Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube David Frum is joined by The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum to react to the news of the American raid and capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a special episode of The David Frum Show. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello, and welcome to a special edition of The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Early this morning, January 3, U.S. armed forces apprehended the dictator of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, to stand trial on a series of indictments for drug trafficking and other charges. It’s an extraordinary moment, and rather than wait any longer, I thought it would be helpful and useful to viewers and listeners if I invited a journalist who knows Venezuela and its opposition well, Anne Applebaum, to share her thoughts with me about what this moment means and what’s to come. Anne Applebaum: Delighted to join you. Frum: Let’s talk about our concerns and our worries and our hopes. The Maduro regime is desperately unpopular in Venezuela. It staged a sham election in 2024, which it lost even though it controlled all of the apparatus of the election. There is a legitimate, recognized by the United States, president of Venezuela, but Donald Trump seems to have something more militaristic and imperial in mind, at least according to his press conference today. Applebaum: Possibly. The only thing that Trump has said is very vague. He said America is going to “run” Venezuela. What that can mean given that we don’t have an embassy in Caracas right now, we don’t have U.S. troops in Caracas right now, it’s not clear to me how we would “run” Venezuela. Maybe it means that we would hand over to the existing regime, which is, of course, what the Venezuelan opposition has been afraid of. Maybe it means that the opposition will be allowed to come back, but by what process that would happen and how that transition would be made legitimate, that’s all pretty unclear and pretty murky. I mean, I should say, there, as you said, there was an election in 2024. The leader of the opposition, which is María Corina Machado, who’s recently won the Nobel Peace Prize, was not allowed to run. And so in her place, Edmundo González, a former Venezuelan diplomat, ran, and he won. The Venezuelans staged this really incredible operation whereby they collected—they had people in all the polling stations or in many of the polling stations across the country, and they collected the original vote tallies. They proved that González was the victor. The Venezuelan courts and the Venezuelan regime, which were controlled by Maduro, refused to let him take power. And not only that, they really and truly violently repressed people who were his advocates and people who’d been working for him. So this is a country that will not be sad or sorry to see Maduro go, but is very, very nervous about what might come next. Frum: Yeah. One of the things I was struck by at the press conference was the nationalist bragging by American leaders that this is a thing they did for the United States, not for the Venezuelans. The United States, of course, acted entirely alone, without any regional support or allies, without any form of international legitimacy, without any action of Congress. There is an indictment by an American court of Nicolás Maduro, so they’re trying to say this is like what happened in Panama in 1990 with Manuel Noriega, where U.S. troops enforced a court order. But again, the ambitions here are much greater, but they look kind of selfish and without regard to the Venezuelan people themselves. And one thing that I think is going on here politically may be that the Trump administration wants to rule Venezuela, or at least wants to control who does rule. At the same time, millions of Venezuelans have sought refuge outside Venezuela, and the United States is treating them like enemies, and is detaining them, expelling them, sending some of them to torture prisons. Maybe this is the way that they reconcile those two imperatives, by saying, Okay, now there’s a dictator we like in charge in Venezuela, and we can now round up and expel everyone who fled the last dictator. Applebaum: I mean, that’s possible. Some of the language used at the press conference today was Trump once again repeating that Venezuela had sent its criminals and it’s emptied out its insane asylums and so on, for none of which there’s any proof. Actually, many members of the democratic opposition fled the United States, many people who were simply seeking a decent place to live and a place to work. There have been a lot of successful Venezuelans in the United States. The smearing of Venezuelans has been one of the ugliest things that this regime has done—I mean the American regime, I should say, has done—since Trump took office. But you’re right to focus on the lack of concern for Venezuelans and for what happens in Venezuela. All of the narrative, from the very beginning of this conflict, has been about the glory of the United States, the reconquest of the Western Hemisphere. There was a bit more of that today—the supposed loss of U.S. oil that is somehow owed to the United States because it was stolen in the past—and nobody’s really unpacked that or explained it. And again, this idea that Venezuelan criminals and crazy people were somehow sent to the United States, for which, again, there’s no proof. So it looks very much like a war or a military action, if that’s what we’re calling it, that has been designed for domestic purposes. This is for U.S. domestic political consumption rather than to achieve something in Venezuela. Frum: I noticed that—and speaking of the U.S. political purposes, Trump made the first announcements of what he had done on his wacky social-media platform, Truth Social. He