In another era, the kidnapping rendition of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro might have consumed headlines for weeks. Amid the most frenetic news cycle in modern U.S. history and after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has quickly faded. That normalization is the point.
The Trump administration is working to frame the operation as a straightforward removal of a fugitive “narcoterrorist” and a transition of Venezuela from a pariah state into a cooperative partner. In this telling, there is no pretense of nation-building. The United States will control Venezuelan oil sales, deny rivals such as China access to strategic minerals, and pull Caracas into Washington’s orbit.
The plan now floated would see Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, stabilize the country with U.S. backing and then call general elections. Aided by historical amnesia, this may appear different from previous regime change wars. But is foreign-directed regime transformation any less perilous than traditional regime change?
Scratch the surface, and the differences fade. Washington has again intervened militarily abroad in contravention of international law and without congressional authorization. Vice President J.D. Vance has dismissed the War Powers Act as a “fake and unconstitutional law.” With the regime’s leader removed, the United States will once more bet on a transitional strongman—or strongwoman—government, not unlike what it did in Iraq or Afghanistan, save for the novelty that the anointed figure emerges from the old order itself. The expectation is a familiar one in which power will obligingly dissolve, free and fair elections will follow, and a system grateful and compliant to Washington will emerge.
Of course, U.S.-Venezuela tensions did not begin with President Donald Trump. Since Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela in 1998, consecutive U.S. administrations have sought to undermine both his government and that of his successor, Maduro.
Yet by the time that Trump left office at the end of his first term in 2021, maximum pressure sanctions, diplomatic isolation, military putsches and multimillion-dollar bounties had failed to dislodge Maduro’s regime. In 2023, Trump complained, “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil.”
What does taking it over mean, exactly?
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a longtime proponent of maximum pressure who applauded Trump’s sanctions against Rodríguez in 2018, apparently will not be getting the traditional regime change that he has long sought—at least, not for now. The Venezuelan opposition led by María Corina Machado, whose Nobel Peace Prize Rubio supported, appears to have been sidelined entirely, even as Rubio vows that a future transition is still on the table.
Trump seems to have been convinced by a CIA assessment that predicted that Machado would not be able to stabilize the country in a post-Maduro scenario, given her lack of control of the country’s security forces and day-to-day operations of the state apparatus.
Multiple reports suggest that South Florida’s Cuban and Venezuelan American communities, Rubio’s historic base of support, were blindsided by Trump’s embrace of Maduro’s socialist vice president, and they are now struggling to frame cooperation with the remaining Chavista leadership as a success that will somehow install Machado into power. Some have even insisted that Trump misspoke when he said that Machado did not have adequate respect in the country, even as reporting confirmed that the administration’s view of the opposition had soured in recent months
Moving forward, Rubio will struggle to manage pressure from South Florida’s Republican base and allied lawmakers who expected that a U.S.-led military operation in Venezuela, about which some have expressed skepticism, would at the very least usher in the country’s opposition. Despite his confident remarks in subsequent media appearances and briefings to Congress, at the Jan. 3 press conference at Mar-a-Lago shortly after the military operation, Rubio appeared visibly defeated, as the current outcome likely runs contrary to his vision for Venezuela policy.
With Maduro out of the picture, Rubio could also be breaking from his maximalist position, hoping that Rodríguez and other soft-liners in her orbit may be pressured or manipulated into facilitating a transition that could, at some future point, lead to new elections or install a more pliant government like the one represented by Machado. This, of course, would require them to act against their own interests, unless they were offered a sufficiently attractive deal in exchange for relinquishing power.
Reports of plans to reopen the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, and with it a greater diplomatic and intelligence presence in the country, could help further fracture, weaken, surveil, or recruit other elements in the interim administration who are supportive of a greater opening to the opposition, leading to what some have called a slow “decomposition” of the Chavista regime.
Rubio said that a transition, including amnesties, prison releases, and return from exile for opposition leaders, will be the third step in a broader transition plan to come after the country’s economic stabilization and recovery, including oil deals for Western firms presumably in conjunction with the state-run oil and gas company, PDVSA.
