The world awakened Saturday to news that U.S. military forces bombed Venezuelan sites and, through a special operations mission with murky details, seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. Both now face U.S. judicial system charges for narcotics trafficking and weapons possession. The greatest surprise emerged during President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago press conference afterward, where amid expected braggadocio came his unexpected declaration that the United States would maintain Venezuelan control until transition completion.
This assertion appeared peculiar. According to Venezuelan accounts, security forces loyal to Maduro remain on Caracas streets and elsewhere, with no reported opposition uprising signs. U.S. troops don’t occupy the vast nation of approximately 30 million people. Since the failed 2019 effort to install former National Assembly President Juan Guaidó as interim democratic president, Trump has made Maduro’s removal a personal project. However, this time—at least for now—democracy restoration wasn’t the focus.
Military Operation Justification
The Trump administration justifies Maduro and his wife’s seizure as targeted “law enforcement” operation, with strikes as necessary accompaniment. That special operation quickly departed with its booty, leaving no officially acknowledged U.S. boots on ground in the beleaguered Andean country. The targeted bombing inside Venezuela was conducted remotely, striking multiple sites including airstrips, military barracks, forts, and a port. U.S. military left no known physical presence. So how do Trump and the United States expect to control any future transition?
Snubbing Democratic Opposition
Here emerges the real Trumpist surprise. An alternative, legitimate Venezuelan government has been waiting in the wings, but Trump immediately snubbed it. By all impartial international accounts, the opposition won the 2024 presidential election, with candidate Edmundo González standing in for banned opposition leader María Corina Machado.
Rather than turn to the opposition movement, the U.S. president declared that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was negotiating with Maduro’s vice president—herself under U.S. sanctions—Delcy Rodríguez. Trump stated Rodríguez was “quite gracious” and ready to “make Venezuela great again,” although she “doesn’t have a choice.” Hours later, Rodríguez, flanked by the country’s defense minister and police chief, gave a televised address denying U.S. claims and defiantly supporting Maduro.
Trump’s implication suggested a more pragmatic, realpolitik regime-change transition with support from existing order elements. Yet this isn’t what most Venezuelan citizens want, whether inside the country or among the almost 8 million Venezuelans who fled during the past decade. Voters rejected Maduro and his acolytes in July 2024, with close to 70 percent of votes going to González, and indirectly Machado. This represented clear expression of change and democracy desire, backed by the Nobel committee when it awarded Machado the Nobel Peace Prize late last year.
Trump’s Dismissal of Machado
All the more shocking was Trump’s Mar-a-Lago dismissal of Machado’s popular legitimacy. In the same briefing, the U.S. president claimed: “I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.” Perhaps not coincidentally, Trump had lobbied hard for himself to win the award. Trump’s January 3 fireworks look less like democracy and human rights defense than pragmatic, limited effort to remove a hemispheric irritant that had openly and frustratingly defied democratic norms and courted rogue governments in Cuba, Iran, and Russia.
Removing a vile, brutal, and corrupt president without clear transition plan, while relying on his former regime to deliver it, doesn’t support democracy. It prescribes chaos.
Incoherent Planning
The U.S. plan has been incoherent from the start. When the United States’ naval buildup started in August, the supposed public objective was stemming drug flows from Venezuela to the United States. Facts told another story: Venezuela is a transshipment point, not major cocaine supplier for U.S. users, and produces no fentanyl, despite repeated Trump administration claims and efforts to label the Maduro government as narco-terrorist regime. Despite previously trying to link Maduro to America’s fentanyl crisis, the eventual indictment mentioned only cocaine.
In the long lead-up to January 3 events, the Trump administration hoped that dedicating significant U.S. naval assets, combined with Trump’s chest-thumping speeches, would convince Venezuelan military to turn against Maduro. The optimistic scenario of regime change on the cheap failed; but once started, escalation momentum was difficult to roll back. When the Trump administration’s buildup and threats failed producing desired change, bombing the country from safe distance and seizing Maduro himself—possibly with inside help—was next.
Decapitation Without Direction
The problem is that the effort has succeeded only in decapitating Maduro government and instilling fear among Venezuelans of future instability. Elements within the former Maduro government, including Rodríguez herself, are already jockeying for political power following the former president’s disappearance. Trump may hope that threat of more danger from above can coerce Venezuelan regime into acting as Washington wants. Can the apparent dismissal of Machado’s democratic legitimacy and embrace of Madurista interim government bring democracy to Venezuela’s long-suffering citizens? It’s unlikely, even if Rodríguez and others are really taking different stance in conversations with Rubio to their defiant public tone.
In 2016, Trump swore off “forever wars” and wasting U.S. blood and treasure on regime change. There is no appetite in Washington for either boots on ground or sustained commitment to state-building efforts that would be necessary to put Venezuela on firm path toward democratic transition.
Trump’s clumsy claims that Maduro government stole U.S. oil investments and that U.S. firms will be put in charge of Venezuela’s oil only cloud the U.S. mission further. (They’re also untrue: Nationalization and expropriation of U.S. firms’ assets largely occurred in the 1970s, long before Maduro or his predecessor’s government.)
Uncertain Future
Ultimately, U.S. military may produce more democratic compromise. But such outcome won’t result from any commitment to human rights or democracy from Trump and his team. Instead, that will depend on Venezuelan people, who in 2024 courageously delivered unified opposition an internationally recognized victory. Despite all the rhetoric of Venezuela becoming effectively temporary U.S. protectorate, Trump has few levers to make that reality on ground, short of full-blown invasion or dramatic internal coup in Caracas. Venezuela’s future will depend on Venezuelans’ commitment to democracy and human rights, and whether Trump administration is willing to help defend them.
For now, though, Trump seems more focused on quick wins, bluster, and hope of government willing to meet his transactional demands than on democracy. Venezuelan citizens are caught, again, between chaos of socialist dictatorship and dangerous inconsistency of U.S. foreign policy.
Original analysis by Christopher Sabatini, senior research fellow for Latin America at Chatham House. Republished with additional research and verification by ThinkTanksMonitor.
