Former Ambassador Not Optimistic About Venezuela

When American special forces swooped into Venezuela to capture the country’s leader and his wife and bring them to the United States for trial, this country was reverted to an American foreign policy that was popular over 150 years ago.

That’s the opinion of Charles Shapiro, who once served as the American ambassador to Venezuela and who now teaches at Georgia Tech. It was, he says, a time when diplomacy meant little and might made right.

“The Trump Administration is reverting to an era of power politics, which was known in the 19th century as ‘spheres of influence.’ It was an age of imperialism, when there were no rules and big countries did what they wanted. They divided up Africa, for example. And that’s what we’re returning to, but it’s going to be very risky for the United States and complicated over the long term.”

Shapiro, who after serving in Venezuela was a deputy assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, made his remarks at a joint session of the World Affairs Councils of Atlanta and Miami. He has his own prescription for success in bringing about change in Venezuela and it starts, he believes, with working with other nations in Latin America.

“One of the things I would do if I were creating United States foreign policy is stop alienating everyone else. We need all of Latin America. We need the Organization of American States. We need the United Nations. All of them are needed to create a timetable to establish a provisional government to replace the Maduro government. But we’ve done just the opposite. We’ve alienated all our neighbors.

The change in American foreign policy has been reinforced in recent months by a policy document outlining our National Security Strategy (NSS). It was released by the administration in December 2025.

Unlike previous editions, including those from President Donald Trump’s first term, it pivots away from American concerns in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. According to Richard Kilroy, a high-ranking retired military officer and a professor of politics at The Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston, the Western Hemisphere is seen as “the primary risk to U.S. interest and security.”

“The second Trump administration’s NSS views the Western Hemisphere as its sphere of influence. More specifically, it largely promotes a new era that places an emphasis on U.S. military intervention and expansion, likely at the expense of other’s sovereignty and self-determination — important concepts in U.S.-Latin American relations.”

It is, he points out, a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, that warned European governments not to meddle in America’s backyard. It could lead, as professor Kilroy points out, to a new age of American imperialism where America will use all its power, including military intervention in the region.

Significantly, the United States, after making its lightning military strike in Caracas to capture Maduro and his wife, has left Maduro’s government largely in place. Maduro’s vice president who, Ambassador Shapiro points out, was once the leader’s chief of staff, now runs the government. Moreover, one of those named in the federal indictment with Maduro still remains as the country’s minister of the interior, running an often brutal and corrupt security force.

Venezuela’s oil industry was once an engine of development that made the country the most prosperous in Latin America. It has proven oil reserves of 300 billion barrels, the largest of any nation in the world. But extracting that wealth will mean a major investment by American oil companies and others that could take a decade or more and cost upwards of $100 billion.

Ambassador Shapiro doesn’t believe major corporations are ready to take on that challenge while Venezuela remains in the hands of its current government.

“My analysis is that the Trump administration is putting stability over democracy,” Shapiro says, “by working with Delcey Rodriguez as president of Venezuela after the removal of Nicholas Maduro, essentially what we have is the Maduro dictatorship without Maduro.”

Venezuela, under Maduro and Rodriguez, has created an economy that the International Monetary Fund says has shrunk by 70 percent in the last dozen years. More than eight million Venezuelans out of a country of 30 million today have left, many of them fleeing to neighboring Columbia. It one of the largest recent migrations, exceeding the number who have fled the wars in Ukraine and Syria.

“We are dealing with people over there,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Senate in January, “that have spent most of their lives living in a gangster paradise.”