It’s early days, but the Trump administration’s approach to a post-President Nicolás Maduro Venezuela is quickly coming into focus. This is not externally imposed democracy building but a regime management project that relies on compliant regime insiders, the existing state security apparatus, and offshore coercive leverage. As I argued previously in these pages, removing the apex of an authoritarian pyramid does not dissolve the pyramid. What changes is who gets to set the terms for the people still holding it up.
White House adviser Stephen Miller made the premise explicit on national television when he declared that “the United States of America is running Venezuela.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio then tried to narrow the claim without abandoning it: The United States is not “micromanaging day-to-day,” he insisted, but “what we are running is the direction this is going to move going forward.” The administration now intends to use coercive leverage to shape Venezuelan governance through the very insiders who have built the authoritarian order in the country. The keyword in Rubio’s statement is “direction.” It’s vague on purpose. It signals U.S. veto power without committing to direct rule, and it sits awkwardly — and hypocritically — alongside the administration’s frequent invocation of sovereignty elsewhere.
In practice, the Trump administration can probably only “run the direction” of Venezuela through three choke points: oil access, sanctions relief, and personal legal exposure. Those levers are not abstract. They are the coercive toolkit the administration can apply quickly, repeatedly, and without owning the day-to-day business of governing the country.
In Venezuela’s case, the tools are visible: expansive sanctions authority, a criminal indictment regime that turns politics into an arrest-and-prosecution logic, and a U.S. military presence deliberately positioned as an over-the-horizon threat. The Maduro raid made that posture real.
The unfolding drama now serves as the first real-world test of the 2025 National Security Strategy. The administration’s own rationale, as it shifted from drugs to sanctions to oil, and the post-raid rhetoric about “running” Venezuela all reflect a new strategic framing. In a post-Maduro Venezuela, the U.S. project amounts to managed authoritarianism: continuity government, calibrated repression, and transactional compliance, with transition reduced to timetable management rather than any democratization.
From Counter-Narcotics to Regime Management
The administration’s objectives did not evolve in a straight line, but the direction has been consistent: maximize leverage while minimizing liability. Early escalation was sold as counter-narcotics — including strikes on suspected drug-smuggling boats and talk of widening pressure beyond maritime interdiction. Then pressure migrated to economic coercion: court-backed oil tanker seizures, “quarantine” rhetoric, and a blockade posture aimed at cutting off cash flows from crude exports. By late 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump was talking openly about “getting back” Venezuelan oil rights, treating Venezuela less as a country in the grip of systemic collapse and a prolonged humanitarian emergency than as a strategic asset to be repossessed.
The Maduro raid was then framed as law enforcement, a warrant-driven arrest operation justified through indictments and sanctions authority. That framing mattered politically, because it gave the administration a cleaner argument for why Congress was left in the dark. In Rubio’s own words, pre-notification would have “endanger[ed] the mission,” arguably a dubious claim.
But the rule of law wrapper is selective. The same administration that has executed a dramatic overseas capture of an indicted foreign leader also chose to pardon a former Honduran president convicted in a U.S. drug trafficking case — a reminder that justice here is not a neutral principle, but a discretionary tool. And it is hard to miss the commercial throughline: Removing Maduro also cleared the political obstacle to a rapid push for U.S.-linked oil access and investment, a point the White House has now leaned into openly. In reality, this was never only about putting one bad guy in the dock. It was about forcing a renegotiation of Venezuela’s power structure under U.S. terms while preserving the claim that this was not regime change.
Detailed reporting on internal deliberations shows overlapping agendas — oil, drugs, and immigration — pulling U.S. policy toward militarized coercion even as the public justification shifted. The intent is not democratization, it is control: reduce outward flows, pressure illicit networks, and restructure Venezuela’s external alignments without inheriting the costs of a collapsed state.
