After months of sabre-rattling featuring the deployment of a massive armada in the seas off Venezuela for a “counter-narcotics” operation, the U.S. military hit targets in Caracas, including the main military base, in the early hours of 3 January. The mission achieved its goal – capturing President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores – swiftly and without U.S. fatalities (around 8o Venezuelan and Cuban nationals were killed, while at least seven U.S. servicemen were wounded). Once in custody, the couple were whisked to a New York court two days later to face charges, including drug trafficking. President Donald Trump and other senior U.S. officials have subsequently stressed that they expect the Venezuelan government, now led by Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, to comply with Washington’s demands on issues ranging from privileged access to the country’s oil reserves to crackdowns on drug trafficking and the presence of forces hostile to the U.S., such as Iranian and Cuban agents and representatives of Hizbollah. Trump has suggested that Washington may directly oversee the country’s management for years to come.

Leaving aside the audacity of the raid and the scale of its international reverberations (to be explored in another Crisis Group publication), the operation has deferred prospects for a political transition in Venezuela to an unknown future date. By prizing stability over other objectives and shunning the country’s opposition leadership, the U.S. now risks leaving Venezuela’s deep-rooted political conflict and economic crisis to fester unresolved. A legitimate, representative government in Caracas, however, is not merely a desirable end in itself but also a sine qua non for salvaging a collapsing economy, revamping the oil industry, addressing the threat of violent unrest, and easing the country’s hostile relations with much of Latin America and the West. Washington should recognise that every postponement of efforts to broker a genuine, negotiated transition is likely to hinder the quick reset of the oil industry Trump wants, could result in a return of massive migration and could lead to even greater dangers for Venezuela and the region.

This sort of transition must not be confused with demands from Venezuelan opposition leaders and constituencies in Trump’s Republican Party for instant regime change in Caracas. Rising in volume and intensity ever since the U.S. naval build-up began in September 2025, these aspirations have ended up colliding with reality on the ground. It was never realistic to assume that external military pressure would induce Maduro to accept offers of a golden exile or persuade his own military to oust him, as the team around Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado had claimed. Machado’s assertions that the removal of the top tier of government would lead remaining military officers and civilian officials to fall into line was also met with increasing scepticism by policymakers in Washington. Speaking after Maduro’s capture, Trump dismissed the idea that Machado might lead the transition, saying she lacked the necessary “support within … the country”. Washington reportedly feared that the hostility toward her among senior military officers meant she could not guarantee stability and internal security.

President Trump now proposes to run Venezuela from afar. The administration intends to use the threat of further military action as well as economic and financial leverage stemming primarily from U.S. sanctions and the ability to cripple the export of oil to force the Rodríguez government to do what it wants. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio insist that Rodríguez has signed on to this plan. While some of her initial statements have been defiant, she has also spoken of cooperation. Faced with U.S. military pressure, Maduro had himself repeatedly offered a deal on issues such as oil, drug trafficking and migration; at least some of Washington’s basket of demands may prove – if not palatable – fairly painless to meet. A significant conciliatory gesture was the 8 January release of large numbers of political prisoners, including some of the most high-profile individuals.

But the regime’s single most important red line remains the prospect of a political opening leading to free and fair elections. Machado was banned from standing in the July 2024 presidential poll, and Maduro refused to respect the victory of substitute candidate Edmundo González despite overwhelming evidence that he had won by a large margin. Even in the unlikely event that Rodríguez were willing to contemplate the prospect of handing over power and ending chavismo’s grip on the state that began in 1999, she would face substantial resistance from the generals. Black-masked military counterintelligence agents and para-police colectivos have already mounted an intimidatory presence on the streets of Caracas in the days following the U.S. raid, seemingly to dispel any notion of a political opening. Combined with Washington’s apparent reluctance so far to lay out clear, public demands on democracy and human rights, this show of force bodes ill for prospects of addressing the all-or-nothing battle for power that stands at the root of Venezuela’s crisis. 

