The Global Fight for Freedom

These pages hold three convictions: that independent institutions with strong checks on power yield the best human outcomes; that unchecked, centralized power always decays into tyranny; and that governments built to extract a country's wealth for a narrow elite deliver far worse lives than inclusive ones built to share power and prosperity broadly. That last divide — extractive versus inclusive — is the central insight of Acemoglu and Robinson's Nobel-winning Why Nations Fail, and it is the lens this newsletter returns to more than any other.
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This week, the divide is on rare, naked display: in Venezuela, where the same transition is being pulled toward extraction by one American and toward institutions by another — and in Russia, where the world's extractive powers are assembling into something Churchill would have recognized.
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This week's pattern: extraction takes what it can carry. Institutions build what can last.

Flashpoints

1. Hope Abounds (Listen to the Venezuelans)
2. Watch the Pieces Assemble

Country names are followed by their 2026 freedom scores according to Freedom House. Not a ranking.

Marco Rubio gets it.

Seven months into Venezuela's transition, one man in the Trump administration is building the inclusive institutions — even though his boss prefers the extractive ones.

This isn’t new for Rubio. He chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Western Hemisphere subcommittee for over a decade, co-authored 2019’s VERDAD Act — the largest U.S. legislative package for Venezuelan democracy ever passed — and was writing sanctions bills against Maduro’s regime as far back as 2014, a decade before he had any power to enforce them.

I have a working theory, unproven: whenever this administration tilts toward democratic principle over raw self-interest, Rubio is usually behind it. I can’t prove it. But watch what he’s doing in Caracas, and it gets hard to explain any other way.

I’ve had my own doubts about Rubio, and I’d guess plenty of readers have too. Last year, his State Department released human rights reports scrubbed clean for Trump-friendly strongmen — El Salvador’s Bukele and Hungary’s Orbán both got a blank “no credible reports of significant human rights abuses.” He’d also ordered diplomats to stop judging whether foreign elections were free and fair, telling them to simply congratulate winners. I’ve wondered whether he has been absorbed by the administration he now serves, or decided his fight is better waged from inside the room.

Bad news still prevails in Venezuela. Maduro’s Chavismo still runs the state. Diosdado Cabello — interior minister, accused by Washington of co-running the regime’s own drug cartel, a $25 million bounty on his head — still controls much of the country with Washington’s tacit approval. Twin earthquakes, magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, struck 39 seconds apart on June 24, killing more than 5,500 people while the government fumbled the response. Inflation has cooled, but poverty hasn’t. And María Corina Machado, Nobel laureate, remains frozen out of the room where her country’s future is being negotiated.

Nobody questions Machado’s courage and commitment to democratic principles. After a year spent in hiding, she escaped Venezuela by fishing boat in December, meeting American veterans mid-Caribbean in six-foot swells to make her flight to Oslo to collect the Nobel she’d later hand to Trump.

But in May, sensing Washington drifting, Machado rallied nearly the whole opposition to sign the Panama Manifesto, naming herself lead negotiator and alienating the Trump administration in the process. The seat went instead to Dinorah Figuera, a Justice First party veteran who chaired Venezuela’s last freely elected legislature, the 2015 National Assembly, before seven years in exile. Figuera has sacrificed for democracy too.

While Western media fixate on the earthquake response and the Machado standoff, they’re missing the story underneath it. Newsweek’s July 29 dispatch from the ground described a different Venezuela: a man in a hard hat cheering an American Osprey overhead, shouting “Welcome to Venezuela!” to the soldier climbing out. Shell signing a new gas deal. SLB returning to the oil fields. Production climbing from 800,000 barrels a day in January to 1.1 million by June. Monthly inflation, measured in the hundreds of percent a year ago, falling to single digits.

As I often do, I’d ask you to ignore the American press and listen to the Venezuelans themselves. Hope in the country’s future spiked from 51% to 81%, per pollster ORC Consultores — before the earthquakes knocked it back. Trust in the United States sits at a shocking 70%, in a country whose previous leader blamed America for all his society’s ills.

These pages have long advocated for Machado as Venezuela’s rightful leader, so why does Rubio keep her at arm’s length? First, a CIA assessment concluded in January that Machado controls neither the military nor the oil infrastructure Rodríguez does — a fear reinforced by a former Chevron executive who warned installing the opposition risked “another Iraq.” And Rubio has also built a near-daily working relationship with Rodríguez that officials are loath to jeopardize. Machado’s own conduct hasn’t helped: after the earthquakes she pushed to help administer U.S. aid and asked for a Marine security detail, prompting officials to call it “political opportunism” and “grotesque,” and to say she has Rubio “at wit’s end.” And one of her own party’s leaders concedes her exclusion is less a rejection of her than a calculated choice not to provoke Chavismo during the stabilization period.

