Hours before the United States invaded Panama in 1989, opposition leader Guillermo Endara was sworn in as the Central American country’s president at Fort Clayton. Washington had roughly 30,000 troops on the ground and could dictate the outcome. This January, the Venezuelan opposition hoped history would repeat itself. Instead, they now find themselves navigating a far more ambiguous U.S. strategy and praying that the White House hasn’t sold them out entirely.

After years of organizing against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—often from exile or underground—the opposition, led by María Corina Machado, expected that his removal in January would finally open a direct path to power, especially after Machado wooed U.S. conservatives and offered her Nobel Peace Prize to U.S. President Donald Trump.

Hours before the United States invaded Panama in 1989, opposition leader Guillermo Endara was sworn in as the Central American country’s president at Fort Clayton. Washington had roughly 30,000 troops on the ground and could dictate the outcome. This January, the Venezuelan opposition hoped history would repeat itself. Instead, they now find themselves navigating a far more ambiguous U.S. strategy and praying that the White House hasn’t sold them out entirely.

After years of organizing against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—often from exile or underground—the opposition, led by María Corina Machado, expected that his removal in January would finally open a direct path to power, especially after Machado wooed U.S. conservatives and offered her Nobel Peace Prize to U.S. President Donald Trump.

Instead, the Trump administration moved quickly to engage regime structures that the opposition had spent years trying to dismantle, working through Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s longtime deputy and a member of a powerful Venezuelan political family, and leaving the opposition sidelined at the very moment that it believed history had turned in its favor. Rodríguez, rumor has it, aided the United States in Maduro’s capture to preserve her position.

The opposition, however, hopes that Rodríguez’s rule won’t last long and that the regime will slowly dissolve under further U.S. pressure, but it fears that Trump may be happy to leave the Venezuelan government in place if it plays along. An initial round of White House-backed talks between the government and a faction of the opposition has now produced its first tangible concession: an agreement to replace Venezuela’s entire Supreme Court, long packed with chavista loyalists. Both sides also agreed to establish working groups on democratic institutions and earthquake reconstruction, and they are expected to meet again in September. But Machado remains outside the negotiations.

“The United States prefers, as the first step, to trust Delcy Rodríguez but with a gun to her head,” argued Freddy Guevara, an opposition leader and a former political prisoner. “If she complies, this........

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