Jan 30, 2026 | In the aftermath of the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, Venezuela has agreed to submit a monthly budget to the Trump administration, which will release money from an account funded by oil sales. It's a deal for the interim government led by Delcy Rodriguéz that historian Greg Grandin calls "governing under the blade." In a further shift away from the nation-building foreign policy of the past several decades of US power, "what the United States is planning for Venezuela is basically to run the country as a vassal state," he says. "This is an arrangement with transactional details that we've never seen before."
