foreign policy

Foreign policy rarely shifts as quickly as Venezuela’s has this year. And when it does, ideology is usually not the driver. Survival is—especially in autocratic systems. 

Since taking the interim presidency, Delcy Rodríguez has quietly reversed much of the confrontational diplomacy that defined the Maduro and Chávez era. As a consequence of the January 3 military intervention, she moved closer to Washington, re-established diplomatic ties with Chile and the Dominican Republic, and welcomed earthquake aid sent by El Salvador and Argentina. She also distanced Caracas from traditional partners such as Iran (currently in a war with the US and Cuba), withdrew Venezuela from the International Criminal Court in a step welcomed by the United States, and signaled a willingness to rebuild relations with Israel. Every one of these moves aligns with what Washington wants. 

These moves add up to more than tactical adjustments. They reveal an emerging foreign-policy strategy: authoritarian pragmatism. The goal is not political liberalization but reducing external pressure, attracting economic opportunities, and creating space for the government to consolidate power at home. 

To understand how dramatic this turn is, it helps to recall where Venezuela’s diplomacy was headed under Maduro. As a young diplomat in Caracas, I watched the country move toward an increasingly divisive and isolationist posture. I still remember sitting in Venezuela’s National Assembly in early 2015 during one of Maduro’s annual addresses. I had attended many official ceremonies before, but nothing prepared me for the bluntness of that night.

The best way to understand this shift is not as a simple turn toward the West, but as an adoption of the multi-alignment model perfected by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Most leaders soften their rhetoric when foreign diplomats are present. Maduro did the opposite. He divided the world into ideological camps: Western governments as imperialist powers, left-leaning Latin American states as part of a revolutionary bloc, Russia and Iran as fellow victims of Western pressure. A few ambassadors were singled out as representatives of friendly nations; the rest of us understood, without being told, that we belonged to a lower tier. At that time, Turkey wasn’t even on Maduro’s radar. 

That speech captured the essence of Maduro’s foreign-policy doctrine. For more than a decade, Chavismo locked Venezuela into a narrow circle of partners—China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba—while confrontation with the United States, Western governments, international institutions, and several regional neighbors left Caracas with fewer diplomatic options. Ideology became a cage.

Delcy’s U-turn

Delcy is now moving in a different direction. Her early signals suggest that she is less interested in defending Maduro’s ideological map than in redrawing it. Governments once treated as adversaries are again potential partners. Regional relationships that had gone cold are being restored. Caracas is talking to institutions it once dismissed as hostile.

The best way to understand this shift is not as a simple turn toward the West, but as an adoption of the multi-alignment model perfected by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey. Turkey has shown how an authoritarian government can maintain strong economic ties with China, trade extensively with Russia, remain inside NATO, negotiate directly with Washington when useful, and still preserve tight political control at home. These relationships do not have to be mutually exclusive.

It’s important to note that the model sits differently on each leader. The two leaders reached power through opposite paths—Erdoğan through repeated elections and a genuine popular mandate, Delcy through a foreign military operation that removed her predecessor. One can afford slow, strategic bets. The other cannot. But the relevant comparison is not how they arrived in office; it is what foreign policy allows them to do once there.

A government can become more useful to Washington without becoming more democratic at home. That is precisely the space Delcy appears to be trying to create. 

Delcy does not need to sever the relations with old allies like China and Russia even though Washington is demanding to reduce the influence of Russia and China from Venezuela. China no longer takes 80 percent of Venezuela’s oil exports, but Chinese state firms still operate joint ventures in the country. The interim regime can concede the first while preserving the second, keeping protocol and trade channels open without returning to the dependency that once made Caracas useful to Beijing and Moscow. It’s true that Delcy is not in Erdoğan’s position, but she is reaching for his method—accumulating enough international goodwill that the questions about democracy at home lose their urgency. 

And there is a practical reason to move quickly. Reviving Venezuela’s oil industry is slow and complex. Rebuilding PDVSA, attracting foreign investment, issuing new licenses, and resolving sanctions and sovereign debt disputes will take years. Diplomatic decisions, by contrast, are fast and inexpensive for her regime.

Consider what these moves cost her. She hosted senior US cabinet officials in Caracas, rewrote the oil and mining laws to bring American companies back, and reopened the energy sector to foreign investment. She restored relations with neighbors that had broken with Caracas over the 2024 election—Chile, Peru, and the Dominican Republic all agreed to normalization roadmaps within weeks of one another. In April, the IMF resumed dealings with Venezuela after seven years, and the World Bank followed the same day. Welcoming Israeli rescue teams in June cost little more than a press conference.

