Nicolás Maduro and his wife awoke yesterday in a safe house on a heavily fortified military base in the center of Caracas. Courtesy of a brilliant, audacious U.S. military operation, the two ended their day in a New York City jail cell. The 1989 operation to apprehend the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega required 27,000 American troops and took weeks to carry out. Removing the Venezuelan president from power, and from the country, took just two hours and 20 minutes.
President Donald Trump characteristically described the operation as “big stuff,” and for once he was right. Maduro’s fall can and should serve American interests and transform Venezuela for the better. Maduro was corrupt and repressive. He was implicated in drug and human trafficking, and he stole his nation’s 2024 election. He was also an incompetent manager who ran an oil-rich economy into the ground. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country. The world should be better off after his departure.
Whether the world will be better off, however, depends on what happens next. Trump says that the United States will henceforth “run” Venezuela, with the details to be filled in later. One lesson of other regime-change operations is not to topple a government without a plan for what comes next. Yet what comes next in Venezuela seems as vague as the plan for running postwar Gaza under a Board of Peace.
The administration may well default to working with a compliant President Delcy Rodríguez and most of the existing government. Rodriguez, who was Maduro’s vice president, would, however, need to cooperate with Washington. In her first public remarks after Maduro’s capture, she demanded his release and denounced the United States. Even if that amounts to rhetorical fodder for the chavista base, governing Venezuela through existing structures will be no easy task. Without broader changes in personnel and policy, exchanging the country’s president for its vice president would hardly amount to regime change.
For the opposition, this initially seemed like the long-awaited hour of liberation. With the tyrant gone, leaders including the Nobel Prize winner María Corina Machado called for the recognition of Edmuno González Urrutia, the winner of the 2024 election, as president. Trump seems unimpressed by both their courage and their domestic support. He dismissed Machado as lacking respect within the country and did not mention Urrutia by name in remarks he gave yesterday.
Nor did he mention democracy. The omission causes an immediate problem for the political legitimacy of the Venezuelan government, at least until a new election or a transition to real democracy takes place. Many would-be supporters of the U.S. operation hoped for freedom, not just a different approach on drugs and oil. Trump’s priorities include the return of migrants, the cessation of drug flows, and a share of oil revenues. The restoration of democracy in Venezuela is not obviously among them.
Countries in the Western Hemisphere had mixed reactions to yesterday’s drama. Most wanted Maduro gone, not least because they desire the Venezuelan refugees in their countries to return home. But in forcibly toppling an unfriendly leader, the United States changed the rules. Other leaders in Latin America now enter a new, nervous era. The president of Colombia should “watch his ass,” Trump said yesterday, and observed that “something’s going to have to be done with Mexico.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio added that he’d now be concerned if he were in the Cuban government. The Pentagon has reportedly drawn up military plans for securing access to the Panama Canal. Even if the administration has no further military designs on the Western Hemisphere, a virtual sword of Damocles hangs over the head of truculent governments.
None can expect much help from elsewhere. Russia, Iran, and Cuba were unwilling or unable to save their friend in Caracas, just as Moscow, Pyongyang, and Beijing stood by when Israel and the U.S. attacked Iran last year. Autocratic friendship has its limits. So do expressions of concern and declarations of illegality by democratic countries. Most European governments spent yesterday pledging to actively monitor the situation.
Yet the greatest consequences will fall on Venezuela and the United States. For 25 years, every U.S. president has opposed nation building abroad and then gotten involved in it. Trump, with his commitment to run Venezuela, appears to be the latest to do so. Nation building, we know from experience, is a long-term endeavor, and one with a mixed record at best. Yesterday’s operation was big stuff indeed. Yet the welcome fall of Maduro is not the end. It is not the beginning of the end. It is only the end of the beginning.
