The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

I explained why military force was not the answer, especially given the inevitable congressional opposition, but that we could accomplish the same objective by working with Maduro’s opponents. I subsequently decided to turn a spotlight on Venezuela, giving a widely covered speech in Miami on November 1, 2018, in which I condemned the Western Hemisphere’s “troika of tyranny”: Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. I announced that the Administration, in its ongoing reversal of Obama’s Cuba policy, would impose new sanctions against Havana, and also carry out a new Executive Order sanctioning Venezuela’s gold sector, which the regime used to keep itself afloat by selling gold from Venezuela’s Central Bank. The “troika of tyranny” speech underlined the affiliations between all three authoritarian governments, laying the basis for a more forward-leaning policy. Trump liked the phrase “troika of tyranny,” telling me, “You give such great speeches”; this one, as I pointed out, had been written by one of his own speechwriters.