From Regime Change to Regime Management: Washington’s Venezuela Strategy

The events of the past weekend mark a decisive inflection point in Venezuela’s long-running political crisis and in the United States’ approach to coercive diplomacy in the Western Hemisphere following the November release of the U.S. National Security Strategy that proclaims a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. Following a brilliantly executed plan to capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, President Donald Trump’s declaration that the United States would “run” Venezuela (later clarified by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as meaning Washington would run Venezuela policy), signals a deliberate departure from democracy-centered regime change toward a model grounded in extracting economic, security, and geopolitical concessions through military coercion, or gunboat diplomacy. Rather than seeking immediate legitimacy through elections or a rapid handover to the democratic opposition, the administration has chosen to prioritize order, control, and enforceable outcomes aligned with its views of U.S. national interests. Whether this strategy leads to a transition or to the continuance of the Venezuelan regime with a new leader remains to be seen.

The president’s statement that the United States will run Venezuela was deliberately provocative and caused much consternation about its true meaning; fortunately, Secretary of State Marco Rubio provided some clarification. The United States is not suggesting a formal occupation or direct administration of Venezuelan territory; rather, it seeks to dictate the policy outputs that matter most to U.S. security and economic interests and to enforce those outcomes through overwhelming economic and military coercive leverage. In practical terms, this policy framework rests on four pillars:

1. Security Compliance: The Venezuelan state must meaningfully reduce its involvement in criminal networks and curb the export of instability through organized crime and migration.
2. Economic Realignment: Venezuela’s oil sector must reopen to U.S. firms beyond Chevron, eventually restoring production capacity while ensuring that revenues flow to both the United States and Venezuela. The flow of oil to some U.S. adversaries, notably Cuba, will also be prohibited.
3. Geopolitical Reorientation: Caracas must curtail cooperation with U.S. adversaries—China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba—and cease serving as a permissive platform for their influence.
4. Conditional Continuity: As long as these conditions are met, the United States will tolerate continuity within the existing Chavista governing structure, at least for the time being.

This is not regime change as traditionally conceived. It is regime management—an attempt to reshape behavior without collapsing the system that produces it. Nicolás Maduro and his wife were apprehended, yet other senior regime figures—most notably Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López—were left untouched despite the former being named in the original U.S. indictment against Maduro and his wife, and the latter being named in a separate U.S. indictment, also for drug trafficking. This was not an oversight. It reflects a conscious decision to preserve the regime’s internal balance and avoid triggering a leadership vacuum.

The specter of Iraq looms heavily over this strategy. The Trump administration appears to have concluded that decapitating Venezuela’s entire leadership would require a ground invasion and a prolonged military presence, risking fragmentation within the armed forces, and inviting violent competition among criminal and political factions. The model offered by Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama in 1989 to depose strongman General Manuel Noriega, who, like Maduro, interfered with elections and was accused of drug-trafficking, was also ruled out as it required nearly 26,000 troops on the ground. An immediate transition to opposition figures such as Edmundo González or María Corina Machado—without U.S. control on the ground—was deemed unrealistic because they would have difficulty leading the government and military, still riven with Chavista loyalists.

Instead, the administration is betting on Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, forcing her into a central and nearly untenable role. Now, as de facto acting president and principal economic decisionmaker, Rodríguez offers the U.S. continuity; the Trump administration believes she is someone it can reason with. Yet her position is structurally contradictory. To satisfy President Trump, Rodríguez must deliver outcomes that run contrary to the ideological foundations of Chavismo: cooperation with the United States, reentry of U.S. oil companies, and distancing from long-standing allies; foundations that she deeply shares as the daughter of a Marxist guerrilla. To satisfy the regime’s base, she must preserve sovereignty, Bolivarian revolutionary legitimacy, and resistance to U.S. dominance. She must accomplish this balancing act with a U.S. Sword of Damocles hanging over her head.

