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.