The U.S. mission to seize Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro has pushed the concept of regime change back into everyday conversation. “Regime Change in America’s Back Yard,” declared The New Yorker in a piece that typified the response to the Jan. 3 operation that saw Maduro exchange a compound in Caracas for a jail in Brooklyn.

Commentators and politicians have been using the term as shorthand for removing Maduro and ending Venezuela’s crisis, as if the two were essentially the same thing. But they are not.

In fact, to an international relations specialist like me, the use of “regime change” to explain what just went down in Venezuela muddies the term rather than clarifies it. I’ll explain.

Regime change, as it has been practiced and discussed in international politics, refers to something far more ambitious and far more consequential than plucking out a single leader. It is an attempt by an outside power to transform how another country is governed, not just change who governs it.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that regime change in Venezuela isn’t still in the cards. Only that Maduro being replaced by his deputy, former Vice........

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