The National Security Strategy is explicit in subordinating democracy promotion to order, deterrence, and transactional hemispheric security. It uncharacteristically frames U.S. interests in terms of controlling access, commerce, and strategic infrastructure. Read plainly, it is a doctrine of management: keep adversaries out, keep flows under control, and treat whether the regime cooperates on oil, migration, and security as instruments of U.S. security, not as ends in themselves.
In that doctrinal frame, a loyalist-led interim government in Caracas is not a bug, but a feature. It is the quickest way to suppress centrifugal dynamics, keep the oil sector moving under U.S. conditions, and pry Venezuela away from Iranian, Russian, and Chinese sanctions-evasion networks. The tension is that continuity is delivered by the very actors most invested in preventing meaningful political opening.
Coup-Proofing After the Apex Falls
“Coup-proofing” is often misread as buying loyalty. In practice, however, it is about controlling coordination: fragmenting coercive institutions so that no single rival can move quickly and seize control. Venezuela’s version has been unusually layered by South American standards, involving overlapping intelligence services, politicized promotions, surveillance inside the ranks, and the empowerment of paramilitary proxies who can threaten even senior officers. That mix isn’t unprecedented in authoritarian systems globally, but Venezuela distinguishes itself by combining multiple parallel security services with irregular enforcers and persistent internal monitoring designed to prevent coordination against the leadership. The system is designed so that no single security entity can move fast without being detected, and no single potential challenger can unify the coercive apparatus without immediately triggering suspicion from rivals who are paid to monitor one another.
The catch is that the same architecture that prevents a coup can make coherent national defense harder when the chain of command is disrupted. It produces a coercive system that is very good at repressing civilians and policing elites, but less capable of unified action under shock. When the apex disappears suddenly, the question inside the system shifts overnight from “who can overthrow the leader?” to “who gets blamed for losing him?” That is when coup-proofing changes targets: The apparatus turns inward to police the ruling coalition itself, enforce discipline, and manage panic.
The empirical record on Venezuela’s coercive apparatus is not subtle. International investigations have documented patterns of arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearance, and intimidation used to police dissent and discipline insiders. A 2025 U.N. report and its detailed conclusions annex describe practices best understood as state policy, not episodic instances of abuse. Human Rights Watch summarizes the same architecture in more accessible terms. This is the apparatus the Trump administration is betting on to keep order now that Maduro is gone, and it is also the apparatus most capable of sabotaging any meaningful political opening if insiders believe cooperation with the United States might be repaid with prosecution or asset seizure.
This is why it is both rational and dangerous for the Trump administration to bet on continuity. Rational, because continuity suppresses the centrifugal forces that coup-proofing tends to unleash when the apex is removed. Dangerous, because the actors best positioned to prevent fragmentation are precisely the actors with the strongest incentives to preserve coercive control. Managed authoritarianism succeeds by keeping the knife visible while moving the goalposts just far enough to garner sanctions relief, investment, and diplomatic breathing room.
Why the Armed Forces Stood Down
The least romantic answer for why Venezuela’s military did not react to the U.S. raid is likely closest to the truth: They could not coordinate fast enough, and because, in a coup-proofed system, acting without clear top cover is professional suicide. In the first hours of the operation, U.S. planners appear to have treated the raid as a short-fuse extraction problem: disrupt communications and air defenses, isolate the protective bubble, and move the target before the regime can generate a coherent response. In that environment, most units were not choosing passivity: They were operating blindly, waiting for direction, and watching for internal traps.
Moreover, once Maduro was removed, the chain of command became ambiguous, and a structure built to punish initiative without prior authorization defaulted to inaction. While it is plausible that a highly placed compromised insider may have made the U.S. operation cleaner, you don’t need a wholesale sellout to explain the outcome. Instead, you only need a disrupted command and control interacting with an apparatus designed to prevent rapid coordination.
