Regime change? Not even close

VENEZUELA

Despite the spectacle of Maduro’s capture, Venezuela has not changed hands. The regime survives intact, and Washington is now working with it, not trying to dismantle it.

MARIA Corina Machado, the exiled leader of Venezuela’s fractured but resurgent opposition movement, has vowed to return home “as soon as possible”, praising Donald Trump for the US operation that seized Nicolás Maduro and declaring her side ready to win a free and fair election.

“January 3rd will go down in history as the day justice defeated a tyranny,” she said.

Her confidence reflects the hope not only of a vast diaspora – one in five Venezuelans has fled the country – but of those left behind, where the UN estimates that 94% now live in extreme poverty.

However they, along with those who denounce Donald Trump’s brazen intervention as a CIA-style coup reminiscent of Guatemala or Iran in the 1950s, are missing a crucial point.

For all the drama of Maduro’s capture, Venezuela has not experienced regime change.

Washington is signalling no rush toward elections. President Trump has already dismissed a 30-day timetable as unrealistic, insisting the country must first be “fixed”.

US officials now see acting president Delcy Rodríguez and other senior figures from the existing structure as the safest route to stability.

Operation Absolute Resolve involved US air power and a Delta Force–led assault on Maduro’s fortified compound, where Cuban security units were overwhelmed before the president and First Lady Cilia Flores were extracted.

Now in US custody, they face trial for conspiring with Colombian guerrilla groups to traffic cocaine into the United States as part of what prosecutors term a narcoterrorism conspiracy.

The operation followed months of US military build-up and private, ultimately fruitless negotiations between Maduro and President Trump’s administration.

Within hours of the extraction, Rodríguez was sworn in as acting president while the Supreme Court acknowledged Maduro “in absentia”.

As Lewis Galvin, lead Americas analyst at Sibylline, puts it: “It’s the same regime. The US just didn’t think it could work with the individual that was Nicolás Maduro.”

Inside Venezuela, the balance of power has barely shifted.

Defence minister Gen Vladimir Padrino López still controls the armed forces.

Interior minister Diosdado Cabello oversees police and militias.

Rodríguez, for her part, holds intelligence and political coordination.

Maduro’s long-standing tactic was distributing authority so no faction could dominate. While Rodríguez’s capacity to replicate that remains to be seen, so far there is little evidence to suggest Maduro’s absence will break that equilibrium.

Nor is the opposition positioned to force change.

Protests may follow but street mobilisation alone has never toppled the regime.

“In Venezuela, you can’t pull off peaceful regime change without backing from the security forces,” Galvin says. “And that backing isn’t there.”

Venezuela ceased to function as a democracy decades ago after repeated electoral distortions, opposition bans and a political system engineered to prevent genuine competition.

But if last weekend’s operation was not about restoring that democracy, what was it about?

Trump’s priorities are blunt and material.

“Front and centre has been oil,” Galvin says, “and securing US interests in the region.”

Venezuelan crude is heavy and sour – exactly what US refineries are built to process.
Allowing China to buy it cheaply was, from Washington’s perspective, intolerable.

Some crude will now reach US refineries, but more importantly, US leverage means China must now pay significantly higher premiums than under previous sanctions-busting arrangements.

The recent seizure of the Venezuela-linked, Russian-flagged tanker Marinera – after a two-week chase – illustrates Trump’s new National Security Strategy, which reframes the Western Hemisphere as a US-controlled security zone.

The US decides who gets what in the Americas.

Rodríguez now occupies a narrow corridor between cooperation and survival.

If she delivers on oil access, limited security concessions and reduced ties with adversaries, Washington can claim success without inheriting the burden of rebuilding a broken state.
If she resists, Trump has threatened a second wave of strikes.

But over-cooperation carries its own danger.

“If senior figures start being handed over, or feel they might be,” Galvin warns, “that’s when coup dynamics emerge.”

The most volatile consequences may lie beyond Caracas.

Armed Colombian groups such as the ELN and FARC dissidents have long operated along Venezuela’s western border.

If protections are stripped away to satisfy US demands, those groups may either relocate, exporting instability into Colombia, or stay and challenge the state.

“If they relocate, it becomes a Colombian problem,” Galvin says. “If they stay, you’re looking at fragmentation.”

For Washington’s strategic rivals, the message is uneven.

Russia has lost prestige rather than leverage, with its air-defence systems exposed as ineffective. Iran’s footprint remains marginal.

China is the real target – but not one likely to be expelled. Instead, the US becomes gatekeeper, controlling access and price.

Regionally, the message is unmistakable.

Trump has shown that his threats are not rhetorical – and that success is no longer measured by democratic outcomes.

Governments in Mexico and Brazil may condemn the operation publicly, but they are quietly recalibrating cooperation with Washington.

Maduro is gone. But for those who hoped this moment would finally end their ordeal, the hard truth is that regime change was never the point.