The United States hasn’t yet declared war on Venezuela—but it’s getting closer. This week, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a blockade on sanctioned ships in and out of Venezuela ports, a decision that led authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro to order his navy to escort other ships in the Caribbean. With a massive U.S. Navy presence nearby, it’s not difficult to imagine an unintended escalation.

What does the White House actually want in Venezuela? What could a war look like? And were Maduro to magically agree to leave the scene, what happens next? On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with James Story, a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela under both the Trump and Biden administrations. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.

The United States hasn’t yet declared war on Venezuela—but it’s getting closer. This week, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a blockade on sanctioned ships in and out of Venezuela ports, a decision that led authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro to order his navy to escort other ships in the Caribbean. With a massive U.S. Navy presence nearby, it’s not difficult to imagine an unintended escalation.

What does the White House actually want in Venezuela? What could a war look like? And were Maduro to magically agree to leave the scene, what happens next? On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with James Story, a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela under both the Trump and Biden administrations. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: What’s the likelihood that we will see actual U.S. military action on Venezuela?

James Story: I think it’s about 80-20.

RA: This week’s blockade strikes me as making things a lot more tense. The fact that Maduro has ordered his navy to accompany ships carrying petroleum products out of Venezuelan ports means there’s a much higher chance of some sort of confrontation on the high seas, right?

JS: It increases the odds of a mistake being made by either side. What’s really important here is to unpack which ships Maduro is escorting. I believe he wouldn’t make the mistake of escorting a sanctioned vessel; a vessel that was stateless, such as the Skipper, which was the vessel that was taken last week; or another vessel that is part of the ghost fleet. Here Maduro is going to have to be very careful, but it’s going to have a massive impact on the regime’s ability to export oil regardless.

RA: What percentage of ships going in and out of Venezuela are actually sanctioned?

JS: The most recent numbers I’ve seen are around 40 percent. I often have advocated for some directed action against stateless vessels or vessels that were spoofing their automatic identification systems (AIS). According to the International Maritime Organization, vessels of a certain tonnage have to display their whereabouts. Some of these ghost fleets have been serving the Russians, with their exports of oil; they’ve served Iranian interests, Chinese interests, and others. They indicate they’re in one ocean when they’re at a completely different place. In the case of the Skipper, they were flying a Guyanese flag, but they’re not registered in Guyana. So taking the Skipper was a righteous, judicial action because it was a stateless vessel.

RA: I’m curious how long Venezuela can last in a blockade scenario. Even though this blockade is currently just for sanctioned vessels, that could easily escalate. Given that all of this is to put pressure on Maduro, how long does he have in this scenario?

JS: One thing that’s not particularly sexy to unpack is how much storage capacity Maduro has for the oil. You have to remember that what Venezuela produces is a very thick, tar-like oil that requires significant inputs of naphtha or light sweet crude in order for it to be pumped out and moved to other refineries or sent on ships. I think they have a storage capacity of about 35 million barrels. If they’re producing close to a million barrels a day, they currently have around 27 million barrels of oil in storage. That means if they don’t export, they’re going to run out of storage capacity soon. And when they run out, then what happens? If you stop producing oil in Venezuela, it creates big problems for the fields themselves. That is why, regardless of a license to export oil, Chevron never stopped pumping oil in Venezuela throughout the episode we’re living in. To do so would be to damage its equipment and ruin the field.

RA: Moving back to the idea of potential military action or regime change, what is the White House’s rationale? We’ve heard a lot of different reasons. We’ve heard drugs, oil, maybe critical minerals, maybe democracy promotion. What is the main reason?

JS: This could be an “and, and” scenario, but let’s start with the world as Trump sees it. He ran on a platform that said criminality was rampant in the United States and that the impact of migration was having a deleterious impact on American society and our economy. This is kind of the perfect storm of those two issues, because during the Maduro dictatorship, 25 percent of the people of Venezuela have fled their country. The vast majority of these are good, honest, hardworking people who are merely seeking a better life for themselves. But there have been younger people who have gotten into criminality. There are elements of Tren de Aragua which have been exported across the region. This is a drug-trafficking, foreign terrorist organization. You have criminals directly linked back to some of the diaspora from Venezuela. So this is an issue for him.

RA: We’ll go through all the reasons one by one, but Jimmy, just staying on criminality and drugs, one immediate refutation of that argument is that criminals come from a lot of places, drugs come from a lot of places—and the United States doesn’t attack them all. And in any case, most of Venezuela’s drugs go to Europe, not to the United States. Add to that, Trump recently pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, a former Honduran president who was actually convicted of smuggling hundreds of tons of drugs to the United States. So the idea that invading Venezuela just because of criminality and drugs doesn’t hold water as the reason for doing this.

JS: I’m not suggesting that the policy is coherent. I’m just telling you what he’s thinking. There is a lack of coherence here on this issue, but Trump ran on that platform, and he directly connected migrants, Venezuela, and........

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