And what these pages have lauded as Machado’s principled resistance to what she calls the Chavismo Party’s “criminal network” is now at loggerheads with Rubio’s push for a “national reconciliation” between political parties, the same model he has cited from Eastern Europe’s transitions out of communism. Machado’s moral clarity — even where she is right — is now viewed within the administration as rigidity divorced from reality.

But the past week has revealed the steps Rubio is taking are exactly those Machado has long called for.

Last week, he told Newsweek Venezuela’s path to elections would take “not years, but certainly months and weeks” — the clearest timeline Washington has offered so far. Talks between the government and Figuera’s delegation opened August 1 in Caracas, and just days ago, Figuera laid out a calendar: opposition parties reinstated by October, a new Supreme Court by November, a new electoral council by December. Notice what’s being rebuilt — the 2015 National Assembly, Venezuela’s last freely elected body, dusted off as the institutional spine for everything that follows.

This is clearly Marco Rubio’s plan — not Donald Trump’s. Trump does not have the patience or discipline for the long, slow, boring work that truly transforms societies — the courts, the parties, the electoral councils nobody tweets about.

What Trump does have patience for is the extracted wealth. The Financial Times calculates Washington has collected more than $13 billion in Venezuelan oil revenue this year — against $386 million in earthquake aid, kept, tellingly, in a separate account. The Venezuelan government’s own transparency tracker lists exactly one sale; the quarterly disclosures promised in April never arrived, and even Florida Republican María Elvira Salazar has joined Democrats in demanding an accounting. Trump, for his part, brags that the U.S. has recovered the cost of the operation “28 times” over and is “making a lot of money, too,” and has said flatly that the oil revenue is now “controlled by me.”

That is the divide Why Nations Fail describes: extractive institutions, built to funnel a country’s wealth to whoever holds the guns, against inclusive ones, built to spread power and property broadly enough that prosperity outlasts any single ruler. In May, Trump posted a graphic online branding Venezuela the “51st State” — hardly a signal of intent to broadly share prosperity. Trump's attention, though, is now consumed by the Middle East, and that may be a blessing for Venezuelans: it has left Rubio free to do the slow work of building the other kind of country anyway.

In January, Machado carried her Nobel medal into the Oval Office and pressed it into Trump’s hands.

Seven months later, the best thing either of them can do for Venezuela is stay out of Marco Rubio’s way.

Primary Sources: El País (Spain, reporting from Caracas), Americas Quarterly (US, reporting from Caracas), Miami Herald, Financial Times (UK)

“There never was a war more easy to stop.”

So wrote Winston Churchill in The Gathering Storm, describing how the democracies watched an axis assemble itself, piece by piece — and did nothing.

Watch the pieces assemble. On July 25, President Zelensky announced that, per Ukrainian intelligence, Russia has been preparing since June to receive 30,000 more North Korean soldiers — nearly triple Pyongyang’s first deployment — plus additional ballistic-missile launchers.

Moscow and Pyongyang won’t confirm it. They hardly need to. In April, Kim Jong Un unveiled a bronze monument to the first wave and praised, in his own published words, soldiers who “unhesitatingly opted for self-blasting” — blowing themselves up rather than face capture. Ukrainian special forces spent a month trying to take a single North Korean alive; one candidate shouted “Glory to the Party” and detonated a grenade. Others destroyed their own faces so their country’s involvement could never be proven. Defectors explain the arithmetic beneath the zeal: a soldier who dies loyal protects the family he left behind. A soldier who surrenders condemns them.

The axis runs on barter. Kim has traded thousands of casualties for Russian missile technology, weapons upgrades, and hard currency — blood for hardware, paid by the lives of young Korean men.

In the weeks ahead, two things are worth watching. The first is whether independent confirmation emerges from the staging grounds in Voronezh — South Korean officials say they’ve detected no unusual movements yet. The second is whether Kim himself boards his armored train for Moscow; his foreign minister’s July visit to Putin had the look of advance work.

Next Tuesday: Iran’s drones, China’s intelligence, Pyongyang’s ammunition — and the question the West keeps refusing to ask out loud: what if the world war already started?

Primary Sources: Kyiv Independent (Ukraine), The Korea Herald (South Korea), The Washington Times

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