Regime change without a plan? Trump’s Venezuela precedents

The United States has now extracted Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela and detained him in New York, with president Donald Trump claiming that the US will “run” the country.

While shocking, nothing about this calamity is new: it recalls four precedents that can help us see elements of the present that otherwise may be shrouded by propaganda or emotion.

For starters, there is the long history of US intervention in Latin America, based on an implicit, if self-proclaimed, right to choose the region’s leaders.

During the Cold War, installing a leader or government approved by US officials was typically dressed up as a pro-democracy crusade, with the logic being that America’s main motivation was to stop communism, which was anti-democratic.

This time around, there is no pretence that democracy is the goal.

Maduro and his allies stole Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election.

But instead of punishing him for that very real crime, the Trump administration prefers the essentially fictional charge of “narco-terrorism.”

No role for Venezuelan opposition?

And while Venezuela has a legitimately-elected president, Edmundo González, there is no sign that he, or the opposition more generally, figures into the US administration’s plans.

Consider that after Maduro’s capture, Trump dismissed the courageous opposition leader and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado as a “nice woman” who lacks support and respect in Venezuela.

Given this, it is worth revisiting the US-backed extraction last month of Machado, who had been living in hiding in Venezuela since the 2024 election. At the time, many thought that the Trump administration was helping her attend the Nobel ceremony in Oslo.

Now it looks much more like an effort to neutralise a popular politician and clear the way for a form of American imperialism directed against Venezuelans.

But this particular imperialist project is even more ill-conceived than most.

Trump appears to be offering Venezuela’s oil to American energy firms (similar to how past US administrations chose leaders in Latin America who supported US business interests), explaining the whole operation in terms of the money to be made.

But there is little profit in Venezuelan oil in the short run; tapping its potential would require huge long-term investments, which in turn depend on political stability.

Another obvious precedent is the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a turning point for US power.

The invasion was predicated on the idea that defeating an army, deposing a bad ruler, and dismantling compromised institutions would be enough to create the conditions for a better, more democratic government.

As a result, president George W. Bush’s administration barely planned for the country’s political future, and the American occupiers were reduced to cooperating with the people they claimed to have overthrown.

By the end of the US occupation of the country, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and around 4,500 Americans, had been killed, and US credibility was in tatters.

In the case of Venezuela, there is a similar belief that simply removing a dictator will bring about the desired outcome.

But the Venezuelan army has not been defeated, and Maduro’s government remains in power.

Insofar as the Trump administration has a plan, it is that Venezuelan vice-president Delcy Rodríguez can run the show for the Americans, even though she is no more legitimate when backed by US violence.

For her part, Rodríguez has denounced Maduro’s kidnapping as illegal and claimed that it had “Zionist overtones.”

The third precedent is more recent: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

It was striking to hear Trump describe the snatching of Maduro as an “extraordinary military operation,” because Russian president Vladimir Putin used eerily similar language in his speech announcing the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. 

Putin deliberately exploited and ridiculed international law, claiming that Russia’s aggression was justified by the UN charter. Russia has worked hard to create a world in which every country treats the UN charter as a joke, so the fact that the Trump administration made no effort to justify its actions in Venezuela in terms of international law is a victory for the Kremlin, even if it is displeased by this particular case.

It is worth noting that the US intervention, although clearly an act of war, seems to have been a long-term CIA plan that was implemented with support from the US military.

Trump’s portrayal of this intelligence operation as “an assault like people have not seen since World War II” is absurd. It also points to the last precedent: the wars that legitimised fascist regimes before their defeat in 1945.

Fascists in Germany, Italy, and Romania justified their dictatorships on the grounds that their political opponents were acting in the service of foreign enemies and international conspiracies.

Moreover, these regimes fought wars to bring the external and the internal enemy into alignment — it was much easier to oppress domestic dissidents when the population was at war.

Military magic and end of story?

By charging Maduro with drug-related felonies, rather than for more serious (and far easier to prove) crimes like extra-judicial killings and torture, the Trump administration is uniting the external and the internal enemy.

Because the drug trade involves foreign and domestic actors, Trump can spin a story about his political opponents being pawns in an international plot.

A Trumpian 'war on drugs' might be used to create a larger domestic security apparatus, much like the panic over migrants has led to a massive expansion of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

Trump wants the political gains of fighting a war without actually having to fight one. In his telling, the US military performed magic in Venezuela, and the story is over. 

But where Putin understands that fascism requires real combat, Trump seems unwilling or unable to go that far, not least because he is weak at home.

Americans can take action to prevent Trump’s “extraordinary military operation” — which is more about regime change in the US than in Venezuela — from accelerating their country’s slide toward authoritarianism, so long as they recognise the domestic political logic behind Trump’s foreign intervention.

This article was originally published by Project Syndicate on 5 January 2026.