I think it's a good idea for regime change to happen in Venezuela because the Venezuelan people have already spoken on this issue.

It would be good for the region, it would be good for Venezuelans, and there's very little popular support to this criminal organization operating at the top.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today I'm asking a surreal question.

Is the United States about to invade Venezuela?

It increasingly looks that way.

President Trump has sent mixed signals about his intentions.

He's deployed America's most advanced U.S.

aircraft carrier to the region, and he's receiving near-daily briefings with military options ranging from strikes on government facilities to special operations raids.

He has said Venezuelan President Maduro's days are numbered, but also that Maduro wants to talk.

Maduro, for his part, has called for peace, going so far as to butcher the lines of a famous John Lennon song, acapella.

Joining me to try to make sense of all this, except for that last part, a man who has served two very different administrations, as U.S.

ambassador to Venezuela under both President Trump and President Biden, James Story.

Don't worry, I've also got your puppet regime.

- Hello.

- Donald.

Wow, look who it is.

You want to end the war in Ukraine?

- No.

- Okay, so what's up?

But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

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Additional funding provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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And... [MUSIC PLAYING] Breaking news.

The US president has authorized the military buildup of ships, aircraft, and special strike forces in the Caribbean.

American fighter jets and bombers fly sorties to intimidate a Latin American strongman accused by Washington of trafficking drugs and rigging elections.

There's talk of US troops going in to remove him.

I'm not talking about Venezuela today.

I'm talking about Panama in 1989.

Fellow citizens, last night I ordered US military forces to Panama.

No president takes such action lightly.

For decades, Panamanian President Manuel Noriega was a paid CIA asset and he was a useful intermediary for covert U.S.

operations across Latin America.

But by the late 1980s, he had become a liability, deeply involved in cocaine trafficking, money laundering, and after annulling an election he clearly lost, openly defying Washington.

When Panamanian forces killed an off-duty U.S.

Marine in December 1989, President George H.W.

Bush launched Operation Just Cause, sending nearly 28,000 troops and hundreds of aircraft to remove Noriega and protect U.S.

citizens in the canal zone.

Fighting is still going on in Panama City.

The Americans say 19 of their soldiers have been killed and more than 100 wounded.

After Noriega fled to the Vatican's embassy in Panama City, U.S.

forces surrounded the building.

But instead of going in, they turned the volume up.

A fleet of Humvees mounted with loudspeakers blasted a deeply ironic playlist of heavy metal music from the clashes "I Fought the Law" to Van Halen's "Panama."

[crowd chanting] The racket outside the embassy clearly angered the Vatican, who called it American harassment.

The campaign to use rock music to drive out Noriega went on all night and this morning.

It was so loud that even people living a quarter of a mile away had a sleepless night.

Conversation was almost impossible.

[crowd chanting] Ten days later, Noriega, an avowed opera lover, surrendered and was extradited to a U.S.

prison.

Within months, Bush moved on to a much larger crisis in Kuwait.

But if President Trump invades Venezuela hoping for a similar quick win, he'll have a rude awakening because Venezuela doesn't so much resemble Panama in 1989 as it does Iraq in 2003.

It's about 12 times larger, and the urban landscape is much denser and more complex than Panama's.

Also, U.S.

forces didn't really invade Panama.

They already had forces and bases and intelligence networks positioned alongside the U.S.-controlled canal.

Plus, Panama's military was tiny.

It was 12,000 troops in total.

Venezuela's armed forces number about 150,000, not to mention an additional million paramilitaries.

Maduro has spent the last decade purging disloyal officers and promoting loyalists.

It's a military designed for regime survival, even if that means guerrilla warfare.

But if a century of US intervention in Latin America has taught us anything, it's the enduring appeal of a bad idea.

And as the Trump administration escalates its military strikes off Venezuela's coast, it's clear that the president is seriously considering something further.

Joining me now to talk through all of this is a man who served as US ambassador to Venezuela during Trump's first term, Ambassador James Story.

Ambassador James Story, Jimmy, thanks for joining us today.

Thanks for having me today.

You said, it wasn't so long ago, that you thought it was like 10% likelihood we were gonna see direct military strikes on Venezuela.

You're up to 80%.

I'm probably at 100% at this point.

So we're both, we're within spitting distance.

What has changed your view?

Once the Ocean Trader came, which is a specialized ship for special forces, the F-35s landed in Puerto Rico, and then with the arrival of Gerald Ford, you have that many assets in the region, you're either gonna use them, or you're gonna, or actually, it's gonna be a net negative if you don't use them.

