Vance: Venezuela Will Have To ‘Play Ball With The United States,’ No Matter Who’s In Charge

No matter who controls Venezuela when all is said and done, Vice President JD Vance said that they will have no choice but to “play ball with the United States” moving forward.

Vance told Salem radio host Scott Jennings that President Donald Trump’s administration certainly wanted to see the Venezuelan people do well — but that it was far more important for the American people to do well and face no imminent threat from an adversarial neighbor.

.@VP on Venezuela: “Whoever the leader of that country is, is going to have to play ball with the United States.”

“It was a very important operation. It was carried out flawlessly… I think it will create great benefits for the American people.” pic.twitter.com/l8qLZnOd05

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) January 6, 2026

“We want what’s best for the Venezuelan people,” he explained, “But more importantly than that by a factor of a hundred, we want what’s best for the American people — and whoever the leader of that country is, is going to have to play ball with the United States. That is the whole problem that we’ve had in that region of the world.”

Vance explained that a “whole host of American competitors” had been invited in to do business and set up shop in Venezuela, bringing additional threats to the United States into the western hemisphere and posing a very real danger to American national security.

“They’ve used their own energy money to fund this terrible narco-terrorism against the United States of America,” Vance continued. “What the president did — and really, the entire team made possible — is to cut off that flow of energy money to narco-terrorists, to then of course cut off the amount of narco-terrorism being imported into the United States of America. I think it’s going to save lives, it’s going to mean cheaper gas and energy prices for Americans, and maybe most importantly, it’s going to mean that we have more control over the energy resources that exist in the world.”

With regard to the Saturday mission to capture Maduro, Vance said that he’d initially been skeptical that such a precision operation could be carried out — but was happy to have been proven wrong: “It was a very important operation. It was carried out flawlessly … I think it will create great benefits for the American people.”