{"id":187,"date":"2026-06-17T09:38:04","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T09:38:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=187"},"modified":"2026-06-17T09:38:04","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T09:38:04","slug":"the-exiles-who-sold-trumps-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=187","title":{"rendered":"The Exiles Who Sold Trump\u2019s Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

When the United States bombed Iran in February and abducted Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro from his Caracas residence in January, celebrations erupted across Iranian and Venezuelan exile communities in America, videos of which President Donald Trump eagerly reposted on Truth Social. For the better part of the past two decades, Iranian and Venezuelan \u00e9migr\u00e9 networks have been an indispensable supporting cast for Washington\u2019s pressure campaigns against their home governments. They were not the architects of U.S. policy. But they were its most convincing salespeople, helping transform what might otherwise have looked like naked aggression into something resembling a liberation project. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Read more The Power of Vote at Home<\/a><\/p>\n

Now, the diaspora figureheads from Iran and Venezuela, each with decades invested in cultivating American power, have been cast aside as nice people unfit to lead. The dismissals came quickly, and in nearly identical language. Mar\u00eda Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, offered Trump her prize\u2014an accolade he had been openly campaigning for since the start of his second term\u2014and said Venezuelans were \u201cvery grateful\u201d for their \u201chour of freedom\u201d after the capture of Maduro. Days earlier, the president had already taken her measure. \u201cShe doesn\u2019t have the support within or the respect within the country,\u201d he told reporters after the operation. \u201cShe\u2019s a very nice woman, but she doesn\u2019t have the respect.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n

Then, Delcy Rodr\u00edguez, vice-president of Venezuela since 2018, was sworn in as acting president on January 5, decrying the \u201ckidnapping\u201d of her former boss. But shortly after Trump\u2019s warning that she could \u201cpay a very big price\u201d if she didn\u2019t comply with his demands, Rodr\u00edguez\u202fsaid her cabinet was willing to work with the United States. A rare oil deal between the two governments granted the United States access to Venezuela\u2019s petroleum revenues in a murky, potentially corruption-riddled process.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran\u2019s last shah, fared no better. The most visible face of Iran\u2019s exiled opposition, he published an effusive op-ed in The Washington Post<\/em> the day the bombing of Iran began, thanking Trump for a \u201chumanitarian intervention\u201d\u2014the same day American airstrikes killed over 100 schoolgirls in the city of Minab. Asked whether the former royal might lead a post-clerical Iran, Trump was dismissive in the by-now-familiar register. \u201cIt would seem to me that somebody from within, maybe, would be more appropriate,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the case of Iran, what Washington wanted instead became clear in May, when The New York Times<\/em> reported that the United States and Israel had been quietly working to install former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad\u2014a Holocaust denier and longtime hardliner of the Islamic Republic\u2014as Iran\u2019s next leader. The plan collapsed only when Ahmadinejad was wounded in an airstrike on his Tehran home. \u00a0<\/p>\n

It echoed what had happened with Rodr\u00edguez in Venezuela, where a managed transition led not to real democratic change but to a regime insider acceptable to Washington. The goal was to swap one ruler for another, not to free anyone, but to find an amenable transaction partner. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAs far as regime change, I never cared about regime change,\u201d Trump told The Wall Street <\/em>Journal on Sundayafter announcing a deal with Iran. \u201cThis is the third group we\u2019ve dealt with, and this is the most rational group yet.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n

Having supplied the justification for intervention through unrelenting activism, the exiles were shut out of the rest of the process. The policies they had demanded for years were carried out. But as immigrants, they are not those who bore the cost. Over time, the Iranian and Venezuelan exiles had lost sight of the fact that they were pushing to impose their will on countries they weren\u2019t calling home anymore, and they were out of step with the people they claimed to champion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Read more How Local News Reduces Loneliness<\/a><\/p>\n

Nowhere is that distance more visible than in the politics of economic sanctions. Iran has for years ranked among the most heavily sanctioned states on earth; one 2024 study put the cost to its economy at $1.2 trillion between 2011 and 2022. Venezuela\u2019s sanctions, concentrated on oil, were narrower in design but sweeping in effect\u2014lost revenues between 2017 and 2024 reportedly equaled 213 percent of the country\u2019s GDP over the period. A study in The Lancet<\/em> has attributed more than 560,000 deaths a year to unilateral sanctions worldwide, through their corrosion of health systems and economic life. (The\u00a0Lancet<\/em>\u00a0authors note that unilateral sanctions from the\u00a0U.S.\u00a0or\u00a0E.U.\u00a0may\u00a0be more lethal than the multilateral sanctions imposed by the United Nations.)\u00a0The scholarly consensus on whether such measures actually change government behavior is, at best, deeply skeptical.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u202fThe evidence didn\u2019t matter to key actors within the two diaspora communities who\u2019ve been leveraging their influence to espouse sanctions, portraying them as benign tools of statecraft that the target nations would happily embrace. Several Iranian-American influencers took to calling the measures \u201cchemotherapy,\u201d a poison administered to cure a terminal disease. The metaphor gave away more than its users intended: Someone has to absorb the toxicity, and it was never going to be them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The most zealous advocates of economic punishment were Iranian-born analysts affiliated with organizations such as United Against Nuclear Iran and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Nominally dedicated to blocking Iran\u2019s path to a bomb, they operated in practice as trade vigilantes, mounting pressure campaigns against any company that signed a deal with Tehran\u2014most of it far from anything military. \u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2014, after a sustained publicity campaign, UANI helped push the British accounting firm Grant Thornton out of Iran; firms in travel, food, construction, and renewable energy were maneuvered into severing ties on the same logic. The target was commerce, and the cost was borne by Iranians, not ex-pats.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Venezuelans in America have similarly championed sanctions against their native country. Former President of the National Assembly of Venezuela, Juan Guaid\u00f3, is perhaps the most notable example. In exile in Florida since 2023, Guaid\u00f3 described sanctions as \u201cnecessary\u201d for the restoration of democracy back home, a call echoed by Venezuelan-American journalists in Miami.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

During the first Trump administration, the significant support the sanctions policy garnered among the Venezuelan diaspora, especially in South Florida, where the largest population of Venezuelan-Americans is concentrated, mirrored the Cuban diaspora\u2019s agitation to perpetuate sanctions against their birth country, a policy that\u2019s now old enough, if it were a person, to receive full Social Security benefits.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now that both the Venezuelan and Iranian regimes have forged agreements with the Trump administration to keep their grip on power, it\u2019s clear that many exiles mistook American coercion for democratic solidarity. They believed they were enlisting Washington in the cause of freedom. In the end, Washington recruited them to the cause of political micromanagement, not regime change. That is the lesson facing exile communities from Tehran to Caracas: the superpower that borrows your moral authority may not share your democratic ambitions. It may only need your story long enough to justify its own. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Read more The Iran War\u2019s Biggest Loser? Definitely Netanyahu<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Iranian and Venezuelan \u00e9migr\u00e9 networks made the case for U.S. intervention. Then President Trump cut them loose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":186,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,17,2],"tags":[73],"class_list":["post-187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-foreign-policy","category-government","category-politics","tag-tagged-donald-trump-foreign-policy-iran-maria-corina-machado-nicolas-maduro-regime-change-reza-pahlavi-sanctions-venezuela"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Exiles Who Sold Trump\u2019s Wars - USA Business Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=187\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Exiles Who Sold Trump\u2019s Wars - USA Business Chronicle\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Iranian and Venezuelan \u00e9migr\u00e9 networks made the case for U.S. intervention. 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