These are big, big, powerful resources that are just simply too powerful to go after narcotics trafficking boats.

Now, there's been talk of late that perhaps President Trump is interested in issuing an ultimatum, a diplomatic ultimatum.

What, if you think that's possible, what would he be demanding?

Well, it's possible.

It's not necessarily probable that an ultimatum would lead to Maduro departing the country.

The fact of the matter is he is surrounded by Cuban intelligence operatives and the Cuban government itself has basically colonized Venezuela because they depend on free oil and hydrocarbons from Venezuela just to keep going.

So for the Cubans, this is an existential problem, right?

And Maduro, he's a Cuban product, let's be very clear.

So for them, they're going to ensure that he doesn't get weak in the knees and leaves just because there happens to be 10% of the US Navy off his doorstep.

Now, having said that, the president has choices to make of escalating kinetic activity, for instance, that could result in additional pressure that would compel Maduro to leave.

But what do you think the plan is?

I mean, is it just get rid of Maduro and, well, whatever the outcome is, that's got to be better than what you have not?

Because I mean, you know, we've learned from Libya, Iraq, other places, that chaos isn't necessarily better than the devil that you know.

Well, I certainly think you have to ask the question, what comes next, right?

And then, and then, and as a former diplomat, retired diplomat, I always made my money pretty far down the alphabet, A to B, B to C, C to D. I was thinking about fourth and fifth order effects, and I'm hopeful that the administration is doing the same.

I think the easy part would be getting rid of Maduro.

And I don't say that cavalierly.

I say that understanding the military in Venezuela, understanding the lack of support that Maduro has, understanding our capabilities.

The hard work happens after that.

For 25 years, the institutions in that country have been systematically destroyed.

And how do you trust any part of a government whose sole purpose was keeping a criminal organization functioning?

And crucially, in a country that's basically a failed state, you don't have dominion over the entire territory.

You have dissident FARC groups, the ELN, these are both Marxist revolutionary groups from Colombia, living inside of Venezuela now, in addition to Hezbollah, the Tren de Aragua, and the Carta de los Soles.

So you have all these illegal criminal groups.

You're going to need the military to help you secure a peace while you rebuild institutions, faith in government, and have a free and fair election.

And that is the same military that has been, you know, basically keeping Maduro in power, that has been being used for repression at his, the dictator's behest.

- Well, you know, you raise an interesting point.

Like we've seen this before in Libya or Iraq or Haiti or what have you.

And let's take a lesson from Iraq.

De-Ba'athification-- - Was a disaster.

- Was a disaster.

And in the case of Panama, they disbanded the military, but quickly built a new civilian-led national defense, homeland defense force, rather than the military.

There are plenty of good people within the government, even this government as terrible government, as terrible as it is in Venezuela, who either live by the lead or silver, plomo or plata, what Pablo Escobar used to say, you're either, if you're with me, you get enriched.

If you're against me, I'll kill you.

They're either living through that or they joined the military out of a sense of greater duty.

They may not themselves be enriching themselves.

You know, the generals involved in crimes against humanity, the kidnapping of American citizens, narcotics trafficking, human rights abuses, murder, they probably can't be rehabilitated.

But aren't there some others that potentially can help revitalize, reform, revamp, and fix this institution that is necessary in a country that large?

- And who's making that decision?

I mean, is that some American commandant that's on the ground?

If the Americans take out Maduro, are the Americans necessarily leading what a regime change policy is gonna be in Venezuela?

Not a small country.

Well, I mean, Secretary Colin Powell has said it pretty well, the pottery barn, if you break it, you buy it.

If you break it, you fix it.

Yeah, yeah.

So, I mean, the question becomes then one of, at what level would the US be willing to engage?

You know, for me, crucially, what does the first 24 hours look like?

Then the first week, you know, we're getting micro-focused here.

And then over the course of how long before you can have either Edmundo Gonzalez is going to be sworn in because he won the last election in July, or they're going to have to revamp the entire system and have a new set of elections.

And a lot of this is going to depend, obviously, on the Venezuelan people and the transition.

Do you believe that there is broad popular support for, not Maduro's removal, again, we know what the people want, but do you think there would be broad popular support for a United States-led policy of regime change, military?

I think that the majority of people in Venezuela are so desperate for change because they've tried everything.

They've negotiated, they've protested, they've won elections, and yet nothing has changed.

So I do believe that there is an overwhelming majority that would like to see him gone and are okay with the United States doing it.

The question really becomes, well, how does the United States do it?

