Delcy Rodríguez thanks Trump at the UN

Eight months after Maduro was seized by United States forces, the interim leader thanked Trump at the General Assembly and declared alignment with Washington, promising an election with no date.

Eight months after watching her predecessor seized in Caracas by elite United States troops, Venezuela’s interim president took the podium of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly and thanked the author of the operation. The scene, summarized in one sentence, condenses the current position of Caracas: survival in power in exchange for public alignment with Washington.

Delcy Rodríguez thanked Donald Trump for the resumption of diplomatic relations and declared her country’s alignment with the United States, with a vague promise of elections and still no set date, according to Le Monde’s account of the UN speech. The gesture came during the 81st session of the General Assembly in New York, in the same week Trump defended the operation in Venezuela from the same podium and announced a major oil agreement with Caracas, as recorded in the UN record of the United States speech.

The sequence that led to the podium

On Jan. 3, 2026, before dawn, United States special forces struck Caracas and captured Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who were taken to a Brooklyn jail where they face narco-terrorism charges, in British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) hour-by-hour coverage of the operation. Trump then announced that Washington would manage the Venezuelan transition and that United States oil companies would rebuild the oil and gas sector.

On Jan. 5, Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s deputy and a United States sanctions target since 2018, was sworn in as interim president at the National Assembly, with public backing from Maduro’s son, Nicolás Maduro Guerra. In April, Washington removed Rodríguez from the Treasury Department sanctions list, a move described by the White House as a sign of progress, according to Politico’s record of the decision. Caracas reopened oil to private investment and restored diplomatic ties broken years earlier.

On June 22, in Caracas, Rodríguez said Maduro’s capture had put the country on “the right path” and called Jan. 3 a turning point, in remarks recorded by Agence France-Presse. The line prepared the September speech in New York.

What was said and what got no date

At the UN, Rodríguez spoke of settling differences with Washington through diplomatic channels and promised elections without setting a calendar. No timetable was presented to the National Electoral Council, and no United States counterpart of permanent sanctions relief was published by the State Department. While she gave thanks, opposition figure María Corina Machado was again prevented from returning to the country, according to complaints from the opposition coalition.

A head of state who reached power through the imprisonment of her president thanks the author of that imprisonment at the headquarters of the body created to protect sovereign equality among states.

The Venezuelan delegation arrived in New York with an agenda of debt, mining and energy, including meetings with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The economic agenda is real, but it depends on outside arbitration: without verifiable sanctions relief and without an election date, the announced alignment works less as a negotiated transition than as a confession of fragility.

Attributed reading

As an interpretive hypothesis of this article, the scene marks the formal conversion of Caracas into an energy protectorate. In that interpretation, in exchange for survival in power, the old Chavista leadership offers oil, openness to foreign capital and silence about the sovereignty violation that brought it to office, while Washington provides a veneer of normalization without demanding immediate democratization. Trump’s praise of Rodríguez as a model he would like to replicate in Iran reinforces the message.

What is verifiable is narrower and, for that reason, harsher: the interim leader swapped denunciation for gratitude before the same power holding her predecessor in a prison uniform in New York. Until a verifiable election calendar appears, the open question the case leaves is: what currency does Caracas deliver in exchange for the recognition it receives in Washington.