Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.

Major breaking news, news that could shape the year, maybe even the century.

Early Saturday morning, President Trump announced that the United States had successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela.

After months of build up.

At two oh one am local time today in Caracas, Venezuela, US Delta forces slipped into the home of dictator Nicholas Maduro.

Within hours, President Trump took to the podium, where he made another announcement that stunned onlookers.

We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transitions.

The administration's decision to strike Venezuela and capture Maduro follows months of strikes on boats suspected of smuggling drugs out of the country and a full blockade on sanctioned tankers pulling oil out of the country.

But the announcement that the US would run Venezuela and safeguard its vast oil serves came as a surprise.

You said that the US is going to run Venezuela.

So who's in power right now?

In the meantime, the current regime in Venezuela minus Nicholas Maduro is working with the US government.

They're on State TV constantly.

They are, you know, sort of maintaining the message to the local press that they have full control.

Creighton Harrison overseas Bloomberg's Latin America coverage.

Delsie Rodriguez is the vice president of Venezuela and a very close loyalist to Nicholas Maduro.

So she's sort of one of the key people of this moment, along with people like Marco Rubio and Donald Trump, in determining what happens next in Venezuela.

You know, if you wanted to, you know, express joy at the end of the Maduro regime, you're not really in a position to do that.

Yet.

The risk of a power vacuum is a problem for everybody involved.

We certainly know that a lot of Venezuela's neighbors are watching this very closely with that same concern, right They're worried about potential for chaos, even if so far has not happened yet.

I'm Nathan Hager, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News today.

On the show, Maduro is out of power in Venezuela.

What comes next geopolitically and economically for the country, the region, and the rest of the world.

The US strike in Venezuela wasn't unexpected.

It followed weeks of strikes on boats, seizures of oil tankers, a major US military build up, and Trump openly saying land strikes could come next.

I asked Bloomberg's Latin America regional editor about what we know so far about the US's goals in Venezuela.

That is the big question.

I think you know, there have been several rationales present it, let's put it that way, but the one that was most prominent in Trump's re Marx on Saturday were about oil.

We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.

So that sounds like, if you just take his own words, like that's a pretty big part of the priority list.

What does not sound like a big priority at this point, and I don't think the word was mentioned even once, is democracy.

Do we have a sense so far about what the US running Venezuela is going to look like at.

This point, it's very hazy.

And you know, Marco Rubio was on a couple of the Sunday talk shows and noted that the US does not have boots on the ground.

There's no presence of US military in Venezuela right now.

There has been no diplomatic presence from the US in Venezuela.

In many years, the United States will retain multiple levers of leverage to ensure that our interests are protected, and that includes the oil quarantine.

That's a place, among other things.

So it's very hard to run a country if you're not there.

What they appear to be doing is waiting to see how the first few days play out with Delci Rodriguez in charge, and to see if she's as cooperative as they think she is.

And if she's not, then, as Rubio said on Sunday, you know, she may face consequences.

Of course, you heard Secretary of Rubio talk about the oil blockade being leverage for the US.

How could that play out over the next coming weeks and months.

So, first off, there is one oil manager there in Venezuela right now.

Chevron has a partnership with UH with Petroleus de Venezuela PEEVES as it's known, the state oil company, and continues to operate there and export oil from Venezuela.

But you're right, other than that, there's no US oil majors there, and the question is would they want to go.

A lot is going to depend, as it always does, on money, because getting new operations started up in a country with a lot of uncertainty, with some poor infrastructure, and with oil that's very thick and heavy crude that's not so easy to transport.

They needs to be diluted just to get it through a pipeline.

It ends up being very expensive.

And you know, Trump talked a lot about the production of this oil is sort of paying for itself in a way, right, that this would pay for any investment that the US or the oil companies had to put into it.

But it's unclear if he's going to to incentivize them in some way or how exactly this is going to work.

Given all this, do we have any sense about when we might see the US lift sanctions on Venezuela and what that could mean, not just for the Venezuelan economy but for global oil flows.

It sounds like the Trump administration.

From everything Rubio said, Trump has said they're not in any hurry to change some of the disincentives that they have in place in Venezuela.

They're very much interested in holding as many cards as they can and making sure that they have cooperation from the government in Venezuela before they start making changes to LOCID things up.

That raises the question about whether there could be any front runners or surprises from the administration when it comes to the kind of Venezuelan leader that they could be able to work with.

I guess Delsi Rodriguez is still a pretty open question.

But are we hearing about any other potential leaders who could step in and work with the Trump administration in Venezuela.

No, we really not.

The question is long term, right, you know, do they want to encourage and move to a more democratically run Venezuela.

But right now there's no name that's being floated out there.

Is that next in line?

We heard from President Trump over the weekend that he doesn't think that opposition leader Maria Karina Machado has a level of support among the Venezuelan people.

Is that the sense that we have that she might not have that kind of level of support that the ruling party has in Venezuela.

Well, remember that Maria Karina Machado.