And if we come in, guns a-blazing and destroy the military, which we could do in a couple of hours, but again, that's a military that you then need to secure a peace in a country that is just riddled with illegal armed groups, including Hezbollah and the FARC and the ELN and lots of other smaller groups that are seeking these kind of economic rents in the country.

So it depends on how it's done, I believe.

But I do believe that most Venezuelans would support even an action by the United States.

One of the points I think here we got to remember, how many failed negotiations have there been?

The Vatican's been involved, the Norwegians have been involved, the Bajans and Barbados have been involved, we were involved.

At some point, losing the football, I mean, Charlie Brown figures out that he's not going to get that field goal, right?

And now we're hearing yet again, just recently, from Maduro saying, "Just peace, not war.

I want dialogue."

Well, dialogue to him is monologue to any other human.

What he really wants is just to tell us how it's going to be and how it's going to be is he's going to remain in power until the day he goes to meet his maker.

So the idea of a dialogue, that dialogue needs to be framed into, okay, how exactly are you packing your bags to leave?

How exactly are we reinstitutionalizing the country?

How exactly are we going to get that democracy up and running again?

Because that's how you deal with the human rights problem, the crimes against humanity problem, the kidnapping of Americans problem, the migration problem.

And people don't talk enough about the fact that this is the largest migration in the history of the hemisphere happening right now.

It's as if 75 or 80 million Americans got up and walked out tomorrow.

We'd be talking about that.

And yet 9 million Venezuelans and it's, "well, Tren de Agua this," and "people coming through the Darien Gap that."

It is ultimately destabilizing to the region.

- Yeah, they're mostly not making it to the US.

But I mean, in Colombia, for example, it's a very serious problem.

You hear about it all the time.

Right, right.

3 million, 3 million in Colombia, Colombia coming out of a 52-year civil war with the FARC, and they're trying to provide education, health care, housing, food, opportunity for their populace, trying to rebuild so that people don't go back into criminality, and then you add on to them the desperately poor who managed to flee Venezuela by walking across the border.

It's a tough situation.

How do you respond to the charges both from governments in the region, even Mexico, otherwise a quite close friend and partner of the United States, not to mention the international community, that what this amounts to so far are extrajudicial executions of people that have not been certainly convicted in any court of law, have not faced rule of law.

The United Kingdom, even again, one of America's top allies, good relationship with Trump and Starmer together, and yet has suspended some intelligence cooperation because they claim what the U.S.

is doing is illegal.

How do you respond to that?

Well, I've got a few different responses here.

Let me start by saying that Congress has a role to play in the authorized use of military force.

So I think this is a question for Congress to take up and certainly a good senator from Kentucky who's a Republican has even raised this issue.

The other thing I'd say is I've been warning about the fact that transnational criminal organizations are transnational, meaning that they don't respect borders.

How we go after those organizations is that we work in cooperation across borders transnationally.

And at the Joint Interagency Task Force South in Key West, we have 20 liaison officers that do this work.

Because while going after a drug load is important, and I believe we should be judicializing these cases, taking down that case and working the case to find out who's got an apartment building in Brickell in Miami and who's also building something in Medellin.

I want to go after the money.

I want to go after the organizations, right?

So I think that we are definitely get, we normally get more intel than we give in the region.

And this is a case where these criminal organizations will change their methodologies, right?

And we will look like we have gotten some success when now we're gonna be blind because we're no longer gonna have regional support in the intelligence to figure out how the drugs are now going north.

So I think that's something we have to take a look at.

We have to be very careful about.

And that's something I'm very concerned that we're losing that intelligence about what's really happening in the region.

We haven't talked much about Maria Machado, who has been the leader of the opposition, who has won the Nobel Peace Prize, who has been pretty outspoken in her support for President Trump.

But of course, there's always the danger that as the United States is involved in direct military activity, there's going to be backlash against the US.

What does she have to do?

Has she been playing her cards well so far?

How do you think she needs to behave if you and I are right and military intervention is indeed imminent and forthcoming?

I mean, what I can say is that I know Maria Corina Machado well.

We worked together and, you know, we in the lead up the primaries leading into this historic election where her chosen person Edmundo Gonzalez won the election overwhelmingly, you know, we were very much aligned on working through democratic means.

And I think one of the things that I would suggest, I've made this suggestion publicly in the past, is if the theory of change here that the administration has is that somebody close to Maduro will either extradite him to the United States, exile him to another country, or send him to meet his maker, all right?

That person needs to understand that the future for them is better than the present, meaning that I would want to know that Maria Corina Machado and the opposition, when they come into power, have a plan that says, "When we change, not everybody is going to be out."

And I think that's important.

