The world woke up Saturday morning to the news that the U.S. military, after months of buildup, had bombed sites across Venezuela and, in a special operations mission whose details are still murky, seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Both are now due to be delivered to the U.S. judicial system to face charges of narcotics trafficking and weapons possession.
The greatest surprise, though, may have come in U.S. President Donald Trump’s press conference afterward from his estate in Mar-a-Lago. Amid the expected braggadocio came Trump’s unexpected declaration that the United States would remain in control of Venezuela until there was a transition.
The world woke up Saturday morning to the news that the U.S. military, after months of buildup, had bombed sites across Venezuela and, in a special operations mission whose details are still murky, seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Both are now due to be delivered to the U.S. judicial system to face charges of narcotics trafficking and weapons possession.
The greatest surprise, though, may have come in U.S. President Donald Trump’s press conference afterward from his estate in Mar-a-Lago. Amid the expected braggadocio came Trump’s unexpected declaration that the United States would remain in control of Venezuela until there was a transition.
It was an odd assertion. According to accounts in Venezuela, security forces loyal to Maduro are still on the streets of the capital, Caracas, and elsewhere, and there is no reported sign of an uprising by the opposition. U.S. troops do not occupy the vast country of around 30 million people.
Since the failed effort in 2019 to install former National Assembly President Juan Guaidó as the interim democratic president of Venezuela, Trump has made removing Maduro a personal project. But this time, for now at least, it was not about restoring democracy.
The Trump administration is justifying the seizure of Maduro and his wife as a targeted “law enforcement” operation, and the strikes as necessary accompaniment. That special operation quickly left with its booty, and there are no officially acknowledged U.S. boots on the ground in the beleaguered Andean country.
The targeted bombing inside Venezuela was conducted from afar, striking multiple sites including airstrips, military barracks and forts, and a port. The U.S. military left no known physical presence in the country. So how do Trump and the United States expect to control any future transition?
Here comes the real Trumpist surprise. An alternative, and 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.
But rather than turn to the opposition movement, the U.S. president declared that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was negotiating with Maduro’s vice president—herself under U.S. sanctions—Delcy Rodríguez, and that Rodríguez was “quite gracious” and ready to “make Venezuela great again,” although she “doesn’t have a choice.” A few 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 was that this is a much more pragmatic, realpolitik regime-change transition, one with support from elements of the existing order. Yet this is not what most Venezuelan citizens want, whether inside the country or part of the almost 8 million Venezuelans who have fled the country in the past decade. Voters rejected Maduro and his acolytes in July 2024, with close to 70 percent of the vote going to González, and indirectly Machado. It was a clear expression of a desire for change and democracy, one backed by the Nobel committee when it awarded Machado the Nobel Peace Prize late last year.
All the more shocking, then, 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 Jan. 3 fireworks look less like a defense of democracy and human rights than a 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 a clear transition plan, and relying on his former regime to deliver if for you, is not supporting democracy. It is a prescription for chaos.
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 the flow of drugs from Venezuela to the United States. Facts, though, told another story: Venezuela is a transshipment point, not a major supplier of cocaine for U.S. users, and produces no fentanyl, despite the repeated claims of the Trump administration and its efforts to label the Maduro government as a 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 the events on Jan. 3, the Trump administration hoped that dedicating a significant amount of U.S. naval assets, combined with Trump’s chest-thumping speeches, would convince the Venezuelan military to turn against Maduro. The optimistic scenario of regime change on the cheap failed; but, once started, the momentum toward escalation was difficult to roll back. When the Trump administration’s buildup and threats failed to produce the desired change, bombing the country from a safe distance and seizing Maduro himself—possibly with help from the inside—was next.
The problem is that the effort has succeeded only in decapitating the 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 in the wake of the former president’s disappearance.
Trump may hope that the threat of more danger from above can coerce the Venezuelan regime into acting in ways Washington wants. Can the apparent dismissal of Machado’s democratic legitimacy and an embrace of a Madurista interim government bring democracy to Venezuela’s long-suffering citizens? It’s unlikely, even if Rodríguez and others are really taking a different stance, in conversations with Rubio, to their defiant public tone.
In 2016, Trump swore off “forever wars” and the wasting of U.S. blood and treasure on regime change. There is no appetite in Washington for either the boots on the ground or a sustained commitment to the state-building efforts that would be necessary to put Venezuela on a firm path toward a democratic transition.
Trump’s clumsy claims that the 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 the government of Maduro or his predecessor.)
Ultimately, the U.S. military may produce a more democratic compromise. But such an outcome will not be the result of any commitment to human rights or democracy from Trump and his team. Instead, that will depend on the Venezuelan people, who in 2024 courageously delivered a unified opposition an internationally recognized victory.
Despite all the rhetoric of Venezuela becoming effectively a temporary U.S. protectorate, Trump has few levers to make that a reality on the ground, short of a full-blown invasion or a dramatic internal coup in Caracas. Venezuela’s future will depend on Venezuelans’ commitment to democracy and human rights, and whether the Trump administration is willing to help defend them.
For now, though, Trump seems more focused on quick wins, bluster, and the hope of a government willing to meet his transactional demands than on democracy. Venezuelan citizens are caught, again, between the chaos of a socialist dictatorship and the dangerous inconsistency of U.S. foreign policy.