Rodríguez remains heavily dependent on Padrino and Cabello, the men with the guns, even while she controls the Venezuelan counterintelligence agency. They may choose to break with Rodríguez if they believe she is too pliant with Washington. Already, there are Colectivos, or paramilitary forces, armed with assault rifles, patrolling Caracas’s streets, arresting journalists, and suppressing any show of support for Maduro’s removal. This is likely tied to a 90-day emergency order that instructs the police to capture anyone who supported the U.S. kinetic action against Venezuela. This may signal the beginning of a new and more profound period of repression to prevent any mass protests in favor of a fuller regime change and a return of democratic opposition; hardly an outcome the United States would like to be associated with, despite the apparent agnostic mood towards Venezuelan democracy.

Even if the administration insists that it is merely running policy, the “Pottery Barn Rule” applies: If you break it, you own it. By forcibly altering Venezuela’s leadership dynamics and assuming responsibility for policy outcomes, the United States has acquired de facto ownership of the consequences. If the criminal nature of various structures within the regime involved in drug trafficking, illegal gold mining, and other illicit activities persists, if migration rises due to increased repression, if oil production falters, or if violence escalates, responsibility will accrue to Washington. This reality constrains U.S. flexibility and transforms Venezuela from a foreign policy challenge into a managed liability, one which almost certainly will require more kinetic action to course-correct.

Secretary Rubio’s assertion that the United States retains immense leverage raises the question of how success will be measured. The administration’s likely metrics include measurable progress against the four pillars of their strategy, namely reductions in cocaine trafficking; a slowdown in migration flows; increased oil production under U.S.-friendly contractual arrangements; and observable distancing from Russia, Iran, China, and Cuba. Already, there are pressures on Delcy Rodríguez’s government to expel official advisers from those U.S. adversaries, and U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has said the Trump administration plans to control future sales of Venezuelan oil and hold the proceeds in U.S. accounts. Notably absent are near-term benchmarks related to democratic reform; the sidelining of Nobel Peace Laureate María Corina Machado is symptomatic of this.

The president’s comments about Machado as lacking the respect needed to run the country were unfortunate, as she is undoubtedly the most respected Venezuelan political figure today. The president may have been referring to her inability to gain support within the power structures of the Chavista regime, which is, of course, accurate, making it difficult and risky for her (or for Edmundo González) to immediately assume power, as less violent actors contest them. This approach is strategic but risky; by deprioritizing democratic outcomes, the regime may be more likely to cooperate, but the U.S. narrows its coalition of domestic and international supporters. Over time, this may complicate efforts to transition from coerced stability to an opening for democratic governance. Elections, if and when they occur, are more likely to be sequenced after some of the initial U.S. policy objectives outlined above are achieved, and after the country is nursed back to health, to paraphrase President Trump.

In this sense, Rodríguez operates as a custodian—maintaining order while the conditions for eventual political change are engineered by the United States. This could include offering exit ramps to regime heavies, such as Padrino, Cabello, and others, reminding them that Maduro was offered the same options, which he chose to turn down, and suffered the consequences. It would invariably necessitate the release of political prisoners, institutional renewal, an end to repression, freedom of the press, opposition participation, and free and fair elections. The success of this transitional approach rests on a series of fragile assumptions. It assumes that in the short term the Chavista elite will prioritize survival over ideology, only to lose political power later; that the military will accept U.S.-directed policy outcomes; that Venezuelan society will tolerate continued authoritarian governance in the short to medium term; that external adversaries will refrain from escalating their involvement; and that the United States will apply force each time the new version of the regime strays from what Washington dictates.

The United States has chosen to manage Venezuela rather than liberate it, to coerce outcomes rather than cultivate legitimacy. This strategy may deliver short-term gains in security, migration control, and energy access. It may even prevent collapse and a resultant possible new wave of migration. But it also binds Washington to Venezuela’s fate in ways that are difficult to unwind, absent free and fair elections, which have not been prioritized. Delcy Rodríguez’s impossible position encapsulates the paradox at the heart of this strategy: Stability without legitimacy can be enforced, but it cannot endure indefinitely, and this carries risks that the United States will now be forced to manage as its own.

Christopher Hernandez-Roy is a senior fellow and deputy director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.