What Can South Africa Learn From Maduro’s Miscalculation?

Nicolás Maduro, the former Venezuelan leader, was taken into United States (US) custody and spirited to New York to face drug-trafficking charges after a daring American raid on Venezuela last week.

American sources allege that Maduro’s government had evolved into a criminal enterprise that used state institutions to traffic drugs into the US, including through links to global terror groups and Iran’s Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The motive for that trafficking was not merely financial but extended to seeking to destabilise the US from within while raising funds to resource groups that would threaten it from without. Long-term US efforts to staunch the flow of drugs and money had failed.

Put plainly: the drug enterprise was read as an effort that undermined the national security of the US and nothing the US had tried to date had been effective in mitigating the threat.

For several months US authorities had raised this with their Venezuelan counterparts and warned that consequences would follow if the warnings were ignored.

Even the briefest chronology of those warnings is stark:

2025
• January 10: United States rejects Nicolás Maduro’s third-term inauguration and recognises an opposition candidate as the legitimate winner of a wholly corrupt presidential election.
• February 20: Tren de Aragua, a crime syndicate enabled by Maduro, is designated a Foreign Terrorist Organisation, with claims it operates as a proxy for the Maduro government.
• February 26 to March 24: United States revokes oil concessions and imposes a 25% tariff on countries purchasing Venezuelan oil.
• August 8: Maduro designated a global terrorist leader of the Cartel of the Suns and arrest bounty increased to $50 million.
• September 2: Maritime counter-narcotics campaign launched in the Caribbean, with multiple lethal interdictions of suspected trafficking vessels.
• November 14: Operation Southern Spear announced, deploying the USS Gerald R Ford and F-35 aircraft to the Caribbean.
• November 21: President Donald Trump reportedly issues an ultimatum to Maduro to accept exile in Turkey with his family; Maduro refuses and demands amnesty.
• December 10 to 17: United States Navy seizes an oil tanker and establishes a formal quarantine on sanctioned Venezuelan oil shipments.
• December 22 to 25: President Trump publicly urges Maduro to leave the country; following a final rejection of exile on December 23, military action is authorised on December 25.

2026
• January 2: President Trump announces imminent US military strikes inside Venezuela.
• January 3: United States military operation launched to capture Nicolás Maduro.

Throughout, Maduro remained defiant, making statements and speeches that his government would not change course and that the US could do nothing to make him.

Tellingly, and this is the crux of the lesson, the Trump administration did not overthrow the entire Venezuelan administration, but has instead sought to work with the existing government under Maduro’s former deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, who has served as the executive vice-president of Venezuela since June 2018, and has now assumed the presidency.

Rodríguez is a left-wing hardliner, and arch US critic, very much in the mould of Maduro himself, and the Trump administration therefore passed on the prospect of installing a pro-US and pro-Trump alternative leader (such an option was available but would have been complex, disruptive, and potentially destabilising).

Instead, Rodríguez was given a choice. Become pragmatic, cut out activity that threatens the interests of the US, and then a deal can be struck to the mutual advantage of both countries. Much of that del will now revolve around getting Venezuela’s oil economy right (the country has arguably the world’s largest reserves, but despite that, under Maduro, Venezuelan GDP fell by over 50%). Venezuela had previously nationalised key US oil assets.

US sources say that Rodríguez has to date been pragmatic and is prepared to work with the Americans to, among other things, rebuild the Venezuelan economy.

South Africa’s leadership, especially that responsible for foreign policy, could learn a lot from the Maduro experience. There is no prospect of overthrowing the local leadership in Pretoria, in part because South Africa does not matter enough, while the threat it poses to US national security (the US has issued similar warnings to Pretoria as it did to Maduro for maintaining similar ties, especially vis-à-vis Iran) can be managed by less dramatic means.

But until South Africa’s approach to foreign policy and aspects of domestic policy shifts, the US may keep up tariffs and the like, and later move to sanctions, while prospects of any vast new investment pacts between the countries, ones that could completely transform South Africa’s economy, remain off the table.

However, if the South African leadership became pragmatic on national interest, as Rodríguez may do now, then the US would be extremely keen, as it is with Venezuela, to strike great new investment pacts to the advantage of both countries, regardless of political history or past ideological differences between the leaderships.

Maduro paid a great price for his intransigence and failure to read the signs of what was coming. So did Venezuela’s people, which is why they have not come to his defence. The African National Congress (ANC) has already paid a nearly similar price in its loss of political control of South Africa. South Africa’s people have also paid a price (GDP per capita is down over a decade, the same trend as in Venezuela, only not as dramatic) which is in turn why the ANC lost the support it once enjoyed.

So, South Africa’s foreign policy and economic leadership, especially that around the ANC, but also in parts of business and the Democratic Alliance (DA), have a choice. They can remain detached, or intransigent and defiant, and make statements about how awful they think Trump is, or how South Africa should fight the Americans, or learn to do without them, and the like. As a consequence, the ANC’s (and later DA/ANC unity government’s) domestic political standing will continue to erode and the rate of economic growth will remain very low. Those two factors will conspire to pose an ever-present threat to the long-term stability of the country.

Alternatively, they can get serious and propose a deal that meets America’s regional and economic objectives in a manner that drives South Africa’s rate of economic growth back to emerging market norms. It is really very easy to do.