Hugo Chavez won an election democratically.

He won them all democratically because of the vast difference in wealth disparity, the wealth disparity in that country.

And if they're going to rebuild democracy in Venezuela, they have to take into consideration that all Venezuelans need to be part of it.

So that's a conversation that I think would be better served being put out there publicly right now, rather than just quietly with the United States.

- Final question for you, Jimmy.

You know, this has been a president who talks about peace an awful lot, talks about a lot at wars that he has ended or played a part in ending.

What we're talking about in Venezuela is very different.

We're talking about potentially regime change.

Maybe we're even talking about some level of American boots on the ground.

I want to ask you before this happens, is this a good idea or a really bad idea?

I think it's a good idea for regime change to happen in Venezuela because the Venezuelan people have already spoken on this issue.

It would be good for the region.

It would be good for Venezuelans.

And there's very little popular support to this criminal organization operating at the top.

- Yeah, but what you said is it'd be good for regime change to happen magically.

I'm asking, is it a good idea for the United States to actually bring about that regime change?

Very, very different question.

- Well, it depends on how you do it.

It depends on how you do it.

So would we exchange the life of one person for freedom in that country?

That's a question, right?

If you think about how small the group is around Maduro, why, and this is something I've struggled with, and I think it's important.

I'd like to know, for instance, what's the process by which the targets are currently being vetted, these drug boats, and what's the decision-making?

I know during the Obama administration, for instance, and other administrations, that it was very tortured, and the final decision-making was by the president.

Is that the same thing?

And then when we look at who is there, so there's a Soleimani type character that exists in Venezuela, and his name is Diosdado Cabello.

He's the head of the military intelligence.

He's the head of intelligence.

He's definitely part of Cartel de los Soles.

He's responsible for the kidnapping of American citizens.

Here's a bad actor who, if taken out, and I'm not trying to get a hit put out on me.

I'm just giving you the example.

If he's taken out and then Maduro and company are given an offer to leave the country within a couple of hours, I think they would take up take him up on that offer.

Maduro does not have a lot of support in the country at all.

He never served in the military.

Diosdado Cabello is his way into the military.

So you have a couple of actors like this that are in the country.

It's a very small group and they have been able to stay in power with the help of the Cubans and also the help of largesse for those who work most hardly for them and also fear.

I think it's a house of cards.

Now having said that, afterwards, how do you rebuild institutions that have been completely gutted for 25 years in a country that doesn't control its territory?

That's going to be a lot of hard work.

So I'm not suggesting it'll be easy at all.

I am suggesting that in much the same way as in Panama, I think arguably with Manuel Noriega gone, and I believe Nicolas Maduro is much worse than Noriega, vis-a-vis Noriega, much worse.

But arguably Panama is much better off today with a stronger democracy and a growing economy and a big middle class than it would have been had Manuel Noriega stuck around.

But they're important moral questions that we have to struggle with and have to think through.

Yeah, well, certainly not easy.

Potential for a lot of backlash.

Lots of questions that have not yet been answered.

Jimmy Story, thanks so much for being a part of this.

Appreciate you helping us out today.

Thanks for having me on today.

I really appreciate it.

[electronic music] - Now to puppet regime, where President Trump turns to an old friend to weigh his military options in Venezuela.

- Hello.

- Donald.

- Ah, look who it is.

- You want to end the war in Ukraine?

- No.

Okay, so, uh, what's up?

More like what's up with you, big guy.

- Are you going to do it?

- Do what?

You know, it.

- What's it?

- Venezuela.

You're gonna do your own special military operation.

What the... Yeah, I'm thinking very strongly about it.

Yeah, I'm thinking very strongly about it.

Don't be punk, Donald.

Quagmire awaits.

Who's Quagmire?

Is that one of Hegseth's drinking buddies?

- Once you surround neighbor with your military, you must go all the way.

It's like gun in Chekhov play.

Well, I do love Chekhov.

He was amazing in Star Trek.

Donchek, it's time to make history.

- Great.

- Maybe no one ever won war on drugs.

- No.

- Or war on terror.

- Okay.

- Or war on regime change.

- Tell me more.

- But that's because no one ever tried to do all three at same time.

- Wow.

- It could be you, man.

- You really think so?

- Yes.

- You think it would get me a Nobel?

- I would nominate you myself.

Puppet Regime.

That's our show this week.

Come back next week and if you like what you've seen, or even if you don't, but you have your own petrostate and your crosshairs, why don't you check us out at gzeromedia.com [Music] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at Prologis.com.

And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, health care, and more.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And... ♪♪