Temporary command and control disruption is only half the explanation. The other half is elite survival calculus. Once the Trump administration demonstrated capability and willingness to decapitate the regime, the incentive for senior commanders shifted from “fight for the leader” to “avoid being the next leader.” The U.S. criminal cases matter here as signaling devices — specifically the Southern District of New York’s 2020 narco-terrorism, drug trafficking, and weapons conspiracy indictment that names Maduro and key lieutenants (and the accompanying rewards/sanctions ecosystem), which tells insiders they are already on a defined target list. Maduro is already claiming status-based immunity as a sitting head of state, and his lawyers have signaled they will litigate it. But from the perspective of Venezuela’s senior security leadership, the raid itself communicates the practical point: The Trump administration is not treating immunity as a shield. The 2020 charging tranche explicitly identified a broader roster of potential defendants beyond Maduro. In that context, ordering units into a direct fight with the United States is not an act of sovereign defense — it is a wager that invites follow-on strikes, collapses illicit revenue networks, and makes you the obvious next target.
There is also the likelihood that the Maduro raid was facilitated by inside help. Authoritarian security systems tend to produce disgruntled gatekeepers: bodyguards, aides, logistics officers, and intelligence liaisons. Reporting indicates the inner circle was penetrated. That does not mean the armed forces flipped. It suggests that the regime’s most protected layer was breached, possibly with the quiet acquiescence of a few senior figures who calculated that standing down reduced their personal risk.
Continuity Government, New External Patron
The regime’s rapid move to install Delcy Rodríguez as interim president was a signal of continuity in the only sense that matters in a coup-proofed system: keep the security chain of command, patronage, and internal controls running so no one splinters. But continuity is brittle. It depends on keeping the coercive coalition intact while meeting enough U.S. conditions to avoid renewed military pressure — without conceding so much that hardliners conclude they’re being sacrificed. American demands are transactional and legible: expel foreign security/intelligence personnel tied to U.S. adversaries, sharply reduce operational ties with China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba, and reopen the oil sector on terms that privilege U.S. firms and buyers. Rubio has framed the rest as compliance benchmarks, trafficking networks, sanctions relief, and an oil “quarantine” calibrated to behavior.
The continuity coalition will not be run by one person. Hardliners such as the interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, and security power brokers such as the defense minister, Vladimir Padrino, will care less about formal titles than about who controls arrests, promotions, and revenue streams. Their calculations will shape whether the interim government is stable or brittle. Both Cabello and Padrino are named in the 2020 case and are under individual sanctions, so they are now calibrating survival in a world where the United States has shown it can reach the apex. That is also why they weren’t taken in the same raid: Senior U.S. officials have said the operation was deliberately narrow and that trying to arrest multiple targets simultaneously would have meant a longer, riskier campaign. Operational logic dovetails with strategy. The Trump administration is trying to coerce cooperation from remaining power brokers to avoid a vacuum, and officials privately worry that removing Cabello outright could trigger violent backlash from paramilitary groups and accelerate instability.
Here, the administration’s “running Venezuela” rhetoric becomes consequential. In practice, it’s the three levers of oil access, sanctions relief, and personal legal exposure that do the steering. The U.S. president’s fixation on getting Venezuelan oil reads strangely for a country producing at record levels, but the fixation isn’t about scarcity: it’s about control of prices, supply chains, and an adversary’s cash flow. Energy dominance does not eliminate the political utility of foreign oil. It changes how it is weaponized.
The blockade and tanker seizure campaign sits in the same coercive toolbox. When the White House described a “total and complete blockade” of sanctioned tankers, it signaled that access to trade is conditional, and that conditionality can be enforced at sea with a mix of sanctions law and force. For the continuity government in Caracas, the message is simple: comply on issues the United States prioritizes — drugs, oil, and geopolitical alignment — or face economic strangulation and the demonstrated possibility of further decapitation.
This is managed authoritarianism in practice: a Venezuelan government staffed by regime insiders, retaining a coercive apparatus capable of repression, and offering tactical concessions to satisfy external demands. It is not an occupation, but it is not autonomy either. The Trump administration may prefer this arrangement because it avoids the costliest parts of regime change while delivering the optics of decisive action against an indicted narco-terrorist. The risk is that the administration becomes invested in the continuity government’s survival, because its collapse would mean either chaos or a deeper U.S. commitment the White House clearly does not want.
