The juxtaposition was striking. On stage was Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim president, addressing the United Nations General Assembly and meeting with President Donald Trump less than a year after both considered her somewhat of a pariah. Her old boss, Nicolás Maduro, was sitting in a jail cell in Brooklyn a few miles away awaiting trial for drug trafficking and narcoterrorism — two crimes that could keep the former Venezuelan despot behind bars for decades. The message was clear: Cooperate with Trump and get rewarded; defy him and get plucked out of your home in the middle of the night to face justice in a U.S. courtroom.
Relations between the United States and Venezuela, two countries that have been adversaries since the late Hugo Chávez took power in 1999, are the best they’ve been in a quarter-century. With Maduro out of the way, the South American country is now led by a woman, Rodríguez, who at the very least is cooperative and at the most extreme a proxy for Americans. Trump’s decision to greet her on the sidelines at the U.N. gathering for a short 15-minute meeting was the culmination of months of the president complimenting her leadership qualities. In reality, what he’s happy about is Rodríguez’s ability to give him headline-grabbing economic concessions that he can brag about at a time when his foreign policy remains hamstrung by the war in Iran.
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