The End of the Beginning in Venezuela |
The United States’ use of military force to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro marks a turning point for Venezuela and for U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere. But it would be a mistake to confuse drama with resolution. Images of Maduro in U.S. custody create the impression of finality. Yet this is not the beginning of the end of Washington’s long struggle with Venezuela. It marks the end of the beginning, and the start of a far more difficult and perilous phase.
The Trump administration is treating the removal of Maduro as a tactical success that speaks for itself, even as it deliberately assumes responsibility for what comes next. President Donald Trump has been explicit about that choice. By announcing that the United States will “run Venezuela” for a while, he is not merely projecting confidence. He is intentionally assuming responsibility for the political, economic, and security consequences that follow.
History offers a warning. In May 2003, President George W. Bush stood beneath a “Mission Accomplished” banner and declared victory in Iraq. What followed was not stabilization, but fragmentation—an insurgency, a legitimacy crisis, and years of costly entanglement. Venezuela now sits at a similar inflection point. Removing Maduro could open the door to a durable transition. It could just as easily draw the United States into a dangerous quagmire.
If Washington manages the next phase with discipline—combining coercion with incentives, and force with political legitimacy—it could reset Venezuela’s trajectory, pull the country back into the community of democracies in the hemisphere, and reassert U.S. influence in a region that has spent the past decade hedging against American power. If this happens, the payoff would be substantial.
Venezuela’s collapse over the past two decades has been the single largest driver of irregular migration, transnational crime, corruption, and illicit financial flows in the hemisphere, negatively affecting U.S. interests. Stabilization would address those problems at their source rather than at the U.S. border. It would also shut down a permissive environment that allowed the Maduro regime to commit systematic crimes against its own population—crimes that hollowed out Venezuelan society while exporting instability abroad. And it would deprive U.S. adversaries (including China, Iran, and Russia) of a strategic foothold.
But achieving such an outcome will take a degree of skillful policy and fortunate circumstance that are far from assured in any administration. The plausible paths of failure include a partial transition that leaves criminal networks intact, a prolonged period of political limbo that sustains migration and instability, or a creeping security commitment that the United States never intended but finds difficult to unwind. What happens next will determine whether this moment becomes a hinge in hemispheric history or another entry in the long catalogue of American overreach.
The operation that ended Maduro’s rule carries the unmistakable imprint of Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It reflects a worldview that prizes decisiveness, spectacle, and payoff—political and economic alike. For Trump, Venezuela is less a foreign policy problem to be managed than an asset to be exploited. The United States, he insists, will “run the country,” extract and sell Venezuelan oil, and convert geopolitical leverage into tangible return. This is mercantilism, unapologetically applied: statecraft blurred with profit, and opportunity created not just for U.S. firms but also for political allies and intermediaries close to power in........