Upon his return to office in January 2025, Trump adopted a very different approach to Venezuela from the “maximum pressure” policy of his first term, which failed outright in its declared intent to dislodge Maduro and restore democracy. As Crisis Group and others had foreseen, he switched to a transactional strategy in which regime change and democratisation appeared to play no part. Special envoy Richard Grenell visited Caracas for a seemingly friendly meeting with Maduro and other top officials; U.S. hostages were released; a deal was reached on repatriation of Venezuelan migrants; and the licence that had allowed Chevron Corporation to produce and export Venezuelan oil despite sanctions was extended. Facing pushback from within the Republican Party, however, especially from the Florida delegation in Congress, Trump soon pivoted to an even more extreme version of “maximum pressure”, eventually deploying more than a tenth of U.S. naval assets worldwide, including the world’s largest aircraft carrier, to the eastern Caribbean in what was touted as a counter-narcotics operation.

This huge fleet was first tasked with destroying fast boats allegedly packed with drugs. It did so to deadly effect, killing at least 110 suspects (in both Caribbean and Pacific waters). These operations raised serious concerns not only about the efficacy but also the legality and implications of eschewing the longstanding practice of interdicting and boarding boats in favour of blowing them up, based on the administration labelling the passengers “terrorists”. This practice of premeditated killing seemingly outside armed conflict shocked many legal experts. On at least one occasion, the U.S. finished off survivors in the water. The administration sought to justify the policy by claiming that drug trafficking was a form of terrorism and that, as Trump himself claimed, each lethal strike on a boat “saved 25,000 American lives”. 

It turned out that the U.S. was working its way toward a bigger prize – Maduro, whom Washington described as heading a “narco-terrorist cartel” rather than a legitimate government, and accused of sending waves of violent criminals to destabilise the U.S. When asked to justify military intervention in a sovereign state, in what UN Secretary-General António Guterres called a “dangerous precedent” that violated international law, U.S. officials said they simply carried out a “law enforcement” operation to apprehend indicted felons. But in view of the conflicting versions emanating from Washington, many analysts and politicians, even within the Republican Party, concluded that the true motivation must lie elsewhere. Some have suggested that a desire to control Venezuelan oil reserves, the largest in the world, was the decisive factor.

The motivations behind the administration’s decision to launch the offensive on Venezuela appear to be more complex. Some officials have been seeking regime change for primarily ideological reasons; others have supposedly been focused on battling drug cartels or curbing migration, while yet others have been seeking to deal a blow to Chinese ambitions in Latin America or simply to reassert U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. Those latter views were represented in the administration’s National Security Strategy, released in November 2025, which was accompanied by what it called a “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. Shifting public rationales for U.S. policy were likely also a reflection of efforts inside the White House to sell the idea of military intervention to Trump. The president finally seized upon the brazen idea of “taking the oil”, even claiming that Venezuela stole the reserves under its soil and saying the U.S. will insist on their return. (Notably, in his first term, Trump was also convinced to leave U.S. forces stationed in eastern Syria to “keep the oil”.)

On 16 December 2025, ten days after U.S. forces seized a tanker carrying Venezuelan oil, Trump announced what he termed a “total and complete blockade” to stop sanctioned oil leaving the country (legal experts noted he used the term “blockade” inaccurately). “We had a lot of oil there”, he claimed. “As you know they threw our companies out, and we want it back”. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller went even further, in a post on X: “American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela”, he wrote. “Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property.”

These remarks were selective in their use of history. The original 1976 nationalisation of Venezuela’s oil industry, which included compensation for U.S. corporations, aroused little controversy at the time and resembled similar efforts in other oil-producing countries. U.S. oil giants ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips did later take Venezuela to arbitration following President Hugo Chávez’s 2007 expropriation of their assets, but sanctions have prevented Caracas from completing payment of the compensation they were awarded. Regardless, President Trump now says oil will be at the heart of what he sees as a recovery plan for Venezuela, supervised by Washington. On 6 January, Trump declared that the “interim authorities” in Venezuela would be turning over to him 30-50 million barrels of oil, the profits from which he would personally manage, “to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States”.

Oil industry experts are sceptical. Venezuela used to produce 3.5 million barrels a day (b/d), but corruption, bad management and sanctions have reduced that amount to well under a million. One specialist says increasing the total by up to another million barrels would require an investment of around $10 billion over two to three years. To return to the 2.5 million b/d level of 2020 would cost $80-90 billion and take six or seven years. Major oil companies are likely to be wary of putting sums that large into an unstable country in which the infrastructure is severely deteriorated, key institutions are all under political control and there is no rule of law.

There is plenty of appetite for Venezuela’s heavy crude on the U.S. Gulf coast, whose refineries were set up specifically to process it. But a true recovery of the industry on which the country has depended for its prosperity for the past century is unlikely to occur without a full-scale political settlement leading to the lifting of sanctions, institutional reform and a government of recognised legitimacy.

