Policy Outlook Event Explores Venezuela After Maduro: What Comes Next?

Just days after the Trump administration captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in a surprise military operation, a University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy panel explored the complex issues shaping what’s ahead for Venezuela and the United States.

“Maduro's removal thrust Venezuela into a period of profound uncertainty with significant questions about the U.S. role in Venezuela going forward,” said Senior Lecturer Rebecca Wolfe, who moderated the "Policy Outlook" event. “This action also has wide ranging implications for energy markets, regional stability, and wider foreign policy.” 

Wolfe was joined by Professor Christopher Blattman; Ryan Kellogg, the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor at Harris and a deputy dean; and Associate Professor Paul Poast from the Political Science Department. Together they spent an hour Jan. 12 in the Sky Suite at the Keller Center dissecting the long-running Venezuelan crisis, the U.S. intervention, and possible next moves. Every seat was filled. 

A Crisis Years in the Making

Blattman first provided context. Once among the hemisphere’s wealthiest and most promising nations, Venezuela deteriorated dramatically under Hugo Chávez—who was president from 1999 until his death in 2013—and then Maduro, who along with wife Cilia Flores is now in New York facing narco-terrorism charges. More than a quarter of the population fled, Blattman explained. Nearby countries such as Colombia, Ecuador, and Chile have seen floods of migrants. But that migration crisis, Blattman argued, is only part of the story. Venezuelan criminal organizations have been “exporting” violence across the entire region.

“This was one of the most destabilizing regimes in the whole hemisphere,” Blattman said.

A Shift in Course

For years, U.S. policy swung between sanctions and disengagement, Blattman said. When President Donald Trump started his second term, reports suggest he wanted Maduro out and initially sought his exit through negotiation, with an offer of exile and immunity. “Once the United States started that negotiation process of ‘leave or else,’ to not follow through on the ‘or else’ would be not just catastrophic for Venezuela, but catastrophic for U.S. relationships in the whole region, the whole world, especially once the United States started the public military buildup.”

Blattman and Poast agreed that if Kamala Harris had been elected president in the 2024 election, a similar effort to remove Maduro would have taken place.

Drugs or Oil?

Early justifications for intervention in Venezuela emphasized the need to combat drug trafficking. Now, oil has emerged as the administration’s central talking point. Just last week, Trump urged the world’s oil giants to invest there. But Kellogg was skeptical “that we're going to see a whole lot of development happening anytime in the near and medium term.”

Why? Venezuela is oil rich, but it is also an investment risk, Kellogg said. Reviving production at scale would require tens of billions of dollars in long-term capital investments—pipelines, refineries, power grids, and skilled labor—all of which demand political stability over decades.

Oil companies, Kellogg noted, have been burned in Venezuela in the past. In the 1990s, major oil companies ramped up investment, propelling Venezuela to export three million barrels of crude a day. But when Chavez came to power, he forced a change in terms on the companies. “They have not forgotten this,” Kellogg said. “Memories are very, very long. And all of these things argue against substantial investment until we see some signs of a long-run durable change.”

As for U.S. national security, Kellogg said he believes there are problems, including drug trafficking, stemming from instability in Venezuela. Oil, he said, “is definitely not one of those problems.” 

“We are in no way dependent on the less than one million barrels a day of oil that Venezuela has been producing lately,” Kellogg said. “It's not a national security imperative at all. There are certainly economics at play; there's potentially money to be made or wealth to be transferred. But, does our economic well-being depend on it? Absolutely not.”

A “19th-Century” Foreign Policy?

Poast framed the intervention through a broader lens, returning to his prediction from an earlier "Policy Outlook" event from that Trump would be a great 19th century president. 

“I think that this is fully in line with him being a great 19th century president,” he explained. “I mean that literally. I say to people, ‘Do you want to understand anything that Trump has done in foreign policy? Just do the following thought experiment: Go back to 1895 New York, find a businessman, bring him to the present, make him president of the United States, and then ask him what makes sense and what does not make sense.’ And that will pretty much explain everything Trump does, including what he is doing vis-a-vis the Western Hemisphere.”

“Because,” he added, “if you're a 19th century president, you are saying, ‘Why are we involved in Europe? Why are we involved in Asia? Why are we not focusing on the Western Hemisphere?’”

Trump, Poast said, is making U.S. security in the Western Hemisphere a priority for his administration. “Now,” he added, "does that mean he's doing it right? That's a whole other question.”

"10% Better"

Throughout the discussion, panelists returned to 10% better. First raised by Blattman, the phrase was used to illustrate that incremental gains matter and that “10% better is realistic” for Venezuela in the short term.

By that, Blattman said he meant: 10% less money laundered for Hezbollah or drug cartels (as Maduro has been accused of doing), 10% harder to steal the next election, or 10% more Venezuelans returning home.

On the resource side, and for oil in particular, 10% improvement is helpful, Kellogg said. 

Such incremental change, Blattman added, could halt the destruction of a country and move things in a slightly positive direction, “so that maybe in a generation, there's a real democratic transition.”

“If the plan all along has been to simply say, ‘let's get an existing regime actor who's going to be 10% friendlier to us and make a 10% improvement and then hold this Sword of Damocles over their head in case they get out of line,’ that's super sensible in some ways, and so much more realistic than what was attempted in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Blattman said. 

Regional and Global Implications

Will the intervention embolden China or Russia to act more aggressively in their own spheres of influence? The panelists were cautious. If anything, they suggested, the operation may reinforce deterrence by showcasing U.S. military capabilities, particularly given Venezuela’s close ties to Chinese surveillance and defense technologies that failed to prevent the strike.

What Comes Next?

“I don't think anybody knows,” Blattman said. “This has been a pretty leaky U.S. administration.… They've not been very leaky on this, however, which either means they don't have a plan, or they have a plan and it's tightly held.” 

Still, he said he was cautiously optimistic, “but very, very cautiously optimistic” about the administration having a strategy in place. 

Still to be determined, Kellogg said, is how the United States will handle oil tankers going in and out of Venezuela. U.S. warships have been intercepting them, and Trump has said “we run the country, we control the oil industry,” Kellogg said. “It's not clear what the plan is for that.”

Poast, meanwhile, reminded that military success does not equal strategic clarity. While the operation to oust Maduro was executed with precision, the aftermath—governance with so many power brokers still entrenched, sanctions relief, oil policy, and regional coordination—appears less clear cut. 

“How,” Poast asked, “are we going to be changing the regime? How are we going to be working with the government? How are oil companies going to be operating there?” 

Such questions, he said, are not a unique characteristic to the Trump administration. 

“That,” he said, “is unfortunately a characteristic of a lot of U.S. foreign policy, which is very well done on the military execution side, but the aftermath? Not planned out so well.”