called in to Fox. It’s as if he says, I’m accounting only to my half or my 40 percent of American opinion—or these days, maybe 38 percent. I’m not accepting any responsibility to the whole country, and certainly not to anybody else in the world. One of the things that—I wonder—there’s been an eruption of Democratic Party opposition to this, emphasizing how wrong it is to intervene in Venezuelan affairs. I’m not sure that many Venezuelans would agree with that view if it had been done properly, that is, if there were some kind of multinational operation involving Colombia, which is Venezuela’s neighbor—long history of the two countries; the country that has received the most Venezuelan exiles and has treated them very hospitably, giving them rights to work and so on in a way the United States has not done—if there had been some kind of international coalition and if there were a clear plan to restore the democracy that Venezuela enjoyed from the 1950s until the 1990s. Applebaum: Yeah, no, there could be more and broader support, and one of maybe the strangest things about this whole thing is the administration’s failure in the run-up to this—I don’t even know what to call it. Is it an invasion? Is it a military event? I mean, in the run-up to it, they made— Frum: We could call it a special military operation. Applebaum: That came to my head, but I was thinking, No, I think I’m gonna not go there just yet. But the failure to justify it to the American people; the failure to sell it; the failure to explain it; the multiple explanations for it that have been offered, none of which are quite satisfying or seem quite true; the kind of belated adding-on of the oil thing as somehow oil was stolen from Americans and we have to get it back and, again, without any explaining of the history of that or whether it’s even true. And then, you’re right, I would say that not only has President Trump appeared on Fox and on his own social media; he also apparently—and we’ll have to find out whether this is really the case in the coming hours—he apparently has only spoken to, or his administration has only spoken to, Republican members of Congress and of the Senate. So rather than creating a bipartisan congressional agreement to do this, he simply appealed to his own side, and that doesn’t seem to be unanimous either. But in that sense, we are in a kind of breakthrough moment. I mean, it is a different kind of U.S. military operation. The U.S. has invaded other countries before; you can argue the U.S. has broken international law before. But to do so without any justification, without any explanation, without any support in Congress or any attempt to get it, without looking for any legal cover, even without having a coherent set of reasons or a coherent strategy, it’s all very strange. And again, my assumption is that because, in fact the true purpose is domestic, the true purpose is to deepen the president’s arguments about supposed narco-terrorists or immigrants whom he’s fighting against, maybe to give him the opportunity to say, America’s at war and therefore more emergencies need to be declared and more laws need to be bent. But it looks more like, as you said at the beginning, a kind of nationalist moment to describe America’s armed forces and how great they are, rather than something that was designed to do some good or achieve something in another part of the world. And I say that as somebody who’s—I’ve been writing for years about how tragic the story of Venezuela is and how much damage first Chávez and then Maduro did to Venezuela, and how impressive the Venezuelan opposition is and how it’s worked under these very tough circumstances to pull together. And so I really wish the best for them, and I am sorry that this is how the United States has decided to intervene there. Frum: The reason I went there on the phrase special military operation, which is the term, of course, that Vladimir Putin uses to describe the Russian aggression in Ukraine, is that there does seem to be a whiff of a deal that Donald Trump has in mind with the Russians, and maybe with the Chinese too, to say, You know how the United States historically rejected spheres of influence? We’re rethinking that. Russia, you can have Ukraine, and I will help you get it. And I will backstab Europeans who try to support Ukraine and resist you. China, I’m not going to meaningfully resist your operations in your own neighborhood. I’m not even that serious about protecting Taiwan. In return, I want your okay to overthrow your client in Venezuela—because the relationship between Maduro and Russia was close, and the relationship between Maduro and China was getting closer. We have aggression in mind against Panama, against Greenland, and maybe also Canada. So we will be the empire of the Western Hemisphere; you guys take your sections. And we will each be masters of our own domain without regard for concepts like democracy or self-determination or meaningful alliances or mutual respective natures. Applebaum: So that idea that the world is going to be split into three spheres of influence has been kicking around for a while. And so I first started hearing it a couple of years ago as an idea kind of bubbling up and moving around in right-wing media. And I have heard a couple of people who were close or claim to be close to the Trump administration talk about it in the last year. And of course it’s terribly dangerous. It’s dangerous for the United States because of the kind of backlash that it may create in Latin America and Europe and elsewhere. It’s dangerous for America’s trading partners and allies around the world. It’s incredibly dangerous for Europe, which then somehow becomes open to Russian manipulation and maybe Russian invasion. And of course it’s very dangerous to America’s allies in Asia: Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and