If he has been explicit about wanting Venezuela to hand over the oil, Trump has been equally uncompromising in claiming that Washington now runs the country. “She said, ‘We’ll do whatever you need’”, he claimed, referring to Venezuela’s new leader, Rodríguez, adding that she really had no choice. “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro”. Trump has also threatened to unleash a second military assault on the country, bigger than the first, if he does not get his way. “We’re in charge” was his pithy conclusion. The U.S. also has the means of fine-tuning the pressure, as Rubio made clear, by deciding whether to seize sanctioned oil tankers. “We have leverage”, Rubio said. “We can pick and choose which ones to go after”.

Despite these claims to supreme power, it is hard to recall a previous occasion in Latin American or indeed world history when one country has sought to manage the affairs of another without any physical presence in the territory concerned. Not only does the U.S. have no military personnel on the ground in Venezuela, but it has also had no embassy in Caracas since 2019. Trump’s claim to be running the country appears to rest exclusively on the assumption that its government will take instructions out of fear of the consequences. That assumption raises two important questions: what exactly will Venezuela’s authorities be required to do in order to avoid the dire consequences of which Trump has spoken? Equally if not more important, how realistic is it to believe that Rodríguez’s government is willing and able to obey commands from Washington?

Trump has been adamant that opening the Venezuelan oil industry to U.S. interests is top of the list of demands. That also means reducing or eliminating the involvement of extra-hemispheric powers such as China and Russia in the industry and cutting off supplies to Venezuela’s key ally in the region, Cuba. Secretary Rubio has said improving the lot of Venezuelans is important, but “the number one objective is America”.

Publicly, the new president in Caracas has been ambiguous, offering defiance and moderation in almost equal measure. In a nationwide broadcast on 3 January she called the U.S. intervention “barbaric” and declared that Venezuelans were “a people that will not surrender, will not give up and will never be a colony of anyone, of empires old or new or in decline”. But on 4 January she issued a statement in which she said the U.S. and Venezuela could “work together on an agenda of cooperation aimed at shared development, within the framework of international law and to strengthen lasting coexistence”. “To those who threaten me”, she said on 6 January , “my response is that only God will decide my fate”.

The reality is that Rodríguez, who has a reputation as a pragmatist, may be disposed to go along with a substantial part of the U.S. economic agenda if it means at least a partial lifting of sanctions and major inward investments for a country whose economy is once again slipping out of control. With oil exports and production collapsing under the U.S. quarantine regime, financial strangulation looms. For some time, there have been rumblings within chavismo about modifying the legal framework that governs foreign oil operations in order to encourage inward investment. Rodríguez herself presided over a partial liberalisation of the economy, though not the political system, in response to the severe sanctions imposed by Washington during Trump’s first term. 

That said, the forced departure of Maduro, whose ability to maintain consensus among rival government factions had been crucial to chavismo’s ability to remain in power, raises doubts about the new leadership’s stability. Critically, Rodríguez and her brother Jorge, who chairs the National Assembly, are civilians with little or no direct influence over state forces. They must negotiate the government’s future direction with two figures, Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino López and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who, between them, control the armed forces, the police and the bulk of the intelligence services. This duo can also call upon a number of non-state armed groups for aid, including the so-called colectivos and the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas from neighbouring Colombia. There is reason to believe that the survival instinct that has served the top leadership so well will continue to discourage open splits. But if Trump pushes too hard, overestimating his leverage or the Venezuelan government’s willingness or ability to satisfy his demands, the outcome could be violent.

With Washington seemingly in the driver’s seat, the threat of violent chaos, whether explicit or not, is in fact one of the few elements of leverage the Rodríguez government has available to it. Ever since the days of Chávez, who was president from 1999 to 2013 and founded the movement that bears his name, chavistas have threatened that mayhem would ensue if they were removed from power. Their defence doctrine relies heavily on concepts of asymmetrical warfare and the arming of the populace against a more powerful invader. In response to the threat of U.S. military intervention, they have explicitly spoken of launching a guerrilla war. On 11 September 2025, Interior Minister Cabello said the time had come for “revolutionary war”, invoking the example of Vietnam. “If they mess with Venezuela”, he said, “that war won’t last two days or three, or four or five. It will be 100 years of war, but we will defeat them”.

