Regime Change is Back on the Menu
2026 is off to a pretty intense start. Let's take stock.
Bearing in mind that it was less than 24 hours ago that I was unsure whether I could get back to work tomorrow, I am getting back to work today instead. I mention this up front by way of apology if anything below comes out as muddled or incoherent. I am still not playing with a full deck, as it were. This is a paid subscriber post but I will be discussing today’s events in Venezuela above the paywall and moving on to a couple of other recent areas of interest after it so if you’re just here for the Venezuela news don’t let the lock discourage you.
As you’ve no doubt heard by now, the US military invaded Venezuela and abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife overnight. Other details are still trickling out. The operation began with at least seven US airstrikes on Caracas (population a bit over 3 million) as well as attacks on several targets outside of the capital (primarily military and airport facilities). According to Reuters, US special forces including the Army’s Delta Force entered Maduro’s presidential compound in the city at around 1 AM local time Saturday morning. They were apparently aided by a CIA team that’s been tracking Maduro from inside Venezuela since August and included “an asset close to Maduro who would monitor his movements and was poised to pinpoint his exact location as the operation unfolded.”
Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, appear to have surrendered without much or any resistance once US forces breached the compound. They were removed to the USS Iwo Jima in the Caribbean. US forces did have to fight their way into and out of Caracas and there were casualties, though I have not yet seen any attempt at a full accounting. A “senior Venezuelan official” has told The New York Times that the US attack killed “at least 40 people” (civilian and military) and that’s the only sort-of figure I can find.
It’s hard to know where to begin. I tend to agree with The Conversation’s Alan McPherson in characterizing this operation as “unprecedented.” He cites the US invasion of Panama in 1989 to remove Manuel Noriega as a partial analogue and it’s true that there are similarities—months or years of mounting tension with the US and a disputed election months before the operation stand out—but there were precipitating events ahead of the Panama invasion like the killing of US Marine Robert Paz in Panama City and that was a full-bore military operation. This was a snatch and grab, and it apparently went so smoothly that I’m more than a little concerned that Donald Trump is going to become enamored with the tactic and start nabbing other regional leaders who displease him.
Another difference, as McPherson notes, is that the US has historically been much more inclined toward direct intervention in tiny Central American countries than in larger South American ones, where it’s usually employed more oblique methods of interfering in domestic affairs. I don’t know if that augurs anything, but given Trump’s apparent interest in using the Monroe Doctrine as a license for unchecked US domination of the Americas I think it’s worth noting.
Perhaps the simplest part of the “what happens now” discussion involves Maduro himself, who has now been brought to the US to stand trial. He’s been indicted in US federal court on narcotics conspiracy and weapons possession charges. Let’s leave aside the absurdity of a US court indicting a foreign head of state for owning guns and focus instead on the absurdity of using a domestic indictment of any kind as a justification for what the US did to Maduro. The US government has never really obeyed international law, but it has in the past at least paid lip service to the concept in hopes that other states might obey it. This was so flagrantly illegal that even lip service won’t work anymore. It marks a very naked assertion that US might makes right, at least as far as the Western Hemisphere is concerned.
As Just Security’s Ryan Goodman writes, kidnapping Maduro violated both international law and US law, inasmuch as it is a clear breach of Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter prohibiting “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” As an active party to that treaty the US is obliged to honor it. The administration is relying on a 1989 memo written by Bob Barr (who served as attorney-general in the Trump I administration) ahead of the Noriega operation that argued that the UN charter isn’t legally binding, a claim that Goodman notes is bullshit. None of this will matter in any practical sense, of course, but it may be helpful to bear in mind as many of the supposed stewards of international law and/or the “rules-based” international order race to the nearest TV camera to praise what Trump has done.
(To its credit, even The New York Times editorial board, which is hardly a bastion of anti-interventionism, has commented on the illegality of this operation.)
Much less clear is what happens to Venezuela now. Trump seemingly ruled out installing “Nobel laureate” María Corina Machado as president, telling reporters on Saturday morning that “she doesn't have the support within or the respect within the country” to take power. So that takes the most obvious next step off the board. The US could hand things over to Edmundo González, who may have won last year’s heavily disputed presidential election anyway, but he only ran because Machado was barred from the ballot and if she doesn’t meet Trump’s criteria it’s unclear why her stand-in would. That said, González didn’t win the Nobel that Trump wanted so maybe he’ll be more acceptable for that reason.
