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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<\/a> President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Both are now due to be delivered<\/a> to the U.S. judicial system to face charges<\/a> of narcotics trafficking and weapons possession.<\/p>\n The greatest surprise, though, may have come in U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s press conference afterward from his estate in Mar-a-Lago. Amid the expected braggadocio came Trump\u2019s unexpected declaration that the United States would remain in control of Venezuela until there was a transition.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n 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<\/a> President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Both are now due to be delivered<\/a> to the U.S. judicial system to face charges<\/a> of narcotics trafficking and weapons possession.<\/p>\n The greatest surprise, though, may have come in U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s press conference afterward from his estate in Mar-a-Lago. Amid the expected braggadocio came Trump\u2019s unexpected declaration that the United States would remain in control of Venezuela until there was a transition.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Since the failed effort in 2019 to install former National Assembly President Juan Guaid\u00f3 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.<\/p>\n The Trump administration is justifying the seizure<\/a> of Maduro and his wife as a targeted \u201claw enforcement\u201d 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.<\/p>\n The targeted bombing inside Venezuela was conducted<\/a> 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?<\/p>\n 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<\/a> the 2024 presidential election, with candidate Edmundo Gonz\u00e1lez standing in for banned opposition leader Mar\u00eda Corina Machado.<\/p>\n But rather than turn to the opposition movement, the U.S. president declared that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was negotiating<\/a> with Maduro\u2019s vice president\u2014herself under U.S. sanctions\u2014Delcy Rodr\u00edguez, and that Rodr\u00edguez was \u201cquite gracious\u201d and ready to \u201cmake Venezuela great again,\u201d although she \u201cdoesn\u2019t have a choice.\u201d A few hours later, Rodr\u00edguez, flanked by the country\u2019s defense minister and police chief, gave a televised address denying U.S. claims and defiantly<\/a> supporting Maduro.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s 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 Gonz\u00e1lez, 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.<\/p>\n All the more shocking, then, was Trump\u2019s Mar-a-Lago dismissal of Machado\u2019s popular legitimacy. In the same briefing, the U.S. president claimed: \u201cI think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn\u2019t have the support within or the respect within the country.\u201d Perhaps not coincidentally, Trump had lobbied hard for himself to win the award.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The U.S. plan has been incoherent from the start. When the United States\u2019 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<\/a>: 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\u2019s fentanyl crisis, the eventual indictment mentioned only cocaine.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> with Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s buildup and threats failed to produce the desired change, bombing the country from a safe distance and seizing Maduro himself\u2014possibly with help from the inside\u2014was next.<\/p>\n 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 Rodr\u00edguez herself, are already jockeying for political power in the wake of the former president\u2019s disappearance.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s democratic legitimacy and an embrace of a Madurista interim government bring democracy to Venezuela\u2019s long-suffering citizens? It\u2019s unlikely, even if Rodr\u00edguez and others are really taking a different stance, in conversations with Rubio, to their defiant public tone.<\/p>\n