Venezuela Is Regime Change Under Another Name |
In another era, the kidnapping rendition of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro might have consumed headlines for weeks. Amid the most frenetic news cycle in modern U.S. history and after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has quickly faded. That normalization is the point.
The Trump administration is working to frame the operation as a straightforward removal of a fugitive “narcoterrorist” and a transition of Venezuela from a pariah state into a cooperative partner. In this telling, there is no pretense of nation-building. The United States will control Venezuelan oil sales, deny rivals such as China access to strategic minerals, and pull Caracas into Washington’s orbit.
In another era, the kidnapping rendition of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro might have consumed headlines for weeks. Amid the most frenetic news cycle in modern U.S. history and after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has quickly faded. That normalization is the point.
The Trump administration is working to frame the operation as a straightforward removal of a fugitive “narcoterrorist” and a transition of Venezuela from a pariah state into a cooperative partner. In this telling, there is no pretense of nation-building. The United States will control Venezuelan oil sales, deny rivals such as China access to strategic minerals, and pull Caracas into Washington’s orbit.
The plan now floated would see Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, stabilize the country with U.S. backing and then call general elections. Aided by historical amnesia, this may appear different from previous regime change wars. But is foreign-directed regime transformation any less perilous than traditional regime change?
Scratch the surface, and the differences fade. Washington has again intervened militarily abroad in contravention of international law and without congressional authorization. Vice President J.D. Vance has dismissed the War Powers Act as a “fake and unconstitutional law.” With the regime’s leader removed, the United States will once more bet on a transitional strongman—or strongwoman—government, not unlike what it did in Iraq or Afghanistan, save for the novelty that the anointed figure emerges from the old order itself. The expectation is a familiar one in which power will obligingly dissolve, free and fair elections will follow, and a system grateful and compliant to Washington will emerge.
Of course, U.S.-Venezuela tensions did not begin with President Donald Trump. Since Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela in 1998, consecutive U.S. administrations have sought to undermine both his government and that of his successor, Maduro.
Yet by the time that Trump left office at the end of his first term in 2021, maximum pressure sanctions, diplomatic isolation, military putsches and multimillion-dollar bounties had failed to dislodge Maduro’s regime. In 2023, Trump complained, “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil.”
What does taking it over mean, exactly?
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a longtime proponent of maximum pressure who applauded Trump’s sanctions against Rodríguez in 2018, apparently........