others. And it really creates the prospect for a reordered world, one in which violence becomes much more common, and the use of military power by big countries against smaller ones becomes normalized. And that, of course, will have economic effects and will eventually be felt by all Americans, because America’s prosperity and America’s power and America’s success over the last several decades—I mean, certainly since the Second World War—have been based on a very different idea of how the world should work, and it looks like at least a part of the Trump administration is ready to give up that idea. Frum: Let me go through that. That’s such an important point, and especially the point about how you make violence more acceptable and more common. Let me just go through something for people who don’t think about this as much as you do, why Americans have, at least since 1945, and really longer than that, rejected the idea of spheres of influence, because it may seem logical to some people. China has its backyard. Russia has its backyard. Why can’t the United States have its backyard? And everybody leaves everybody else alone. The reason the United States historically rejected this idea was twofold. The first was, America said: When we call for collective defense, when we call for free trade, when we call for democracy and human rights, we’re not doing that to assert American dominance over others. We’re using the extraordinary advantages of the United States, the security, the natural resources, the wealth to deliver something to other people that all human beings want—not all human beings should want; all human beings do want. They all wanna have the benefits of freedom and material prosperity. So we’re gonna speak for all—the United States has more means, but the ends are not American. The ends are universally human. So we’re gonna speak for that. And then, what’s our sphere of influence? The answer is: The whole thing. There are practical limits; we’re not going to go out there looking for wars and causing trouble. But our ideal is that ultimately all human beings will live this way and will live together in cooperation. And so the sphere-of-influence argument is never an American argument. It’s always an argument by other people who want some carve-out from human rights and freedom and democracy and international peaceful commerce, and we’re not gonna give it to them. Now, the fact that the Trump administration is so open to these ideas is to me—and I think this is one of the things that is most surprising—it’s a doctrine of American weakness and retreat, saying that the United States no longer feels able to defend Europe, much less Ukraine on Europe’s east; no longer feels able to defend the free peoples of Asia. So we’re just gonna retreat. And because that makes the American project much less attractive to other countries, there’s gonna be more—within the American sphere of influence, there’ll be more force. And Greenland has been a target of this; Canada has; and now Venezuela is. Applebaum: No, absolutely. I mean, it’s America giving up on relationships with the world, and America retreating into a kind of 19th-century idea of We dominate our neighbors, and we don’t have anything to do with anything else. It means that America’s global companies will suddenly discover that the rules that were very often created to help them and help them succeed in Asia or in Europe will change, and they’ll be less successful. It means that things that Americans took for granted—the ability to travel or the ability to do business in different parts of the world, maybe even the dominance of the American dollar that was accepted by people as a kind of quid pro quo in exchange for the Pax Americana—all those things will begin to fall away, and they will make Americans poorer. I think every American will feel it. Americans will feel it economically. They’ll feel it politically. They’ll feel it in terms of how they are defined in the world, and therefore how they define themselves. So the United States will no longer see itself as a beacon of democracy or as a country that stands for freedom, but rather as an ordinary neighborhood bully. And I think that will affect the way Americans perceive their own country as well. And I think it will have an echo in domestic politics. I’ve seen this happen in other countries. When the nature of the country changes, when the role it plays in the world becomes different, that affects people. I think Americans have grown used to the idea that we were a good power in the world, or we tried to be, and we didn’t always succeed, but we had some ideals or there were things we stood for. There was international law, there were international institutions that we backed. And once we don’t do that anymore, I think Americans will feel differently about their country. And I really do believe it’s something that’s going to affect everybody. Frum: This is not a hypothetical point; this is a point rooted in American history. If you lived in the United States a hundred years ago, 1926, over much of the country was fastened a system of laws that bear a lot of resemblance to what the Nazis imposed on German Jews at Nuremberg. Over maybe a third or a quarter of the country and beyond that, not just in the old Deep South, but in other places too. There were restrictions imposed by race on where you could travel, how you could travel, what facilities you could use, who could marry whom, that extended beyond the South too. It was the need to defend democracy first against Nazi Germany, or to defend American interests, first against Nazi Germany and then against the Soviet Union, that transformed a lot of what Americans regarded as acceptable at home, that the country had to be a democracy at home if it were to defend democracy abroad. And the classic