Biden's move on Venezuela leaves Trump little room to cut a deal

Nicolás Maduro was hoping for a “fresh start” with the U.S. under Donald Trump. Instead, he’s getting déjà vu.

The outgoing Biden administration announced Tuesday it now considers opposition candidate Edmundo González as Venezuela’s president-elect. While it doesn’t go quite as far, the move harks back to when the U.S. unsuccessfully declared another Maduro rival the rightful leader of the South American nation during Trump’s first term at the White House.

It also makes Trump’s job harder, given it’s now less likely the incoming U.S. president can cut a deal with the socialist strongman in exchange for accepting planes full of Venezuelan migrants deported from the U.S.

“At this point a return to ‘maximum pressure,’ or something like it, is all but guaranteed,” said Geoff Ramsey, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council — referring to the Trump strategy that saw the U.S. tighten sanctions and recognize Juan Guaidó as interim president in a failed bid to sweep Maduro from power.

The Biden team’s move sets “an important early test” for the incoming administration, Ramsey added. It will force Trump to decide whether to “go all the way and recognize González not as president-elect, but as the legitimate president.”

Tuesday’s shift, telegraphed to allies at the Group of 20 summit in Brazil and then confirmed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a post on X, is the strongest U.S. acknowledgment yet that the opposition won Venezuela’s contested election in July. It also fits with the most likely approach by Trump’s pick to succeed Blinken, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who has been one of the Maduro regime’s fiercest critics.

Venezuela’s bond prices have been slumping ever since Rubio’s appointment. Sovereign notes maturing in 2027 are now trading at levels not seen since the end of October, before they rallied ahead of the U.S. election on hopes of a fresh approach under Trump.

Trump’s transition team didn’t respond to a request for comment Tuesday on Venezuela policy. Before Biden’s change, analysts had speculated he could still seek a bargain with Maduro, despite his hard-line cabinet choice.

The new president’s planned crackdown on undocumented migrants would be easier to implement if Maduro agreed to allow Venezuelans to be forcibly returned to his country. About 8 million people have fled in the past decade because of political repression and economic struggles, making Venezuelans one of the biggest sources of undocumented migration to the U.S.

Venezuela’s oil is also complicating factor. Chevron Corp. is major American producer working in the country under an exception to U.S. sanctions that is vulnerable to a harder line against Maduro. Caracas sends about a third of its oil to China, and the U.S. could disrupt that relationship by being friendlier to the socialist strongman.

Although Rubio favors a maximum-pressure approach, “Trump is less critical of dictators than he is and is exposed to an oil lobby pressing for the lifting of sanctions,” Harold Trinkunas, a senior scholar at Stanford University in California, said before Tuesday’s announcement.

Rubio makes his Cuban heritage and opposition to communism central to his political identity. He introduced a bill seeking to increase a reward for Maduro’s arrest to $100 million and has been one of the most vocal opponents of President Joe Biden’s Venezuela policy, saying the easing of U.S. sanctions in exchange for democratic guarantees instead helped the regime steal the election again.

Still, Maduro found reasons to welcome Trump’s victory this month, saying a “golden opportunity” opened for change in the relationship between the U.S. and the region. “We didn’t get along during your first term,” Maduro said Nov. 6 on state television. But now “we can bet on a win-win that benefits the U.S. and Venezuela and all of Latin America.”

On Tuesday, however, Foreign Affairs Minister Yvan Gil called Blinken’s comments “ridiculous,” saying in a statement sent by the information ministry the new U.S. move makes González a “2.0” version of Guaidó.

For her part, banned opposition leader María Corina Machado — who remains in hiding, having last appeared in public on Aug. 28 at a rally Caracas — has praised Rubio’s appointment as “excellent news.” Taking swift action against Maduro could provide the Trump administration with “an enormous foreign policy victory in the very, very short term,” she told the New York Times this week.

To one veteran Republican policy hand, the timing of Biden’s move is hard to explain given Venezuela’s election was more than three months ago. Waiting until now only serves to deny the Trump administration an “opportunity to differentiate his foreign policy from theirs,” said José Cardenas, who worked on Latin America issues under former President George W. Bush.

But it’s “something the Venezuelan opposition had been asking for,” Cardenas added. And “it makes it harder for Maduro and his allies to deligitimize González and the opposition’s electoral victory in the court of world opinion.”