Donald Trump says he attacked Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolas Maduro, to defeat narco-terrorism. Yet the successor government he has chosen to work with is run by officials whom he once indicted for that very offense or who held top positions under Maduro.
The new interim president, Delcy Rodriguez Gomez, who was sworn in on January 5, was Nicolas Maduro’s vice-president. Hardline top officials from Maduro’s government, notably interior minister Diosdado Cabello Rondon and defense minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez, remain in place. Cabello, whose previous jobs include being president of Venezuela’s parliament and heading its intelligence services, is the most hardline of the lot.
Both Padrino and Cabello were indicted during Trump’s first presidential term: Padrino in the District of Columbia in May 2019 and Cabello in the Southern District of New York in March 2020. In January 2025, Trump renewed the bounties for Cabello ($25 million) and Padrino ($15 million) that President Biden issued at the end of his term. Yet Trump says that the post-Maduro government and his administration are “working well together,” particularly on modernizing Venezuela’s oil industry.
Trump says he’s now running Venezuela and will do so for years. But what does that mean? To rule a country—especially one that contains 30 million people and is 2.6 times as large as Germany in land area—you need governing institutions. Where are Trump’s?
Or does he plan to rely on Venezuela’s existing ones, which as recently as a few days ago he said were corrupt and riddled with drug traffickers? On matters related to oil, apparently not. In a meeting with the head of American Big Oil on Friday, he told them that they had to deal directly with him, not Venezuela’s leadership on matters related to investment in the country’s oil sector.
Trump says that Rodriguez, the interim president, has no choice but to do his bidding, including giving him sole authority to decide which companies will invest the $100 billion or more over ten years needed to modernize Venezuela’s run-down oil infrastructure.
For now the companies, while not dismissing Trump’s call for mega investments out of hand, are not exactly rushing in—Chevron is the only major US company still operating in Venezuela: the rest pulled out once the government of Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor, demanded an at least 60% equity stake—and ExxonMobil’s CEO Darren Woods describedVenezuela as currently “uninvestible.” (Maybe they’re holding out for a big subsidy from Trump.)
As for Venezuela’s government, what if interim president Rodriguez doesn’t comply with Trump’s directives—or can’t because of opposition from hardliners like Cabello and Padrino? Based on Trump’s words, it appears that he will then launch another military operation. But to do what, precisely? Abduct Rodriguez and leave the likes of Cabello in charge? To seize all of them? That, however, would not align with his insistence that drug profiteering pervades Venezuela’s institutions and poses a serious threat to the United States.
Perhaps Trump will order regime change and install a new government, one completely beholden to the United States and free of drug traffickers. He hasn’t ruled out that step, and the US certainly has the military might needed to knock down a country’s state structure and did so in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.
The question is whether it can manage what follows next. The historical record provides ample room for skepticism.
The regime change operations in Afghanistan and Iraq led to multi-year wars, which killed nearly 7,000 American troops, along with 243,055 Afghan and Iraqi civilians. And the Afghanistan military campaign culminated in the Taliban’s return to power.
In Libya the 2011 US-led NATO intervention ended the rule of Mu’ammar al-Gaddafi. But the resulting vacuum was filled by anarchy and bloodletting. To this day, Libya has multiple competing centers of power, including two rival governments, a general (Khalifa Haftar, commander of the Tobruk-based Libyan National Army) who marches to his own drummer, and a host of armed groups and human traffickers.
What grounds are there to believe that this time it will be different—that in Venezuela Trump will bring down the state and stand up another that, at minimum, proves capable of maintaining order? He says the previous botched operations were overseen by weak, incompetent American presidents and that his regime change operation in Venezuela, if he decides to launch it, will be—you guessed it—an unrivaled success such as we’ve never seen before in history.
But what if a US intervention aimed at regime change once again leads to prolonged turmoil and violence? Which American oil corporations would risk big investments in Venezuela when the basic security of their personnel and operations cannot be guaranteed?
Trump’s Venezuela gambit rests on the assumption that the Venezuelan leaders who succeeded Maduro, his closest associates, will prove to be reliable instruments of the Trump administration and that if that proves not to be the case, they can be swept away by a regime change operation—a move fraught with all manner of risks.
The abduction of Maduro isn’t about the mortal threat supposedly posed to the United States by the flow of drugs from that country. The people whom the administration accused of drug trafficking wield more power now than they did under Maduro. Nor is it about creating better governance for Venezuelans: the leaders who’ve mismanaged Venezuela still run the show.
The real explanation for Trump’s military intervention in Venezuela has two interrelated parts.
First, the Trump administration’s recently-published National Security Strategy states that the primary goal of the US is to substantially strengthen the dominance of the United States in the Western Hemisphere through a “Trump Corollary” to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. Trump wants to make sure that no external power —especially China—will have any economic or military influence in the Western Hemisphere and that such activities as they pursue are pursued with American permission.
This ambition amounts to old wine in new bottles. As history shows, the United States has long sought hegemony in this part of the world. As a result of the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), the United States annexed 55% of Mexico’s land, an outcome codified by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Since 1945, there have been at least 42 covert operations and military interventions to topple governments in South and Central America as well as invasions, in the Dominican Republic (1965) and Panama (1989).
Second, as part of the overarching goal spelled out in his National Security Strategy, Trump wants the United States to control as much of Latin America’s natural resources, trade, and investment, in part to thwart China’s now-deep economic presence in the region.
Chinese trade with Latin America soared from $8.5 billion in 2000 to $518 billion by 2024. And thanks in large part to the numerous projects that are part of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which began in 2013, China’s cumulative foreign direct investment (FDI) reached $600 billion in 2024. The United States dominates FDI in the region, accounting for 38% of the total, China around 2%; but it’s the growth in China’s investment that has caught the attention of the Trump administration.
How does Venezuela fit into all this? Because of its oil wealth. True, the country’s oil production has plummeted from an average of 3.7 millionbarrels a day in 1970 and nearly 3 million as recently as 2000 to a current 893,500 a day, slightly less than 1% of total global production. But Venezuela sits atop the world’s largest proven reserves: 300 billion barrels (mainly in its Orinoco region) or 17% of the world’s total. Trump wants the United States to control it—exclusively—and certainly doesn't want around half of Venezuela’s oil exports going to China, as it has been.
So Trump’s military intervention in Venezuela has nothing to do with stopping deadly drugs entering the US from Venezuela, which accounts for a tiny share of the cocaine entering the United States and virtually none of the fentanyl inflows. Nor was Trump’s intervention motivated by regime change: he’s ready to work with a regime that he’s accused of narcoterrorism so long as it follows his orders, and Trump has pushed Venezuela’s most popular opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, who had courted him assiduously, to the sidelines, claiming that she lacks support within the country.
Trump’s armed intervention isn’t about stopping the flow of illicit drugs into the US or fostering good governance in Venezuela. It’s part of his larger ambition to establish uncontested American dominance in the Western Hemisphere through what he now calls the “Donroe Doctrine.” Controlling Venezuela’s oil reserves—by making sure that American petroleum corporations monopolize prospecting, drilling, and refining—is a means to that end.