Of course, she did not run herself in the election in twenty twenty four, but she had a surrogate candidate in her place in Monico Salez, and by all International Observer accounts, he won handily in twenty twenty four.

So we know she has a certain level of popularity, or at least did in twenty twenty four when she campaigned very openly for change in Venezuela.

It is possible that that popularity has slipped a little bit.

Let's say there's a lot that's happened since the middle of twenty twenty four, and she got a lot of people that hoped up and then was unable because of the Maduro regime to see through the promise of democracy that she sort of represented.

But it remains true that she's a very compelling figure.

The Trump administration's calculation here maybe that you know, we've talked to some people who share this view that it's better to ease in a transition with the current institutions and power rather than try to place someone in the middle of it and risk, you know, dissent in the ranks with the military and other parts of the government by just popping someone on top who sort of doesn't see eye eye with them to begin with.

So there may be some cold logic to this, you know.

But Trump's remarks that Machado didn't have respect do hit pretty hard, and we talked to some people close to her and in her camp who were really taken it back and saddened by those comments.

What the US action in Venezuela means for its neighbors in the region and for other global power players, and how this could impact the global economy.

That's next.

The US mission to remove Nicholas Muduro from Venezuela and transport him to face criminal charges in New York sent shock waves around the world.

I asked Bloomberg's executive editor in Latin America, Creighton Harrison, about the message this may sent to other countries in the regions with leftist leaders like Colombia and Cuba.

Trump, you know, Colombia, he has accused Usava Petro, the president there, of supporting or at least looking the other way at drug production there, at cocaine production, which which has grown by any measure under his presidency, so some vague threats there.

Cuba is in a very difficult situation right now.

Economically, it's already had declines in some key industries like agriculture and tourism.

Then it depends very heavily on Venezuela for oil.

It's an island, right and it only has so many ways to power its economy.

So it has depended for many years on a kind of barter with Venezuela and which it accepts oil in exchange for services.

So that barter system is now presumably under threat at the very least, And if the US were to stop oil shipments to Cuba from Venezuela, it would have a pretty astic consequence for the Cuban economy because Cuba doesn't really have a lot of other sources of loyal at the moment.

And just thinking about this beyond the Western hemisphere as well, if you're Chinese President Chijinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, You're Ron's president Posesshkin, all these leaders who had their own regional conflicts that the Trump administration has come out pretty hard against.

How are you thinking about this?

I think there's sort of two minds of looking at this.

On the one hand, you know, Venezuela as allies, and China, Russia, Iran are in that group very publicly would look at US intervention there as a bad thing, right Obviously, they don't want to see an ally get their president captured, I don't think by any stretch.

But on the other hand, at least a couple of those countries, Russia and China, have designs on their territory.

Right.

In the case of Russia, you know, right, the international community almost unanimously at the time rejected the world in Ukraine.

The Chinese Taiwan situation continues to be a source of great intrigue around the world.

You know, our colleagues in Asia had this story yesterday about people being very active on social media in China over the weekend saying, hey, this provides a template for us in Taimelan in.

This intervention in Venezuela.

Does this look to you like a shift in geopolitical strategy for President Trump?

And if so, what do we know about what may have motivated that?

Well?

President Trump has talked about the Monroe doctrine quite a bit, right, That's Monroe Doctrine.

Date affected the nineteenth century, and is this idea that I mean depends how you define it, but loosely based that the US has to protect its fear of influence in Latin America and has it reserves the right to play a role in politics in those places and sort of defend them militarily and treat them as America's backyard, which is a very controversial term here in Latin America.

And Trump even made reference to it, of this idea that it's now the Donroe doctrine that Donald Trump has made its own corollaries to this.

So you know, if you think about Venezuela as a source of oil and minerals and other things, this fits neatly into that worldview.

It also is consistent with other things Donald Trump has talked about, like Greenland and the Panama Canal.

So you know, those things could come up again in the coming weeks as people sort of turn their attention to what he's trying to do.

So we're taping this around three o'clock in the afternoon East Coast time on Sunday.

There's a lot that remains to be seen about what's going to happen in Venezuela.

So Creighton, What are some of the biggest hurdles you're going to be looking out for in the near term.

What are you going to be watching for next?

I think the key is how Delsi Rodriguez plays, you know, the balance between you know, pleasing the Trump administration and showing that she's the right partner for them, and keeping the Chavista government in Venezuela in line, including all of Maduro's top lieutenants and loyalists.

That seems like a really, really hard job.

And so what she says publicly and who she talks to behind the scenes are are going to be really key for us to watch, And I think we'll tell us a lot about the trajectory of things in the coming weeks and months, including what happens with oil, what happens with Venezuela's finances, what happens with the blockade, et cetera.

This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News.

I'm Nathan Hager.

To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot com, subscribe today at Bloomberg slash Podcast Offer.

If you liked this episode, make sure to follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts.

It helps people find the show.

Thanks for listening.

We'll be back tomorrow.