As the United States built up a naval armada off the coast of Venezuela last year, the worry on many minds was that military intervention would destabilize the country and draw the U.S. into a quagmire. But now that the military has struck — raiding Caracas and seizing ruler Nicolás Maduro — the main concern seems to come from the other direction: that the U.S. is legitimizing Maduro’s cronies rather than demanding a more decent government. “What we need in Venezuela is a peaceful transition to democracy,” said British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens was incredulous that the U.S. would leave “what’s left of Maduro’s odious regime in place.”
Yet the Maduro raid was never billed as a democracy-promotion operation, and for good reason. Regenerating constitutional democracy in Venezuela would probably require far more intensive U.S. military involvement than the Jan. 3 in-and-out Delta Force attack. After all, Maduro’s autocratic regime controlled Venezuela’s security forces — that’s how he was able to steal the country’s 2024 election — and there’s no indication that this has changed.
The two rationales the Trump administration has most clearly communicated for the raid are, first, the instability brought by the country’s drug trade and the violent gangs it supports, and second, Venezuela’s coziness with countries and organizations hostile to the U.S. (such as Cuba, Russia, China and Hezbollah).
Successive administrations have tried to change Venezuela’s behavior, including its human-rights violations, through sanctions and other diplomatic tools. President Donald Trump’s administration has now introduced limited military operations to the equation by blockading Venezuela’s oil and seizing Maduro.
It seems prudent to wait and see whether and how much this new leverage can change the regime’s behavior on issues that matter to the U.S. before trying to push it out altogether, with even more military force. Interim president Delcy Rodríguez, a Maduro henchwoman sanctioned by the U.S., doesn’t have to be a democrat to recognize that it might be in her interests to take Trump’s demands more seriously than did her former boss.
Democratic transitions take time. After the George W. Bush administration — the most fervent about democracy-promotion in recent U.S. history — helped push strongman Charles Taylor out of power in Liberia, elections weren’t held for more than two years. Venezuela has a robust tradition of democratic politics from before Hugo Chávez’s takeover in the 1990s, so a transition could conceivably be faster. But it would still require negotiation with the armed groups loyal to the current regime. At the moment, an active democratic opposition in Venezuela would probably need U.S. military protection to survive.
One argument for prioritizing regime change is that the Trump administration can’t achieve even its realpolitik objectives — on gangs, foreign powers and the oil trade — through the current crop of Venezuelan leaders. That might prove to be the case, but it at least seems too early to say. Maduro had been at the helm for 12 years, so it’s unclear how the autocratic regime will behave in his absence and with a new level of threat hanging over its head.
Foreign policy, as journalist Walter Lippmann wrote in 1943 and the Trump administration echoed in its national security strategy last year, is about aligning ends and means — or, put more colloquially, only biting off as much as you can chew. Changing the structure of Venezuela’s government is a heavy lift, and it’s not necessarily a precondition for making progress on other issues of importance to the U.S. If it were, why did the Biden administration and first Trump administration bother negotiating with Maduro in the first place?
The U.S. can still lean on the regime for democratic reforms. That’s already taking place to some degree, judging by its release of some political prisoners in recent days. Interestingly, the narrow legal justification the U.S. used for the Caracas strike has a democratic logic baked in. To circumvent the prohibition on aggressive war, the administration had to claim the attack was a “law enforcement” raid to arrest Maduro at the Justice Department’s request. And in order to circumvent “sovereign immunity” — the restriction on prosecuting foreign heads of state — the administration will have to insist that Maduro is not Venezuela’s legitimate leader. By that logic, of course, the rest of his government is illegitimate as well.
But legal concepts are easier to manipulate than Venezuela’s political institutions, and Trump is right to be wary of lunging for regime change. Instead he has simply flipped the tables in the negotiations with a thuggish regime. Trump is more impulsive than the foreign-policy establishment would prefer. But insofar as that establishment would prefer a more extensive military deployment to safeguard democracy in Venezuela, Trump’s approach seems sober and judicious.
The post Trump wisely takes a go-slow approach to Venezuelan democracy appeared first on Washington Post.
