Late Friday, Delcy Rodriguez, in her capacity as interim president of Venezuela, said her country’s in the early stages of “an exploratory process” that could culminate in the reestablishment of diplomatic ties with the US.

Delcy’s statement reflected the many paradoxes of her current predicament. She described the hypothetical restoration of formal relations with Washington as a step born of necessity — a measure which, if taken, is aimed at “address[ing] the consequences arising from the aggression and the kidnapping of the president of the republic and the first lady, as well as to pursue a working agenda of mutual interest.”

Got that? Venezuela needs to cultivate a working, mutually beneficial relationship with the nation which, less than a week ago, abducted its president and his wife in flagrant violation of, as Delcy put it in the same statement, the “international legal order.” Venezuela will apparently send a delegation to D.C. to look in on its shuttered embassy in Georgetown.

Representatives of Donald Trump, meanwhile, were in Caracas for the second time in seven days. This time, they weren’t wearing night vision goggles, although the State Department said diplomats dispatched from the Venezuela Affairs Unit run out of the US Embassy in Colombia were accompanied by “security staff” as they assessed a “potential” resumption of operations at America’s embassy in Caracas which was closed in 2019 after Nicolas Maduro expelled the US diplomatic mission amid the international push to legitimize Juan Guaido’s claim on the presidency.

A quick scan of the “news” section on the official website of the Venezuelan president’s office underscores the delicacy of Delcy’s balancing act. On a day when Trump said Venezuela’s “working well” with the US, Delcy’s staff published a string of pro-Maduro propaganda with titles like, “Social movements march to demand the release of President Maduro and the First Lady,” “High-Level Commission for the Liberation of President Maduro and Cilia Flores Established,” “The Bolivarian Government will create a commission to support the families of victims of the US attack” and “Venezuela and Cuba pay tribute to those killed in Trump’s offensive.”

You could argue — and some have — that if anyone in Caracas can successfully navigate this particular Strait of Messina, it’s Delcy. Her rise to the top of the Venezuelan government is in many ways the story of a savvy operator who’s the aggressively outspoken daughter of a Marxist martyr when she can be and a practical, pedantic technocrat which she has to be.

But the task ahead of her — acquiescing to US dominion over her country’s oil reserves and, ultimately, accepting the de facto relegation of Venezuela to colony status vis-à-vis Washington, all while somehow preserving her revolutionary bona fides and protecting the national pride — could prove largely impossible.

I’ve been asked repeatedly over the last several days what the “worst case” looks like in a post-Maduro Venezuela. While there’s no “right” answer, one disaster scenario finds Delcy deposed and the legislative chamber chaired by her brother, Jorge, suspended or dissolved in a military coup, and I don’t mean the US military.

It’s at least possible that between the humiliating optics of Delcy’s forced pandering to Trump’s colonial imperialism and the curtailment of cocaine revenues which enriched high-ranking members of the Venezuelan military and security apparatus, that Padrino Lopez and/or Diosdado Cabello decide to remove Delcy by force.

It’s useful (not to mention accurate) to think of the regime as having a two-person civilian component controlled by Delcy and her brother and a two-person military-security component run by Padrino Lopez and Cabello who, between them, have a monopoly on the guns.

There’s no physical impediment (at all) to an internal military coup with Maduro gone. Delcy doesn’t have a Cuban Praetorian Guard, and while I won’t pretend to know whether and to what extent the military rank and file harbor some manner of patriotic affection for a daughter (the daughter) of the revolution, it’s probably fair to assess that the risk to her from the military is higher than it was for Maduro.

Delcy and Jorge have one thing going for them in the internal leverage department: They’re the only thing standing between the US military and the Cabello-Padrino Lopez duopoly. But — and this is the wildcard — Trump doesn’t want to be involved in an actual military occupation of Venezuela, let alone with the mid-terms coming up, and everyone knows it.

If Cabello and Padrino Lopez overthrew Delcy and declared military rule, Trump would presumably green-light round after round of airstrikes to degrade Padrino Lopez’s forces. The CIA would likely try to kill Cabello. (According to Reuters, Cabello was notified by US officials that he’s a target in the event he attempts to obstruct Delcy’s cooperation with Washington.)

Like Maduro (and, now that you mention it, Trump), both Cabello and Padrino Lopez have been indicted in the US. There’s a $25 million bounty on Cabello, easily (and proudly) the most outspoken hardliner in the country. He controls the infamous colectivos, a pro-regime motorcycle gang Maduro used to suppress dissent. With Maduro locked away in New York, it wouldn’t be a stretch to describe the colectivos as Cabello’s own private army.

And that’s not (even close to) the half of it. Cabello basically is the regime. He embodies it. His role dates to the very beginning when he forged a friendship with Hugo Chavez initially over baseball when the two men were being trained for the military.

