How Did Jack Ryan “Predict” The US-Venezuela Intervention?

• A clip from Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan season 2 has gone viral following the US military’s politically polarising capture and extraction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
• The scene, which originally streamed six years ago, features the titular CIA analyst (John Krasinski) detailing why Venezuela should be deemed a “major threat on the world stage.”
• “Our job was to make the situation feel credible,” said series co-creator and early showrunner Carlton Cuse.

In the midst of all the discourse surrounding the US invasion of Venezuela, and the extrajudicial abduction of sitting president Nicolás Maduro alongside first lady Cilia Flores, seemingly prescient footage from Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan season 2 has gained renewed relevance.

The scene in question, which initially hit streaming queues all the way back in 2019, features John Krasinski as the eponymous US Marine turned CIA operative, positing why the resource-rich Venezuela is a “major threat on the world stage” on par with the usual triad of Russia, China, and North Korea.

“Which one of these places can claim to have the largest oil deposit on the planet? More than Saudi? More than Iran? What about things like gold? More than all the mines in Africa combined. Venezuela is arguably the single greatest resource of oil and minerals on the planet,” begins Krasinski’s Jack Ryan.

As we speak, President Donald Trump is priming the South American country’s nationalised oil assets for the likes of Chevron, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips to pump out the billions of dollars they’re reportedly owed.

Ryan then references the failings of Maduro’s fictional (though no less corrupt) counterpart, dictator Nicolás Reyes, who canonically “crippled the national economy by half” and “raised the poverty rate by almost 400%”:

“On the news, they’ll call it a crisis, but on the world stage, they’ll call it a failed state. Other examples of a failed state in recent history are Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. And if that’s not bad enough news for you, Venezuela is also the only one of these places within 30-minute range from the US for next-gen nuclear missiles.”

Spooky, albeit exaggerated for entertainment purposes, no?

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But similar to the insanely over-educated crew behind The Simpsons – which has often been accused of perpetrating “predictive programming” – there isn’t any grand deep-state-elite conspiracy at play. This simply comes down to actually knowing a thing or two about the world we inhabit and factoring in the longstanding reality at hand.

“What always surprises you as a storyteller is how often real-world events catch up to fiction,” Carlton Cuse, who co-created Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan with Graham Roland, told Deadline.

“The goal of that season wasn’t prophecy – it was plausibility. When you ground a story in real geopolitical dynamics, reality has a way of making it rhyme… The season came from our desire to tell a fictional story about the forces at play, not from imagining an outcome.”

Cuse, who also served as showrunner for the first two seasons, continued: “Graham Roland and I weren’t making a statement, we were telling a fictional character-driven thriller rooted in Venezuela’s long-standing strategic relevance. Our job was to make the situation feel credible.”

“We approached Venezuela as a country where democratic ideals, economic reality, and geopolitical interests have been in tension for a long time (and where choices are never simple).”

Where do we go from here? In fiction, Nicolás Reyes is ousted after his political prison camp is exposed, thereby losing him the 2018 presidential election on a riotous occasion; while in the real world, Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores await trial in New York City for 2020 narco-terrorism charges, and Delcy Rodríguez has since stepped up as the interim Venezuelan head of state.

Check the Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan Venezuela clip out for yourself above.

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