However, if Rodríguez can steward a modest economic recovery, improve relations with the United States, and prove to be more compromising than the historically uncompromising Machado-led opposition, then this plan could ironically cement Chavismo in power—especially if the Trump administration is distracted by domestic crises.
An equally plausible explanation is that Rubio’s true end goal is the demise of the Cuban government, and so even if he does not oversee a broader transition that results in Machado’s team taking power in Caracas, sufficient pressure on Rodríguez to cut all economic and security ties with Cuba might be enough for him.
After all, Trump said that if Rodríguez did not accede to U.S. demands, which reportedly include the expulsion of ties to Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba from the country, she could face something “probably worse” than what Maduro has faced. After Rodríguez released a number of political prisoners, a threatened second wave attack was reportedly called off by the Trump administration. It is increasingly difficult to distinguish bluster from reality.
There are serious questions as to whether cutting off all Venezuelan oil to Cuba will irreparably hurt the island’s economy. Oil imports to Havana have dropped precipitously in recent years, and Mexico has surpassed Venezuela as the island’s largest supplier. Rubio and his allies in Congress have put public and private pressure on Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to halt oil sales and donations to Cuba in anticipation of the upcoming negotiations of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement (USMCA).
They argue that Cuba’s international medical missions to Mexico, presumed to be a form of payment for the oil shipments, as they have long been in the island’s trade with Venezuela, constitute human trafficking and violate the labor provisions of USMCA. Yet Sheinbaum has rejected the claims and firmly stated that these shipments will continue following Trump’s Venezuela raid.
For now, a Qatar-facilitated deal—proposed by the Maduro government, supported by U.S. special envoy Richard Grenell, and reported by the Miami Herald in October—is by and large the one that seems to have prevailed, with the key concession being that Maduro himself had to go, as Trump had made clear for months.
That outcome leaves Rubio working with what the Herald reported were the “more palatable” Chavistas whom he has spent his career demonizing, even if his tremendous ideological flexibility allows him to justify this move as part of a longer-term plan to coerce Caracas or achieve the narrower objective of hitting longtime foe Cuba where it hurts.
Whatever trajectory ultimately emerges, Washington is once again deeply involved in reshaping a foreign country without a coherent plan. Supporters of the administration’s actions will frame this as realist interventionism: a decapitation raid rather than an occupation, intended as a low-cost effort to coerce the existing Venezuelan government into aligning with U.S. interests and perhaps even relinquishing power.
As veteran neoconservative foreign-policy advisor who served in different roles in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, and most recently as the U.S. special representative for Venezuela (and later also for Iran) in the first Trump administration, Elliott Abrams recently argued in an interview with the New York Times that Venezuela is different. It is relatively homogeneous, has a history of democracy, and therefore poses fewer risks than Iraq.
Yet however different Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Venezuela are, what has remained constant is the confidence with which serving and former U.S. officials, editorial boards, and policy wonks assume that they can manage political outcomes in distant lands. In the early phases of both Iraq and Afghanistan, elite consensus similarly held that victory was swift and things were going well. The more revealing question, however, may not be whether this intervention will fail, but what success could portend.
By the narrow metrics that justified the 2003 invasion, Washington succeeded in Iraq. The Baathist regime was removed; a democratic system, however flawed, was established; and Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capacity was eliminated, even if it was never found. From that “success” emerged the Islamic State, a web of Iran-aligned militias, and a state unable to transform vast resources into stability or true sovereignty. The second- and third-order consequences only became obvious years later.
Venezuela may follow a similar pattern. Even if Washington achieves its near-term objectives, other powers may attempt to replicate this model in ways that the U.S. finds unacceptable, accelerating an unstable and escalatory shift in international norms. If things go poorly, then the United States could once again find itself drawn deeper into a deteriorating foreign political landscape that it does not fully grasp.
The parallels are striking enough that The Daily Show was able to assemble a near word-for-word montage of official statements on Iraq and Venezuela. Then, as now, much of the opposition focused on international law and imperial overreach, while proponents celebrated a masterful operation, with neither grappling with how intervention can succeed on paper while failing in reality.