Five years after graduating from Venezuela’s military academy, Cabello — and this is real — commanded a tank platoon on a failed excursion to sack Miraflores Palace on behalf of Chavez. It didn’t work and Cabello was thrown in jail, only to be pardoned with Chavez two years later.

Over the ensuing four years, Cabello and Chavez pressed on in their quest for power, a collaboration which ultimately found the latter ascending the presidency in 1998. Thereafter, Cabello held a dizzying array of government positions including, amusingly, the presidency when Chavez was briefly deposed for 47 hours in 2002.

Initially, that episode installed Pedro Carmona as interim president, but Chavez loyalists, including his personal security detail, managed to thwart the coup and recapture the presidential palace, at which point Cabello presided as president until Chavez was released from captivity.

From 2002 until Chavez’s death in 2013, Cabello occupied nearly every government post imaginable, including head of the legislature, the role currency held by Jorge Rodriguez. He’s been accused by anybody and everybody of anything and everything, and Venezuelans are understandably scared to death of him.

By the time Maduro was snatched up by Delta Force this month, Cabello had succeeded in establishing a monopoly on paramilitary force and a near-monopoly on domestic intelligence gathering. He maintains a veritable Rolodex of contacts with leftist guerrillas and non-governmental armed groups, and by every account except his own, he’s knee-deep in the coke money which buys loyalty across the official military ranks, which means it’s difficult to know where loyalty to Cabello ends and loyalty to Padrino Lopez begins.

As if all that’s not enough, Cabello’s a genius provocateur and a gifted propagandist. He has a weekly TV show called “Con El Mazo Dando” which translates to “Hitting with the Sledgehammer” or “Going at it with the Club,” in English.

As the name suggests, Cabello wields a spiked bat on the show while carrying on about sundry conspiracies. “Cabello expounds for hours at a time, mixing political commentary with dark humor as a small audience claps and laughs,” The Wall Street Journal wrote recently, describing the show which, the Journal dryly noted, is “now on its 556th episode.”

In 2017, The Miami Herald implicated Cabello in a murder-for-hire scheme targeting Marco Rubio. “Although federal authorities couldn’t be sure at the time whether the uncorroborated threat was real, they took it seriously enough that Rubio [was] guarded by a security detail for several weeks in both Washington and Miami,” the linked article reads.

By comparison, Padrino Lopez is a pragmatist, a characterization supported by the lower US reward for his capture: “Just” $15 million to Cabello’s $25 million. The general has ties to The Kremlin — he’s named for Lenin — and was trained, ironically, in the US at Fort Benning.

Although he, like Cabello, was instrumental in maintaining Maduro’s hold on power, he’s not viewed in the same light as Cabello by the US nor, I imagine, by Venezuelans despicable as he is.

The question for the Trump administration is this: What to do in the event Cabello and Padrino Lopez depose Delcy? Because they could. In the blink of an eye.

Trump’s answer is of course military action, but what if that doesn’t get the job done? Now that he’s apprised of the risk, it won’t be nearly as easy to capture Cabello as it was to seize Maduro, and that’s assuming it’s possible at all. And we know from experience that air power isn’t usually sufficient to achieve America’s goals when those goals are couched in political terms.

Oil executives who met with Trump on Friday reportedly expressed more than a little hesitation at the idea of spending tens of billions of dollars to rebuild Venezuela’s oil infrastructure. If the US ends up in a prolonged bombing campaign to oust a newly-installed military junta, that rebuilding project will go up in smoke, literally.

I don’t know how likely it is that Delcy will be deposed internally, but I do know that the Cabello question will have to be answered, or at least addressed, eventually. Maybe Padrino Lopez will go along with Trump’s program, and without full buy-in from the formal military ranks, it seems unlikely that Cabello can seize and hold power.

But it’s very difficult, bordering on impossible, to imagine Cabello standing by idly as the US implements an unapologetically extractive policy whereby Delcy, however begrudgingly, cedes Chavez’s revolution to a colonial arrangement with Washington.

Of course, people like Cabello are inherently self-interested no matter how loudly they assert themselves as unflinching ideologues. It’s certainly possible he can be “bought out,” so to speak, by the US. Or who knows, maybe Trump can get away with assassinating him.

If nothing’s done, it’s possible Cabello and Padrino Lopez will call Trump’s bluff. As noted above, Trump will not — cannot politically — occupy Venezuela ahead of the mid-terms. The Senate’s already moved to block him from further military action in the country. If he tries to order a full-scale invasion to oust a military junta that only came to power because he deposed Venezuela’s president, Trump would risk a wider rebellion among the otherwise fanatically loyal GOP ranks.

In the meantime — i.e., between now and whenever there’s more clarity on what’s next for Venezuela — spare a thought for Delcy, complicit though she is in the regime’s long history of brutal repression. She’s sailing between Scylla and Charybdis with Cabello and Trump.

---