Then there’s Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president and legally first in the line of succession. The Venezuelan Supreme Court named her “acting president” later in the day on Saturday so she is at least nominally in charge for the time being. Trump suggested on Saturday that Rodríguez was cooperating with US authorities, but whether that’s out of duress or because she’s decided to seize the opportunity for advancement remains to be seen. Publicly she’s denounced the abduction and called for Maduro’s release, but there’s no indication that she’s mobilizing any sort of meaningful response. There’s no indication that anybody else in Maduro’s circle, including senior military officers and civilian security officials, has been targeted by the US so in that sense his administration is still largely in place.
Whoever winds up running Venezuela, it’s clear that they’ll be reporting to Trump for the foreseeable future. Trump told Fox News on Saturday that “we can’t take a chance on letting somebody else run it”—“it” being, of course, Venezuela. It’s also clear why Trump wants to run Venezuela, and that’s because he wants to loot it. The Trump administration has gone to great lengths to manufacture a justification for removing Maduro over “narco-terrorism,” hence the War on Speedboats in which the US military has murdered at least 115 people in roughly four months according to the latest count. There had long been an expectation that those strikes would eventually expand to airstrikes on Venezuela—which according to the NYT they did, late last month, via a CIA drone strike on a Venezuelan port facility. But Trump himself has publicly and repeatedly evinced an interest in opening Venezuela’s oil reserves up to US exploitation. His multiple acts of piracy targeting Venezuelan tankers made the point even more clearly. And in his Fox interview on Saturday he insisted that the US will “be very strongly involved” in Venezuela’s oil industry moving forward.
If Venezuela is open for business it’s no wonder that so many business types suddenly appear to have dollar signs in their eyes. Chevron in particular stands to reap a fast windfall from the opening of Venezuela’s oil industry because, unlike other major US oil firms, it already has a presence in the country. And The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that several “officials from top hedge funds and asset managers” in the US are already planning a trip to Venezuela to assess their options for picking the country clean. Hundreds of billions of dollars are potentially on the table and one assumes that Friends of the Trump family will get a substantial cut.
It’s unclear whether any of this will help the Venezuelan people, mind you. Without romanticizing Maduro or pretending that he was universally beloved, nobody involved in this story in any meaningful way has evinced the slightest concern for the fate of ordinary Venezuelans in this brave new world. The decision to leave Maduro’s administration essentially intact is a pretty clear admission that none of this was about issues of political legitimacy or human rights so we can join the Trump administration in dismissing those out of hand.
The Guardian published a piece last month about the results of a series of wargames the US government conducted six years ago about what might happen in the event of Maduro’s departure. In every one the result was fragmentation, chaos, and violence, and the lesson Trump II seems to have drawn from those Trump I simulations is to just go for it and not worry about the consequences. I mean it’s not like Trump or Marco Rubio are going to be affected by them, right? If Trump now moves to lift US sanctions on Venezuela that might provide benefit to the Venezuelan people, but a) he’s given no indication that he’s actually going to do that and b) even if he did there’s no guarantee that it would improve the lives of anyone in Venezuela (especially while the country is being stripped for parts).
The way Trump is talking about maintaining US overlordship in Venezuela leads inescapably to occupation, which should send a real thrill up the spines of anybody old enough to remember Iraq. To be clear, when Trump talks about “running” and militarily occupying Venezuela we know from very recent history that what he really means is running Caracas and maybe a few other major cities (and/or oil sites) but certainly no more than that. Large parts of Venezuela were already tenuously under central control but the vacuums that are likely to develop now will dwarf whatever existed previously. The military may fragment. Gangs and other armed non-state actors may exploit the situation. Local militias may emerge. I doubt that Machado and her supporters are just going to slink away quietly. The probable result is the fragmentation, chaos, and violence that those old wargames predicted. But as long as the oil flows there’s no reason to think anyone in the Trump administration will care.
That’s as much as I can say about this right now. But since we’re here and in an effort to keep tomorrow’s news roundup from being a 10,000 word monstrosity, let’s talk about a couple other things that have been happening over FX’s winter break.
