a video a couple weeks ago about what it would be like to be to impose rule on Venezuela. We will share that video again. You don't want to get involved with that. So this seems like a bomb it and forget it situation. Keep in mind that the Maduro government is so incompetent that they mismanage selling crude to get dollars to buy food to feed their people

to such a degree that the average Venezuelan a few years ago lost 20 pounds in a year, full-on famine. You remove the government. That's probably the only way you could make something worse. So last time, that encouraged almost one-third of the Venezuelan population to flee the country to avoid famine. We'll probably see something on that scale again in the months to come, should this be what the Trump administration has planned.