statement of this, I refer people if they have a chance to look at it, to watch or to read President Kennedy’s civil-rights speech in 1962, when he made this explicit, how he said, How can we defend freedom in Berlin if we don’t have freedom in Alabama? And so the United States, to win the Cold War, became a more perfect democracy at home. If the United States gives up on that, the way is set to unravel all those changes that happened comparatively recently, between the 1930s and the 1960s. Applebaum: There’s another example of that as well, which is that in the arguments that were made for desegregation of schools in the United States, in the Supreme Court arguments that were made, the American Justice Department specifically made a reference to the U.S. presenting itself abroad—you know, how can we argue for democracy abroad if we aren’t willing to have desegregated schools here in the United States? So, starting in about the 1940s and 1950s, you’re absolutely right that the idea of what America stood for abroad (again, theoretically; it wasn’t always true in practice) and what America should be at home (again, theoretically, not always in practice)—those ideas came together. And as they split apart, as the United States becomes something different abroad, you’re right that we may find ourselves becoming a different country at home. Or certainly the constituency, the people who want us to return to an older way of running the country and older ideas about race and hierarchy, you’ll see them saying, Well, since we don’t have to play this role in the world anymore, what do we need civil-rights legislation for now? Frum: Let me ask you, just to go back to the point about special military operation. One of the big mysteries about Trump has always been, what’s the special sauce? What’s the hold that Putin has over him? Applebaum: I think his business links to Russia go back a long way. I think his interest and admiration for Putin is very deep. And of course he knows that Putin helped him win the 2016 election. I don’t think you need a specific deal like that, but we can speculate that it’s not absolutely impossible. It does look like—and some of the Venezuelan opposition are saying this, so again, there’s no proof, so I have to be careful—it does look like some kind of deal over Maduro was done. That he was given up, you know, that he was handed over. Maybe that was done by people who did it in exchange for hoping that they would stay in charge, that the other members of the regime would take over after him. Maybe it was done with help of others—maybe the Russians, Chinese, we don’t know. But the links between Trump and Putin and between Trump and Russia go well beyond Venezuela. Frum: Well, that point about what the Venezuelan opposition fears brings me to maybe this closing segment of our dialogue today, which is my concern about the way some of the Democratic opposition, capital D, in the United States has been talking about this, that you are hearing from some very outspoken people who say it’s wrong for the United States ever to help to overthrow a dictatorship. That whatever government a country has, that’s its business, and however much the vast majority of that country’s people hate that government and fear it, however cruel and authoritarian and even aggressive it is—because the Maduro regime has committed aggressions against neighbors, Brazil and Guyana and Colombia, too—that it’s none of our business and we should leave it alone. And I think in reaction to Trump’s militarism and imperialism, we’re getting a kind of isolationism from his opponents that is very dangerous. And I wish I heard more Democrats saying, If this war were about restoring the legitimate winner of the 2024 election, if it were waged with backing from Congress and with support from Venezuela’s neighbors, then, yeah, helping to bring about the restoration of the legitimate president of Venezuela, that would be a proper thing for the coalition of the Americas to do. Not to replace dictator with dictator, but to work in tandem with others. But there does seem to be a kind of, in reaction to Trump’s “America First,” a kind of similar kind of chauvinism that we’re hearing from that: This is none of our business; we have no concern with who governs Venezuela and how. Applebaum: It also ignores the fact that we have influence over—not over Venezuela, but in Venezuela, in other countries, whether we want to or not. I mean, we’re the elephant in the room in a lot of places. And had we decided to support Maduro, which I think some members of the Trump administration did want to do, and do oil deals with Maduro, for example, which we might easily have done. I think there were, as I say, people who wanted to do that. Then we would also be affecting the outcome of politics in Venezuela. So to pretend that we live by ourselves in a bubble and we don’t influence anybody else is also wrong. I mean, I do have to say that given how little Trump involved the Democrats and how minor his effort is even today to reach out to people and explain what he’s doing and justify it, and how half-hearted it all seems—I mean, I found his press conference very half-hearted, and he seemed kind of unenthusiastic, and people were sort of repeating themselves and saying things by rote, you know: how great our soldiers are and what a marvelous thing this was. And given that, it’s not really surprising that people have reacted this way. It’s also to say, Well, it would be great if we had done this on behalf of democracy in Venezuela feels a bit empty, given that obviously Trump wasn’t gonna do that, because he doesn’t care about democracy anywhere. So I have some sympathy with people who are very critical. I would like to emphasize, it is important to keep remembering how happy a lot of Venezuelans are and how delighted people