How many Venezuelans, civilians, police or soldiers, would sign up for such a war is an open question. But in a country awash with guns and armed groups, it would not take many committed militants to mount an effective destabilisation campaign against an incoming government if the U.S. were to opt for full-scale regime change. That fear is precisely why Washington opted to work with Rodríguez instead of attempting to instal Machado and Edmundo González in office. Even so, the preservation of chavismo in power, backed by the U.S. but without any real electoral mandate or popular support, also poses a continuing threat of factional ruptures, public unrest and the emergence of new violent challenges to the status quo.

As Crisis Group has repeatedly insisted, there can be no resolution of Venezuela’s deep-rooted, long-running conflict without comprehensive negotiations leading to a sustainable, gradual political transition. The government in Caracas, first under Chávez and then, after his death, with Maduro at the helm, has never demonstrated willingness to engage in such negotiations in good faith. It is now faced with an existential dilemma: whether to bow to the demands of a much more powerful enemy or risk a sudden, violent end. But instead of employing its considerable leverage in pursuit of a negotiated, peaceful transition, the Trump administration appears largely focused on forcing the Venezuelan government to accept what amounts to neo-colonial tutelage and pillage of its oil riches.

The decision by the opposition leadership under Machado to surrender control of their strategy to the Trump administration on the grounds that only foreign military pressure would dislodge the Maduro government may prove to have been a mistake. They overestimated, and overstated, their own capacity to manage a transition triggered by regime change, assuming that either the bulk of the military would fall into line or U.S. forces would guarantee their security. They also paid a political price for operating in lockstep with a government that was not only attacking Venezuelans on the high seas for allegedly trafficking drugs but also seeking to expel hundreds of thousands from the U.S. and even deporting hundreds to a prison in El Salvador.

Washington eventually came to the conclusion that if it wanted a stable and compliant partner in Caracas, Rodríguez would be a more reliable bet than Machado. That has left the opposition leadership with the worst of both worlds: many of its key players are either in exile, in jail or in hiding, while the government in Caracas continues to exert control through repression. A deep rift has also emerged in the opposition itself, between a leadership in pursuit of regime change at the hands of a foreign power and those who continued to argue for negotiations and electoral participation, despite Maduro’s decision to shrug off the 2024 presidential election result.

Divided and seemingly powerless, the opposition nonetheless represents the desire for fundamental change expressed by the overwhelming majority of Venezuelans in that election. It is incumbent upon opposition leaders to overcome their differences and forge a consensus around a set of minimum demands not only for the Rodríguez government but also for Washington. These should include an amnesty for political prisoners, estimated before the 8 January releases to number over 800, and an end to the repression, but also a clear commitment, including a timeline, to negotiations leading to a domestic political settlement. Concerned foreign governments and multilateral bodies should press for these measures and be ready to participate as facilitators and/or guarantors.

Venezuela’s regional neighbours have a particular responsibility to contribute to a resolution of the conflict, not least because of the precedent Washington has set for asserting hegemony through armed force in its “backyard”. The crisis has laid bare as never before the parlous state of regional bodies, which are divided and seemingly impotent in the face of U.S. aggression. Political trends in the region, which has been moving steadily rightward, have left each government to deal bilaterally with a volatile and expansionist administration that makes no secret of its ambitions. That said, those governments that have more affinity with Trump, and whose leaders have long decried chavismo, might be best positioned to press for a genuine political transition over a mere transactional arrangement.

The U.S. military operation to capture Maduro and Flores and the decision to leave the remainder of the government in place have avoided, for now, the immediate threat of a collapse of the existing order leading to violent chaos. But if Washington continues attempting to dictate outcomes over the heads of the Venezuelan people, without a physical presence inside the country or an acknowledgement of the complexities of the internal political conditions, and in particular the balancing act that President Rodríguez must now perform, it will soon produce the sort of instability and institutional corrosion that it was ostensibly seeking to avoid. In particular, it risks provoking factional disputes within the ruling elite, possibly provoking violence, as well as shoring up a repressive state apparatus and delaying essential reforms.

The restoration of institutional rule in Venezuela and the establishment of a government genuinely representative of the popular will is not something that can be achieved overnight. But it cannot simply be treated as a vague aspiration, to be addressed at some undetermined future date. It is in Washington’s interest, not just those of Venezuelans, to resolve this issue promptly instead of merely extracting the country’s natural wealth.