The concessions to Washington were real, but they were concessions of access, not of power. What Delcy bought with them is a government that can once again be received, financed, and invested in—and that has yet to surrender any control over the courts, the security services, or the electoral machinery.

The Turkey comparison helps explain why. On July 7–8, Erdogan hosted NATO’s annual summit in Ankara, with President Trump in attendance—the first visit by a sitting US president to Turkey in more than a decade. The summit gave Erdogan an important diplomatic moment and strengthened his position internationally. Yet political pressure on Turkey’s opposition continued. Three weeks later, Turkish police detained 55 people, including an opposition mayor, in coordinated raids across nine provinces. By early August, 29 opposition mayors were under arrest, with dozens more suspended. Erdogan’s strongest rival, Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, has been in prison since March 2025, jailed the day he became his party’s presidential candidate. Western governments barely reacted to these autocratic practices.

As long as Delcy stays within the boundaries of the Donroe Doctrine, Washington has strong incentives to encourage this opening.

In today’s world, a government can become more useful to Washington without becoming more democratic at home. That is precisely the space Delcy appears to be trying to create. 

The emerging model is less about ideological loyalty than strategic flexibility. Caracas can cooperate with Washington on oil while maintaining ties with China. It can reopen relations with countries it previously alienated while preserving its partnerships with traditional allies. It can accept humanitarian assistance from governments once labeled enemies without altering its domestic political system.

In other words, Venezuela does not have to become less authoritarian to become more internationally flexible. That is the part of the interim regime’s strategy that deserves the most attention.

As long as Delcy stays within the boundaries of the Donroe Doctrine, Washington has strong incentives to encourage this opening. Those boundaries are narrower than they first appear, and they are not about democracy. Washington’s requirements are resource access, the exclusion of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian strategic presence from the hemisphere, and cooperation on migration and counter-narcotics. Everything else has proved negotiable. A more cooperative Venezuela creates opportunities for American businesses, investment, energy cooperation, and a more predictable bilateral relationship—something the United States could never achieve under Maduro’s siege mentality.

Venezuela may be changing how it deals with the world without changing how power is exercised at home. If this continues, the new administration’s foreign-policy shift could mark the beginning of a new phase of Chavismo—less ideological, more adaptable, and potentially more durable.

Walking through Budapest, it is impossible not to notice the contradictions. Hungary is a member of NATO, a member of the European Union, and a beneficiary of decades of Western integration. At the same time, Chinese companies are building multibillion-dollar factories, Russian energy remains essential, and Viktor Orbán spent years cultivating close ties with both Moscow and Beijing. 

From Caracas, many would interpret this reality as an anomaly. Perhaps for a country so accustomed to contradictions, it is a window into the world that is coming. Or into the world that already arrived.

For decades, international politics was dominated by a relatively straightforward question: whose side are you on? The Cold War forced countries to choose between Washington and Moscow, although Venezuela took a novel approach in the second half of its democratic period. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American unipolar moment sustained the assumption that development, prosperity, and international integration were ultimately synonymous with Westernization.

The twenty-first century has proven more complicated. Turkey purchases Russian weapons while hosting American bases as a NATO member. India participates in strategic partnerships with the United States while maintaining longstanding military and energy ties with Moscow. The United Arab Emirates hosts capital, companies, and citizens from virtually every geopolitical camp. Hungary, home to CPAC Europe and a destination for both Chinese investment and Western conservative movements, has perhaps turned this logic into a national strategy more successfully than any other European country.

These countries are not neutral. Nor are they non-aligned in the classical Cold War sense. They are states that have learned to maximize their options in a multipolar world.

Time to embrace multipolarity?

For years, discussions about Venezuela’s future have been framed as a choice between opposing models. Would the country resemble Cuba or Colombia? Nicaragua or Costa Rica? Would a transition imply a return to the Western consensus that shaped much of Latin America after the Cold War?

Five months after January 3 and the beginning of a period of unprecedented American tutelage, those questions appear increasingly outdated.

The symbolism of recent weeks is difficult to ignore. While Delcy Rodríguez was in India seeking to deepen energy ties with one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, General Dan Caine was simultaneously in Caracas discussing security cooperation with Venezuelan authorities. In the traditional chavista worldview, these developments would have belonged to rival geopolitical universes. In today’s Venezuela, they increasingly appear as part of the same strategy.

