The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Venezuela’s End: Was a Deal Struck? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

There's been speculation that a deal could have been struck between the US and a power like Russia or China that allowed the US to move on Venezuela. Let's put that one to rest.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3LC3Ujq

Hey everybody, Peter Zion here coming from Colorado. It's like 60 mile an hour winds outside, so we're going to do this one inside. Ever since Nicholas Maduro was captured by the United States over the weekend. I've been getting a lot of questions about some of the details. And one that keeps coming up over and over and over is whether this is some sort of deal

with the Russians and the Chinese, where the Americans get their way in Venezuela, and in exchange, the Chinese get their way in Taiwan, and the Russians get their way in Ukraine. Short version is no. That's not how the United States works. Not that the United States is not willing to make a deal. Not that the Trump administration, of course, likes to make deals. But for it to be a deal, there has to be something that the other side can give you.

And in this case, with China and Russia, there isn't. Neither country has the ability to impose any sort of security reality really outside of their own near abroad. Their militaries are very limited. The Chinese Navy really can't operate more than a couple hundred miles from their own coast. The Russians may need months in order to search troops to place on their border, and they have never demonstrated the ability, even at the height of the Soviet period, to operate outside of hemisphere in a meaningful way.

So when you look at, say, the Russians, like, what is it that they could potentially hand to the United States and Venezuela? And the answer is absolutely nothing. I mean, at the height of Soviet power vis-a-vis American power, they were able to put some missiles in Cuba, which generated the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was a massive strategic defeat for Moscow. And they've never risen back up to that level, again, certainly not in the post-Cold War era. And that's before you consider that their entire military is now committed to Ukraine, and they just don't have the ability.

Now, the Russians did have some investments in Venezuela. That is fair. But Venezuela's oil company was more technically advanced, even after 30 years of degradation and looting, than Russia. Russia's oil companies are today. So that investment has gone nowhere. Basically you had the Russians putting some money in to cover some of the expenses. The Venezuelans or the Americans did the work, Chevron specifically. And the Russians got a cut of the profits and some of the oil to sell in international markets.

That's gone to zero. There is nothing to trade. China sounds like a more productive playing in the Western Hemisphere, but everything that they have done is based on investment. investing in ports and infrastructure in order to bring raw commodities, whether it's soy or iron ore, out to the coast and then on to East Asia. But again, that is something that they can't do themselves. Not that they don't have the money. Of course they have the money. But the Chinese Navy, while it has almost 600 ships, really can only operate in a very limited distance. About 10% of their ships can maybe sail more than 1,000 kilometers from the coast

and operate to a degree. They've never been battle tested, very important. but they've got foes in Japan and Taiwan and Korea and Indonesia and Singapore. They can't get past the first island chain. Even if they could, they'd then be cut off from the homeland, and every ship that did that in the hot war would then be destroyed in the Pacific. The Chinese can't operate in Latin America at all unless the U.S. Navy is providing freedom of the seas for everyone. Now, ever since 1992, the U.S. has been moving bit by bit away from that for a mix of military, strategic, political reasons. We haven't hit the hard break yet where the United States is actively undermining

the system, but wow, are we close? Because we now have the United States going after, say, for example, ships of the Shadow Fleet that are working with Iran and Russia and, of course, Venezuela. So it's entirely possible that this is the magic year where that all breaks, in which which case the entire Chinese position globally goes from being overextended to just be broken. We're not there yet. That's a conversation for another day. But for purposes of this question, was there a deal? No. Because the United States now, if it wants to, has proven they can just completely dismantle the entire Chinese position in the hemisphere with minimal military effort. And I expect we're going to see a lot of that over the course of the remainder of this calendar year.