While Washington was arguing over the viability of President Trump’s proposal to annex Greenland, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro held a sham inauguration in Caracas for his third term in power and threatened to invade Puerto Rico.
Flooding the U.S. with refugees while aligning himself with America’s enemies, Maduro has made himself an enduring bipartisan headache for the last decade.
While renewed attention to the long-neglected Western Hemisphere is welcome, the Trump administration would be remiss if it were to solely focus its efforts up north. To the south, unseating Maduro in Venezuela presents an opportunity to make good on Trump’s promise to tackle surging immigration, while simultaneously neutralizing a geopolitical threat in America’s backyard.
Former President Joe Biden’s failure to unseat Maduro is the last mark on a checkered foreign policy record. But Trump has an opportunity to make Venezuela his first foreign policy success by avoiding his predecessor’s mistakes and taking a more aggressive posture toward Caracas.
Maduro’s inauguration was the capstone of a fraught policy of appeasement from the Biden White House.
In mid-2023, Biden faced a two-pronged Venezuela conundrum. The first was the surging numbers of Venezuelan refugees entering the U.S. The second was the sham election that just took place, motivating even more Venezuelans to flee the country.
With immigration a hot-button domestic issue and the upcoming 2024 U.S. election in mind, the Biden administration held high-level talks with Venezuelan diplomats focused on tackling migration in October 2023. Upending years of a closed-door policy on direct repatriation, Caracas agreed to begin accepting deportation flights originating from the United States.
Days later, the Maduro regime and the Venezuelan opposition signed the Barbados Agreement, establishing a path toward a free and fair Venezuelan election. The Biden administration sweetened the deal by conditionally relieving sanctions against Venezuela’s oil industry, giving Caracas until the end of November 2023 to begin lifting bans on Venezuelan opposition candidates and release American and Venezuelan political prisoners. Deportation flights began the same day.
The administration erroneously believed it was tackling two issues at once: facilitating an open election in Venezuela while stemming the flow of Venezuelan refugees by boosting the Venezuelan government’s coffers. But the Maduro almost immediately regime pounced on America’s naiveté.
After Maria Corina Machado, Maduro’s top political rival, decisively won Venezuela’s opposition primary, Maduro suspended the results. By the time the November deadline was reached, Maduro had repeatedly flagrantly violated the Barbados Agreement and the conditions of the adjoining U.S. sanctions relief.
Following the deadline, the Biden administration refused to enforce snapback sanctions. Instead, it opted to express “deep concern” while continuing an ill-fated pressure campaign to ensure Machado could run in Venezuela’s general election. It would never come to pass.
Not only did Venezuela’s highest court uphold a ban on Machado’s candidacy, the Maduro regime blocked Machado’s replacement, Corina Yoris, from registering as a candidate — all as the Venezuelan dictatorship continued to enjoy the benefits of U.S. sanctions relief.
When the U.S. reimposed some sanctions shortly after, Venezuela halted the deportation flights the Biden administration had so eagerly sought after just months earlier. It wasn’t until April 2024, months after the initial adherence deadline, that the Biden administration fully triggered snapback sanctions, citing Maduro’s repeated attacks against the Venezuelan opposition.
The appeasement plan decisively failed on both fronts. The U.S. could no longer help manage the surge in Venezuelan border crossings through repatriation flights, and Caracas was on track for a sham election.
The Venezuelan opposition unified around Edmundo Gonzalez as a second-alternate, charging through the Maduro regime’s obstacles toward the July 2024 Venezuelan election.
By almost all accounts except Maduro’s, Gonzalez won decisively. However, without strong enough external pressure on the Maduro regime to recognize the true results, Gonzalez was forced into exile. He has not set foot on Venezuelan soil since — not even after the Biden administration nominally supported a foiled plan by the Venezuelan opposition to have Gonzalez return to Caracas last week to be inaugurated.
Maduro’s inauguration prompted the last breaths of Biden’s Venezuela policy — eight individual sanctions against Maduro-connected officials.
Now, as Maduro begins his new term, Chevron’s license to conduct business with Venezuela’s oil industry — a financial lifeline for the Maduro regime — remains untouched. Venezuelans fleeing Maduro’s repression continue to trek toward the U.S. A poll conducted shortly after the July election showed that 43 percent of Venezuelans were considering fleeing the country.
Trump inherits a further-entrenched, belligerent Maduro and a continued flow of Venezuelan refugees.
Rather than Biden-style appeasement, Trump should turn up the temperature against the Maduro regime. American companies, namely Chevron, should be banned from enriching the Maduro dictatorship further — the central component of Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s (D-Fla.) bipartisan REVOCAR Act.
Trump should avoid repeating Biden’s mistakes and cutting deals with the Maduro regime in the hopes of mitigating refugee flow. Maduro has overseen one of the world’s worst refugee crises — precisely because he and his government’s gross mismanagement and repression continue to fuel it. For Venezuelans to return, Maduro must go.
With an experienced Latin America hand in Marco Rubio heading the State Department, and an eager congressional partner in Salazar leading the House Foreign Affairs Latin America Subcommittee, Trump has the resources and opportunity to accomplish in Venezuela what Biden simply could not.
Kareem Rifai is a graduate student at the Georgetown Security Studies program.
