The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Venezuela's End: Next on the Chopping Block || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

With renewed American activism in the Western Hemisphere, Venezuela has become just the first to get some "extra attention." So what countries could be next on the list as the US reasserts regional dominance?Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3LlsJ36

What is next? So, because this isn't just about Trump, because this isn't just about Maduro or Caracas or Venezuela, the bigger picture is that the United States is going to start intervening in a lot of places in the Western Hemisphere for a more detailed version of what this all looks like. Absent superpower, my second book, deals a lot with what I call dollar diplomacy

and how that's going to unfold. But in the midterm, we are looking at probably three main targets. The first one, of course, is Cuba. The personality that was most responsible for this policy change in the Trump administration is Marco Rubio. Rubio is the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor. In the first part of the Trump administration, he was largely shut out of the White House because Trump didn't trust anyone who knew anything about international affairs, and he wanted his own people like Steve Whitkoff who knew absolutely nothing about international affairs

and bragged about it, was proud about it. He wanted them to take over. Well, after nearly a year of Whitkoff, Trump has been made to look stupid over and over and over and over and over again in the eyes of not just the Allies, but the Russians and the Chinese, and has found himself outmaneuvered on really every issue that matters. So Rubio was able to weasel his way back. Weasel his way. That makes it sound bad. Anyway, start to do his job. Trump started to let him do his job again.

and Marco Rubio is a descendant of a Miami Cuban family. So the Cubans were, the Miami Cubans were largely ejected when Castro took over back in the 60s. And they've run, like in Caracas, basically a kleptocracy that calls itself socialist, that he's not really fan of. So when he had the opportunity to get control of foreign policy to degree, which is, you know, what the Secretary of State National Security Advisor is supposed to do, he started getting the Trump administration more on board with taking action against Maduro and Venezuela. Well, Maduro and Venezuela, going back 25, 30 years, have been subsidizing the existence of Cuba with cheap gasoline products and oil.

That now goes to zero. Cuba was already facing economic catastrophe because they've run their system into the ground as well. And those oil imports, subsidized oil imports, were really the only thing holding the country up. that is gone. So the American administration doesn't necessarily need to intervene militarily in order to tear Cuba down. Basically just needs to up the economic blockade a little bit more. And it's really difficult for me to see without intervention the Cuban system lasting more than a couple years at this point. Throw intervention in and, you know, of course, it can go any number of directions based on the type of intervention. The last time the United States tried to militarily intervene, it was the 60s,

it was the Bay of Pigs invasion, where we basically armed a bunch of Cuban. nationals to go and take over their own country. It was a disaster because these people weren't trained. But as we've seen with Caracas, if you include U.S. Special Forces, the math changes. So I'm not saying that we're about to hit Havana. What I'm saying is there's going to be broad spectrum pressure on the entire Cuban system to break it. What happens the next day is a different topic. The next country to look at is Brazil. It's not that Brazil and the United say it's really cross paths economically or strategically. It's just that it's the second largest country in the hemisphere from a population and land point of view. And we're on the other side

of the Amazon and the other side of the Caribbean from one another. It's actually faster generally to fly to Europe than it is to get to populated Brazil. But it is a major power. It does have a lot going on. And in a world where the United States is taking a more active role in the region, Brazil is going to have to find some way to basically make the Americans happy because the Americans hold most of the cards here. One of the reasons why a regeneration of Monroe is so easy for the United States is we built our Navy for the Eastern Hemisphere. And it is more powerful than every Navy in the Eastern Hemisphere combined by a significant margin,

probably by a factor of five or seven right now. No one in the Western Hemisphere except for the United States. even has a Navy that's worthy of the name, which means the United States can choose the time and the place and the nature of any sort of conflict, whether that's going to be military, economic, or otherwise. Brazil has a long coast. Most of the population lives in enclaves on that coasts that are loosely connected to the rest of the country. It is child's play if the United States wants to muck with internal Brazil to do so. And if you want to have current politics into the situation right now, the Trump administration really doesn't like the current Brazilian administration because it's passing a lot of

laws that basically block the right to lie. And it's trying to intervene in Brazilian politics so that its political allies who have said nice things about Donald Trump rise back to power. It's gotten to the point now that the guy that's of most concerned, Bolsonaro, who's the former president, who is currently in prison for trying to throw a coup against the current present, the Trump administration has tried to get him out of jail and preferably back in power. So there are thousand ways that this can go because there's a couple hundred million people in Brazil, and it's a big place, but the degree that Washington is going to be in pressure on Brasilia is going to be huge, probably not to the same degree as Havana.

But it's something that is probably going to be designed to break the country as a functional unit. And we're going to see that not just with Trump, but with whoever is next. Third up, here's a weird one, Honduras. So Honduras is a Central American country that used to be run by a drug runner. Well, that drug runner was arrested, was sentenced, convicted, and, and, and, and, and, put in prison here in the United States, and he said some nice things about Trump, and so Trump pardoned him. So we now have the United States actively intervening in the politics of a

Central American country to attempt to resurrect a drug lord and put him or his allies back in power. That is going to be a shit show. But once you strip the Trump and the drugs out of it, the idea that the United States is going to start treating Central America as a region that will install personally handpicked leaders, we are going back to the 1800s because that's what we used to do then. Now, will any of this work kicking over the ant hill? That is really easy. Reconstructing something on the other side that is stable, that is almost impossible. We've tried to do it in Iraq, we've tried to do it in Yugoslavia, we've tried to do it in Afghanistan. There's an argument that we're trying to do it now in Syria. It usually doesn't work unless you're willing to put at least 100,000 troops

in a country that's the size of Venezuela, maybe 50,000 in case of Cuba. I don't think we have the troops that would be necessary for a place like Brazil. And if you want to do it in Central America, keep in mind there's not just one central American country. It's a strip. And if you just do it to one, you really haven't fixed anything. So you have to do it from Panama all the way to Guatemala. And most of these places are broken states. Making them look like Wisconsin is not an option. and the effort of doing something would be something that would be more involved than Vietnam and Korea and Afghanistan and Iraq combined. So at some point, Washington will have to come up with a plan that is more realistic. But as we have seen from the last several decades of American foreign policymaking, not just this administration,

Americans tend to bite off more than it can chew when it comes to reconstructing or nation-building an area, and it never ends well. That doesn't mean it still won't work for American policy. Because remember, the primary goal here is to prevent eastern hemispheric powers from having a foothold. And while it would be nice to have economically successful countries that are political democracies aligned with the United States, the first and foremost concern is security and economic penetration, which brings us to the last target that the United States is going to have, and that's China. China's entire geopolitical plan is for the United States to ultimately underwrite its geopolitical. political success. Its Navy may be large, but it's largely coastal. It can't project power. Its population is dying out literally, and their whole economic model is to make product with

technologies that have stolen from the rest of the world and then export it to undercut other potential competitors and shove products into their market and have the United States strategically underwrite the entire thing. In Latin America, it has been partially about market access, but it's mostly been about resource access, and that has put Chinese footprints all over the region. The United States was always going to act against that. It looks like it's starting now. In the case of Venezuela, most of the crude eventually ended up at teapot refineries in the greater Shanghai and Shangdon region. That's going to obviously end. So basically, you should look at any investment that the Chinese have on the ground in Latin America now as circumspect and likely to be a target

because the Chinese have nothing that they can do to protect it, and the United States has lots and lots and lots of options shy of kidnapping a president in order to get rid of it.