are across the continent that Maduro is gone, and to just keep that in mind as a factor going forward. Frum: This is more a marker for the future: I mean, obviously it’s true, as you say, Trump didn’t do this for democracy. Indeed. And he didn’t do it to stop the drug flow, either. Maduro is right now an alleged and indicted drug-trafficking president, but there was a convicted drug-trafficking president in an American prison, and he was released at the end of November, pardoned at the end of November—I guess they announced the pardon at the end of November and made it legal at the beginning of December. In exchange for what? One can only speculate, but I don’t think it’s just for a Christmas card that Trump would let somebody like that— Applebaum: This was the former president of Honduras. Yeah, there’s hypocrisy all over this story. As I said, the conversations with Maduro about oil that took place last year, the letting-go other drug kingpins, the question of whether Venezuelans were really importing that many drugs to the United States anyway. Frum: The Venezuelan drug traffic was cocaine, which was on its way to Europe. And by the way, blowing up boats is, judging by market prices—The Wall Street Journal reported, I think in the fall, that the retail price of cocaine in the United States over the first year of the Trump administration was down, if I remember this right, something like 25 percent. The one price he successfully brought down was the price of cocaine. That’s the drug that is flowing via Venezuela. So obviously blowing up boats doesn’t work. Applebaum: No, no, no. When you look at any of his reasons, they all kind of shrink on touching them. And this is why we’re all looking for other kinds of explanations. Is there a secret oil deal? Is there a secret deal with Putin? Is there some deeper plan to spread this form of conquest across the Americas? Because the reasons as stated just don’t make any sense. They don’t add up. They’re not a strategy. They aren’t a plan. They’re certainly not a plan for Venezuela. But they also don’t really make sense for the United States. It’s not about increasing American prosperity or safety, or even America’s good name in the world. And I think that’s what’s perplexing people and causing this really angry reaction, which I agree that there’s an aspect of it that’s maybe small-minded. But I empathize with it too. Frum: Well, I just worry that the parts of Trump One that proved most enduring, that Biden continued, were Trump’s protectionism. And I worry that it would be a bad result if the part of Trump Two that continued is this spreading to both parties of American narrow nationalism and disregard for, as you say, the hope and faith that the Venezuelan people have put in a different America, the America they remember and many of them still believe in, which is a country that would say, Look, we’re not going around the world starting wars; we’re not intervening promiscuously. But how other people do matters to us, especially in this hemisphere, but everywhere, but especially in this hemisphere. And if the United States in conjunction with law and partners can restore a democracy that was stolen and support people who have, as you say, courageously acted to defend and maintain and reassert their democracy, that’s not none of our business. That’s part of the common business of humanity. Applebaum: No, I agree. And that the United States aspired to be a beacon and aspired to be a country that wanted to make itself better and make the world better was one of the things that gave Americans a lot of pride and a lot of satisfaction, and it would be, I think, tragic for us to lose that. Frum: As we’re talking, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has apparently added a threat to Cuba to the list of reasons that the United States supposedly acted in Venezuela. Do you have any thoughts about how to make sense of that threat? Applebaum: So people should understand that there is a deep and close relationship between the Venezuelan regime and the Cuban regime. So much so, I was talking to a Mexican journalist recently who told me he’d been to Venezuela not that long ago and was very struck by the fact that all the people around Maduro were all Cuban. So a lot of his security guard was Cuban and a lot of the people who were protecting him were Cuban. The Cubans were supplying security help and advice to the Venezuelans and have been a really important part of keeping the regime in power, especially as it became more and more unpopular. Cuba also gets oil from Venezuela and has a kind of symbiotic trade relationship with Venezuela, and so it may be that Rubio hopes that the fall of Maduro, or the change of regime in Venezuela, will eventually have a knock-on side effect in Cuba. So he may be hoping for that as a possible consequence. Domino theories have a way of proving incorrect or dangerous or wrong, and so for Rubio, to hope that by changing the government of Venezuela, he will somehow affect the government of Cuba, there’s a long history of those kinds of theories being wrong. But it’s perfectly possible that that was one of the things in his head when he pushed for this operation, as we know he did. Frum: Seems unlikely that President Trump was thinking about that. Applebaum: Seems very unlikely that President Trump cares one way or the other about Cuba, I agree. Frum: Anne, thank you for taking time today. Applebaum: Thanks for devoting the time yourself. Frum: And we’re going to resume normal scheduling with the program releasing on Wednesday. Thank you all for watching The David Frum Show. Remember, the best way to support the work of this program and of Anne and myself is to subscribe to The Atlantic. I hope you’ll continue doing that. See you on Wednesday when we release the next episode of The David Frum Show.