World affairs are acquiring some curious symmetries, particularly when it comes to the United States and Venezuela. During the 2024 Presidential campaign, Donald Trump made the South American nation his favorite scapegoat to propel his anti-immigrant policies, by branding its undocumented migrants in the United States as members of a feared transnational gang, the so-called Tren de Aragua. Then, once in office, he deported hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to internment in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. More recently, Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon has been attacking alleged narco-boats in the Caribbean which were said to have left Venezuela with the U.S. as their ultimate destination. So far, four boats have been destroyed, resulting in the deaths of twenty-one people. Even as the Pentagon has published footage of the strikes, it has produced no evidence that the boats were carrying drugs. Just a month before these attacks began, the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, had offered a reward of up to fifty million dollars “for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction” of Venezuela’s President, Nicolás Maduro, “for violating U.S. narcotics laws.” According to the Administration, Maduro does not preside over a government but, rather, a narco-terrorist group that has hijacked power and held its citizens ransom.

In a parallel, equally surreal campaign, Trump lobbied for months to be given the Nobel Peace Prize. He did so unabashedly, despite having launched bombing raids against Iranian nuclear sites in June, likening them to the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and warning Tehran to choose either “peace” or “tragedy,” with further U.S. strikes to come if it dared to retaliate. In August, Trump announced that he had “solved” seven wars. The claim was largely specious, however, since some of the nations he referred to weren’t actually at war. Meanwhile, his claims to have ended the brief but intense border conflict in May between India and Pakistan appears to have seriously backfired with reports that the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is incensed over Trump’s bragging. In June, egged on by Trump’s envoys, representatives for the governments of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which have long been engaged in a proxy war, came together to sign a document promising to undertake good-will steps toward “peace and security,” but that détente has already unravelled.

As last week ended, however, with mounting hopes that, after two years, Israel’s brutal campaign in Gaza might end with a deal brought about via Trump’s ministrations, speculation circulated that the American President might indeed win the Peace Prize, which was to be announced on Saturday. Instead, it went to María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s main opposition leader, who has been in hiding in that country since last year’s disputed Presidential elections. Machado, a wildly popular conservative politician in her fifties, was banned from participating in the elections, so she named an elderly diplomat, Edmundo González, to stand in her place. After the votes had been cast, Machado’s supporters produced electoral tallies appearing to show that González had won with a sweeping majority, but Venezuela’s official electoral tribunal, without producing any proof, declared Maduro the winner. In the protests and street chaos that ensued, some two dozen people were killed, and Machado and González both went into hiding. Eventually, one step ahead of a prosecutor’s arrest warrant, González sought diplomatic asylum in the Spanish Embassy in Caracas and was allowed to leave the country.

On Saturday, Trump made a backhanded acknowledgment of Machado’s win, saying that “the person who actually got the Nobel Prize called today, called me and said, ‘I’m accepting this in honor of you, because you really deserved it.’ ” Trump added that the gesture was a “nice thing to do,” then made some self-serving remarks about how he had assisted Machado—whose name he had perhaps forgotten, as he did not mention it—and how Venezuela “needed help” because it is a “disaster.” A little while later, the White House’s communications director, Stephen Cheung, a former spokesman for the United Fighting Championship, seemingly expressed the President’s true sentiments: “The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace.” In subsequent statements, several prominent Trump loyalists made it clear that his Nobel quest wasn’t going away, among them Jason Miller, a former Trump campaign adviser, who said, “The legacy of the Nobel Peace Prize will be irreparably damaged if it isn’t awarded to President Trump in 2026.”

Machado, though, is a curious choice for the Nobel Committee, given that she has said she supports Trump’s pressure campaign against Maduro and also the U.S. military attacks on the Venezuelan boats. Additionally, one of her top advisers told the Times last month that Venezuela’s opposition was in discussions with the Trump Administration, and had drawn up an action plan for the first hundred hours after Maduro’s eventual ouster. In other words, publicly at least, Machado and her colleagues appear to be on board with Trump’s revival of the Monroe Doctrine and with old-fashioned Yankee gunboat diplomacy in a region where, for many decades, political leaders of all stripes have sought to present themselves as defenders of Latin America’s economic and political sovereignty.

I spoke on a Zoom call with Machado, a little over a year ago, about two months after the elections. A thin woman with long brown hair, seated in a room in a clandestine location, with sunlight coming through a partially curtained window behind her, she was adroit and assertive. She wanted to know everything about the conversation before it went ahead: what topics it would focus on, how long it might last, when it would be published, and, finally, whether I was already recording. But she quickly established an intimate tone, calling me by my first name, and she was very determined that I understand her point of view. Maduro and his comrades were not just cynical and corrupt, she told me, they were “desalmados”—soulless. They were criminals, homophobes, ecocidists, and racists. She was from the center right—“a liberal in the classical sense,” she added—meaning that she is in favor of private property, individual initiative, and a reduction of the role of the state, which over the years in Venezuela had engendered a system of corrupt patronage.