Despite early appearances, the Trump administration’s abduction of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela doesn’t seem to be a regime change operation. After all, America is leaving the regime, now headed by Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, in power. As of Monday, all of Venezuela’s ruling officials aside from Maduro appear to have remained in their posts, including Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who controls the police and was known as one of Maduro’s most fearsome enforcers.
“That’s very odd, historically, to see something like this,” said Javier Corrales, a professor at Amherst and the author of “Autocracy Rising: How Venezuela Transitioned to Authoritarianism.” “To see that you get rid of the leader, but the regime stays in place.”
But for Donald Trump, the preservation of something close to the status quo makes sense, given that his goal is extortion, not political transformation. Rather than the moralistic imperialism of George W. Bush, Trump’s foreign policy is imperialistic gangsterism. As one administration official put it to me, there’s “something refreshing about Trump just saying, ‘Yeah, we are taking the oil.’”
Before this weekend, some neoconservatives and Venezuelan exiles hoped that if Trump followed through on his threats to the country, he’d make common cause with Venezuela’s opposition, headed by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado. She is, after all, a conservative who has lavished Trump with praise, even dedicating her Nobel to him, and her democratic legitimacy is hard to dispute. After she was banned from running in the 2024 election, her surrogate, Edmundo González, likely won more than two-thirds of the vote, though Maduro’s government refused to recognize his victory.
But attempting to install Machado in Venezuela would be a genuine regime change operation, with all the American sacrifice that implies. It’s far easier for Trump to leave the current junta in place, minus its leader, with the threat of future violence if the administration’s demands on oil and immigration aren’t met.
At his news conference on Saturday, Trump threw Machado under the bus, describing her as a “nice woman,” but one who doesn’t have the “respect within the country” to lead. It “was a massive bucket of cold water for the opposition leadership,” said Phil Gunson, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group based in Caracas.
At the same news conference, Trump claimed that, with Maduro gone, “we are going to run the country.” But so far, there’s no evident plan to do that, and on Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said there were no American forces on the ground. Instead, it appears that the administration will let Rodríguez remain in office provided she does Trump’s bidding. “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” Trump told The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer.
John Feeley, a career diplomat and former ambassador to Panama who resigned in protest during Trump’s first term, said that to understand what’s unfolding in Venezuela, look to the mob, not traditional foreign policy doctrines. “When Donald Trump says, ‘We’re going to run the place,’ I want you to think of the Gambino family taking over the Colombo family’s business out in Queens,” he said. “They don’t actually go out and run it. They just get an envelope.”
Trump wants a few things in that envelope, chiefly access to Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest in the world; less migration from Venezuela; and the country’s acceptance of more deportees from America. At least in the short term, he may well get them.
Initially, Rodríguez sounded defiant, saying in a televised statement, “Never again will we be slaves, never again will we be a colony of any empire.” But the experts I spoke to assume her words were for domestic consumption, describing her as not just an ideologue but also a canny pragmatist. By Sunday night, her public posture had grown more conciliatory. “We extend an invitation to the U.S. government to work together on a cooperative agenda, oriented toward shared development,” she wrote on social media.
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Rodríguez has rivals in post-Maduro Venezuela, namely Padrino López and Cabello. But for now, said Gunson, “their own survival instinct tells them that the best thing to do is to hang together.” Obviously, no one knows what’s coming, but Gunson is more worried about increased repression than imminent implosion.
“This is going to be essentially a military government with a civilian facade,” he said. Power will lie with “the people who wield the guns and who hold the keys to the jail cells of all the political prisoners.” As Reuters reported, the government has already ordered “the national search and capture of everyone involved in the promotion or support for the armed attack by the United States.”
Many Venezuelans were understandably elated by the removal of Maduro. But Corrales believes that, with the administration’s dismissal of Machado, they’re likely to be disappointed by what comes next. “The general condition of Venezuelans will continue to be tyranny,” he said.
That might suit the Trump administration fine, so long as Venezuela’s leaders pay it tribute. In that case, the danger to the rest of us isn’t a military quagmire, at least in the short term, but an emboldened president who has learned that audacious thuggery works. American foreign policy will shed its last vestiges of restraint and become fully and nakedly predatory.
Already, Trump’s designs on Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory, have assumed a new gravity. On Sunday Denmark’s prime minister, noting that her country is a member of NATO, implored Trump to “stop the threats against a historically close ally and against another country and another people.” It’s easy to understand why she’s appealing to the old rules of sovereignty, self-determination and binding treaties, since small countries are having a hard time adjusting to their increasing irrelevance. But laws and norms don’t matter unless there’s someone willing to enforce them.
Trump has often said that America is done being the world’s policeman. Mission accomplished: It’s now a mafia instead.
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