Venezuela arrives at this reality from a different place. Questions of external influence, compromised sovereignty, competing centers of power, and tutelage have played a far larger role here than among our neighbors.

The concept of regime learning refers to the ways political systems adapt in order to survive. In Venezuela, that process has already transformed the country’s economic model. Price controls have largely been abandoned. The private sector is in a slow process of rehabilitation. In short, revolutionary orthodoxy has repeatedly yielded to political necessity.

Regime learning does not only change how states govern. It changes how they understand the world.

What is becoming apparent in 2026 is that the same process may be transforming Venezuela’s geopolitical posture.

The Bolivarian Revolution was founded on a particular assumption. Venezuela would help construct an alternative pole of power, aligned with actors such as Cuba, Russia, Iran, and eventually China. The goal was not merely to diversify partnerships. It was to build a geopolitical project capable of challenging American influence in the hemisphere.

Twenty-five years later, the lesson learned appears remarkably different.

Arriving late to the game

Russia became absorbed by its invasion of Ukraine. China proved willing to defend its own interests, but not necessarily those of its partners. Iran remained geographically distant and economically constrained. Cuba, despite years of leeching off the Venezuelan state, proved largely incapable of defending the revolution against genuine external pressures. The experience of governing under sanctions, isolation, economic collapse, and great-power competition appears to have produced a different conclusion: dependence on any single external patron creates vulnerabilities.

The logical response is not non-alignment, but rather hedging.

Instead of anchoring Venezuela to a single geopolitical camp, the emerging strategy appears designed to maintain productive relations with several simultaneously. Security cooperation with Washington. Oil exports to India. Commercial ties with China. Investment from the Gulf. Access to Western financial markets. None of these relationships are mutually exclusive. In fact, they reinforce one another.

To some extent, there is nothing uniquely Venezuelan about this. Much of Latin America already operates in a multipolar environment. Governments across the ideological spectrum maintain economic ties with China while preserving political, commercial, and security relationships with the United States. Yet Venezuela arrives at this reality from a very different place. Questions of external influence, compromised sovereignty, competing centers of power, and political tutelage have played a far larger role in Venezuelan politics than in most neighboring countries.

The lesson Venezuela appears to be learning is neither socialist nor liberal, neither anti-Western nor fully Western.

In some respects, the country’s experience over the last quarter century has more in common with the dilemmas faced by some post-communist European states (like Ukraine) than with those of Colombia, Peru, or Ecuador. Venezuela is never going to become Switzerland, nor is it going to become India. It lacks the geography, the institutions, and the scale required for either role. Yet it may be discovering a different path, one better suited to its circumstances: not a great power, not a neutral sanctuary, but a medium-sized energy producer whose strategic value derives from its ability to remain relevant to multiple centers of power simultaneously.

This is what makes Hungary such a useful comparison. Not because Hungary represents a political model for Venezuela, nor because Viktor Orbán and Nicolás Maduro are comparable figures. If anything, a Venezuelan transition led by María Corina Machado would likely have more in common ideologically with a post-Orbán government than with Orbán himself. Yet that is precisely the point. Even a post-Orbán Hungary would remain a member of NATO and the European Union, continue attracting Chinese investment, and remain constrained by the economic and energy relationships accumulated over decades. Hungary is useful because it illustrates a broader phenomenon: the emergence of states whose prosperity depends less on belonging to a bloc than on remaining useful to several at once.

Viewed from this perspective, Venezuela’s current trajectory increasingly resembles neither Cuba nor the Colombia of the early 2000s. It is not moving toward the permanent isolation of the former, nor toward the straightforward Western alignment of the latter under Álvaro Uribe. Instead, it is beginning to occupy an intermediate position, one that may become increasingly common in a multipolar world.

The Bolivarian Revolution aspired to create a twenty-first-century Cuba. Five months after January 3, its most enduring geopolitical legacy may be the emergence of an oil-rich Hungary in the Caribbean.

Regime learning does not only change how states govern. It changes how they understand the world. After 25 years of revolution, sanctions, collapse, and adaptation, the lesson Venezuela appears to be learning is neither socialist nor liberal, neither anti-Western nor fully Western. It is something more pragmatic: in a multipolar world, survival belongs to those who can make themselves useful to everyone.