Maduro’s government has been uncharacteristically quiet about the case. Two months after the arrests, Cilia Flores said that the D.E.A. had “been here, in Venezuelan territory, violating our sovereignty and committing crimes,” such as kidnapping. Since then, she has refused to speak about the case. In November, 2016, Maduro said, “The empire has created a cause that has the sole objective of attacking the First Lady, the first combatant, the wife of the President. You think it’s a coincidence?” He went on, “This is a policy to end one of the stronger spiritual forces of the revolution, which is an awakening of consciousness and of the historical rights of women.”

In Maduro’s view, the episode was another in a long history of American violations of Venezuela’s sovereignty. Sitting at the wooden desk in his office, he told me that even Chávez had been careful to avoid pushing the U.S. too far. “He understood that he needed to have a good relationship with el poder”—the power. He had mostly managed that until the 2002 coup. “After that came a very difficult period,” Maduro said. “The coup was followed by more assaults against Venezuela, until Obama came to office, when it seemed like a door to a new relationship had opened up. Unfortunately, that was closed when President Obama himself, under pressure from the State Department, the Pentagon, and the United States Southern Command, declared Venezuela a threat to the security interests of the United States.” He was alluding to an executive order that Obama had signed in March, 2015, which, he said, “opened the door to a complex and full-fledged assault on the Bolivarian revolution.”

Several Obama Administration officials told me that the White House recognized early in Maduro’s term that he was unable to hold the country together. “It was clear that he was a much weaker leader,” a diplomat who works in the region told me. “Chávez saw a line and stayed just this side of authoritarianism. Maduro didn’t.” The Administration hoped to resolve the situation through negotiations, led by other Latin-American nations. But a bipartisan group of politicians, with Marco Rubio prominent among them, wanted tougher action. Finally, the Administration agreed to sanctions against seven Venezuelan officials, for corruption, human-rights abuses, and other transgressions; at the urging of the Treasury Department, they added language describing Venezuela as a security threat to the United States.

Maduro saw a political opportunity. In a televised speech, he stood before an audience, wearing a sash patterned on the national flag, and said, “The aggression and the threat of the United States government is the greatest threat that the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, our country, has ever received.” As the audience applauded, he urged, “Let’s close ranks like a single fist of men and women.” In the coming weeks, according to the U.S. official, there was a regional surge in sympathy for Venezuela. “Latin solidarity really reared up against us,” he said. In the end, diplomats “had to organize a hallway meeting for Obama with Maduro, painfully scripted, in which he had to say, ‘Of course you’re not a real national-security threat.’ ”

The Trump officials with the most direct responsibility for Venezuela are H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser, and Juan Cruz, a longtime C.I.A. officer, who in May was named the National Security Council’s chief of Western Hemispheric affairs. Maduro complained that the tensions had only escalated under Trump. “The extremists and the lobbyists are now the ones in all the positions of power in the United States,” he said. Without offering evidence, he told me that, during the unrest last spring, members of the opposition had colluded with Trump’s government to overthrow him: “Funds were invested for the purpose of destabilizing Venezuela, so as to justify a U.S. military intervention.” Maduro said that Julio Borges, one of his most vociferous political rivals, had openly called for a U.S. invasion. (In fact, Borges and his allies had urged foreign countries to apply economic pressure on the government. In one statement, they said, “Sanctions against those who are vagrants, human-rights violators, and looters of public resources will always have our support.”) “There’s not a government in the whole world that would find that acceptable, because all states have a right to defend themselves,” Maduro said. “In the United States, they’d have all gone to the electric chair.”

If the U.S. attacked, Maduro warned, his government would “become insurgent,” and fight back. In his speech the day before, he had extolled the recent national military exercises, saying, “Chávez did not till a furrow in vain. He left us with a powerful armed forces—for peace!” But few American officials take Trump’s threat of military action seriously. “My read is, it was a conversational gambit—he wanted to appear tough,” the U.S. official said. “But no one involved in real military planning has ever thought of this as a place we’d put blood and treasure into—because, quite apart from anything else, there’s no national-security threat. I don’t think any President, not even this President, would make that call.”

Maduro seems to recognize that much of his legitimacy rests on opposing the U.S. In our conversation, he predicted that Trump’s Presidency signalled “the end of the American hegemony in the world,” and added, “In this day and age, you can’t conduct international politics coercively with a supremacist agenda.” But, like Chávez, he knows that he cannot provoke the United States too much. In public remarks, and in his office, he argued that the tense situation came about because Trump had been lied to by his advisers. He told me several times that he had “nothing personal” against Trump, and would be happy to speak to him.

Chávez was able to offset the United States’ influence by rallying his fellow-leftists in Latin America. But Venezuela’s power in the region is diminishing, as its government has made deep cuts in handouts to friendly nations. Cuba, which used to receive a hundred thousand barrels of subsidized oil a day, now gets barely half that; Jamaica has gone from twenty-four thousand to thirteen hundred. Venezuela’s neighbors are increasingly willing to criticize Maduro. But U.S. officials in the region see few good options for encouraging change. “The ineptitude of the opposition and the willingness of the Russians and, maybe, the Chinese to keep them afloat means that we don’t have a lot of tools left in the tool chest,” the U.S. official said. Oil sanctions remain possible, but they would likely cause a complete collapse of the Venezuelan economy, and also have an effect in the United States. “They’re going to put a lot of people out of work in the red states where the refineries are,” the official went on. “Trump loves to kick Maduro, but he doesn’t want to get into a pissing match with the Southern states.”

The diplomat in the region offered a stark assessment. “There’s an A scenario and a B scenario. A is a desperate economic crisis leading to a struggle over leadership and then someone within the P.S.U.V. takes over from Maduro. You will end up with a much more lawless environment in Caracas and a gray, stumbling scenario as the P.S.U.V. tries to control the economy and stay in power. The B scenario is an international crisis that lifts the price of crude. It doesn’t solve all their problems, but it gives them breathing room, and Maduro stays in. A and B are both bad. I don’t really have a C. It’s going to get grim.”