The Opposition as a Controlled Variable
One important way to see that democratization in Venezuela is not the near-term U.S. priority is to watch what happens to the political opposition. In theory, Maduro’s removal should strengthen the organized democratic bloc. In practice, the opposition is being treated as an input to be managed: useful for legitimacy, dangerous if empowered.
Edmundo González and María Corina Machado still matter because, by most international observers’ accounts, they won the July 2024 elections. Machado has praised the arrest of Maduro and has tried to ingratiate herself with President Trump by offering the Nobel Peace Prize to him. A meeting between the president and Machado is scheduled for Jan. 15th, but it is uncertain if the opposition leader will be able to persuade the president to accelerate the political transition. In fact, the president has already indicated that elections cannot happen any time soon. Trump told Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, “They wouldn’t even know how to have an election right now.”
The reality is that, in a continuity-first strategy, including the demands of the opposition carries complications. Their inclusion raises demands for accountability, security-sector change, and guarantees they can participate freely in any future electoral process, all of which threaten the coalition of insiders the Trump administration is trying to co-opt. Expect a pattern seen in other U.S.-backed stability-focused transitions: limited, symbolic engagement with opposition figures to create the appearance of inclusion, paired with continued reliance on the coercive apparatus and procedural and legal engineering to keep the timetable controlled from above.
In Venezuela, a stability-first approach doesn’t start from a blank slate — it plugs directly into the state’s coercive infrastructure built and refined in the wake of the 2024 elections. The 2025 U.N. report describes how intimidation operates through systematic practices and through institutions that answer upward, not outward. The International Criminal Court’s Venezuela investigation remains a background pressure point for insiders weighing whether cooperation buys protection or merely delays accountability. In that context, a continuity government under U.S. direction has every incentive to keep the coercive toolkit intact because it is the only reliable way to enforce elite bargains in the absence of trust.
The Current Equilibrium: Stable Enough, Legitimate Enough
The post-Maduro moment can be summarized as an equilibrium the Trump administration appears willing to accept — stable enough to reduce migration and keep oil flowing, plausible enough as a transition to justify selective sanctions relief and a rollback of the costliest pressure tools, and coercive enough to prevent a rapid political break. That equilibrium is what “running Venezuela” looks like in practice: not governing ministries, but setting the outer boundary of what is permissible and punishing violations. For the Trump administration, the attraction is obvious: claim victory, avoid inheriting state failure, and trade sanctions relief for compliance. For regime insiders, the attraction is survival: keep the apparatus, keep the rents, and bargain down personal risk. For Venezuelans who expected a real political rupture, the implication is harsher. The same system remains in place, only now it answers to two masters: domestic hardliners and an external patron whose priorities, by words and deeds, are not democratic reform.
That is why the democracy question should be answered head-on. The Trump administration is not behaving like an actor trying to midwife a democratic transition. It is behaving like an actor trying to manage problems: migration, drugs, oil, and geopolitics, in that order. In the near term, the best predictor of what comes next is not Venezuela’s electoral calendar. It is the bargaining space between the administration’s leverage and the regime’s coup-proofed coalition, and the narrow slice of managed authoritarianism that both sides currently find preferable to the alternatives.
Orlando J. Pérez, Ph.D., is a political science professor at the University of North Texas at Dallas. He authored Civil-Military Relations in Post-Conflict Societies: Transforming the Role of the Military in Central America and Political Culture in Panama: Democracy after Invasion; co-authored Making Police Reform Matter in Latin America, and co-edited Democracy and Security in Latin America: State Capacity and Governance under Stress. As a consultant, he has worked on issues of democratization, civil-military relations, and anti-corruption for the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.N. Development Program.
Image: Vice Presidency of Venezuela via Wikimedia Commons