00:00You've said in the past few days that you're not viewing this as a regime change.
00:04You think about Delce Rodriguez, of course, Maduro's vice president,
00:07now inaugurated as the acting president of Venezuela.
00:11How do you see her working with and that relationship with the U.S. administration evolving?
00:19Well, again, it's leadership change, not regime change.
00:22All the other components, all the other features of Venezuelan society
00:26essentially are what they were four or five days ago.
00:31The real question, I think, the interesting one is what is the nature of any, shall we say,
00:35understandings between Delce Rodriguez and, say, Marco Rubio, and also whether they're kept.
00:41You're going to have various forces and pressures come to the surface in Venezuela.
00:47So it'll be very interesting to see how the opposition reacts to being shut out,
00:52whether there's pushback against what is seen as a large American presence
00:57or international presence in the oil industry,
01:00whether certain groups feel disadvantaged and decide to take up arms.
01:04And the administration is essentially banking on continuity, and that could well happen.
01:10But I've learned in these situations never to assume good news.
01:15Well, to the point on oil, you think about Delce Rodriguez, an oil minister.
01:19She has been sort of the go-to contact for senior executives in the oil industry.
01:25Much has been made, of course, about Venezuela's oil reserves,
01:28and there's been a lot of ink spilled about what this could mean for the global oil market.
01:32If you do see Venezuela's output sort of go back to the peak levels that we saw in the 70s, Richard,
01:39and I wonder how you see that evolving and whether or not some of those big ambitions,
01:45whether the timelines are realistic here.
01:48In my own view, most of the optimism or the argument that this is going to be a game-changer is way overdone.
01:57Yes, on paper, Venezuela sits on 17, 18 percent of the world's proven oil reserves,
02:02but the oil, as you know, is heavy in sulfur.
02:05The wells and the infrastructure in a serious state of disrepair.
02:10This is a moment where we say there's a lot of supply out there.
02:13The fact that oil is at $60 a barrel is of itself, you know, is quite revealing.
02:18So it'll take time and money to get oil production up in a market that, at the moment,
02:24is not desperate for more oil, which, by the way, would add further downward pressure on prices.
02:30So my own hunch is, yeah, over time, this will, you know, the output will go up from a million barrels,
02:35maybe to a million and a half, maybe even to two or slightly more.
02:39But this is not a game-changer in a world where you've got over 100 million barrels a day.
02:43I am curious, though, Richard.
02:45I mean, it's going to take a while before we even get to the energy infrastructure build-out,
02:49if it does indeed come.
02:51There are questions, though, just about the general stability in the overall region.
02:54We've already heard from some neighboring countries, including Colombia and Guyana,
02:57have expressed a little bit of disappointment, if you will, about the U.S. intervention in Venezuela.
03:02And I am curious as to how, if you were still at the White House,
03:06how you would sort of advise the president and the other people there
03:10about how to approach the possibility that some of those neighbors
03:13might actually end up working against U.S. efforts to do whatever the goal is.
03:17Well, again, I think the administration has to decide whether what happened in Venezuela
03:23is a one-off, which leads you in a certain direction.
03:26And essentially, we're going to focus on keeping things stable there,
03:30or whether what happened in Venezuela, if you will, is step one.
03:34And now the United States is going to turn its sights on Colombia or Canada or Cuba or Greenland
03:40or you name it.
03:42And, you know, the signals coming out of the administration are quite muscular.
03:46And my concern is if too much momentum comes out of this,
03:50if the administration starts to feel that it can't miss, it can't lose,
03:55then my sense is they'll overreach and they will trigger a reaction against them,
04:00not just in the Americas, but obviously if they move against a place like Greenland,
04:05that would have deep, deep consequences for the future viability and cohesion of NATO.
04:11Well, and there's also issues about what the U.S. capabilities are.
04:14It's one thing to get involved in one or two countries with regards to this type of intervention,
04:17but you start rattling off the list of names that you said.
04:20I don't even know if we have the capacity to do that.
04:23And I do want to go back to your time in the administration, during the Bush administration,
04:27a lot of the concerns about our invasion of Iraq, the Pottery Barn rule, you know,
04:32which wasn't really a rule, but certainly something that you, Colin Powell, and others invoked a lot.
04:37The idea that if you go in there and start messing stuff up, ultimately the responsibility ends up being
04:42on the U.S. government or the U.S. military to fix things.
04:46Yeah, it's for that reason that I believe this administration has decided to limit itself, again, to a change at the top.
04:53They swapped out Maduro for Rodriguez, but otherwise they seem pretty content to leave things as they are.
04:59This is not a policy based on trying to bring the Democratic opposition to power.
05:05That would probably trigger massive resistance, could trigger a civil war.
05:09So I think what the administration is hoping is they can get the access they want to Venezuela's oil
05:15in exchange for essentially leaving most of the powers that be in place.
05:20That's the deal there. They're essentially working.
05:22And the question is whether that deal holds.
05:24I am curious, Richard. I don't want to be too speculative here.
05:27But do you think that Russia had any involvement in the decision by the U.S.
05:32to take this action against Maduro last weekend?
05:35I don't. I think the Russians are probably on one level slightly unhappy with what has happened.
05:43It's a bit of an embarrassment for them. Venezuela was associated with them.
05:48They have to be concerned about what this might mean for Cuba.
05:51On the other hand, if you're Vladimir Putin, who, by the way, a week ago had no interest whatsoever
05:56in peace with Ukraine, I think now, if anything, he feels vindicated.
06:00He sees that the United States is using force to, in this case, to get rid of a leader
06:06it judged to be illegitimate in its backyard.
06:09And Vladimir Putin goes, I like that way of thinking.
06:12It kind of works for me vis-a-vis Ukraine.
06:14So I think in the larger sense, Vladimir Putin is probably happy, as is China,
06:18also seeing the United States more involved than ever.
06:21And we're in danger. We've got to think about this, whether we want to, in some ways,
06:25voluntarily change ourselves from being a global power to being more of a regional power.
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