Machado’s Failed Venezuelan Gambit
Machado’s Failed Venezuelan Gambit
The Venezuelan opposition finds they have been left high and dry even after Maduro is gone.
Thousands of Venezuelans rejoiced across the globe after the United States conducted a lightning operation that left Caracas in flames and captured President Nicolás Maduro. Many believed that the U.S. was on the brink of toppling the regime and installing the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado or her follower Edmundo González as the new leader of the country.
Their celebration quickly turned to confusion and indignation. At the press conference following the raid, President Donald Trump declared that the U.S. would work with the government of Venezuela’s then-vice president, Delcy Rodríguez. Machado, Trump said, “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.”
The Venezuelan opposition’s predicament cannot be understood apart from the long shadow of the country’s disputed election. Machado’s movement insisted—credibly, in the view of many outside observers—that the vote was manipulated, that Maduro’s victory was manufactured, and that the regime had exhausted whatever legitimacy it once claimed. Yet these assertions, however accurate, never altered the basic balance of power inside Venezuela. Maduro’s National Electoral Council proclaimed him the winner, and the military and police cracked down on protests by Machado and her opposition. The presidential candidate González, who probably won the election, fled the country. The opposition produced spectacle at home and sympathy abroad, but nothing that meaningfully shook the grip of the Venezuelan government. By the time Machado and her allies turned decisively to Washington, they were already operating from a position of severe weakness.
That weakness was obscured, for a time, by the drama that surrounded Machado herself. Barred from office and driven into hiding from the state, she became a celebrity for sympathetic Westerners. Her Nobel Peace Prize—less a recognition of concrete achievement than of symbolic resistance—cemented her status as the international face of Venezuelan democracy. Her decision to publicly praise Trump and to dedicate the award to him was strategic. Machado understood that the only force capable of dislodging the regime was external, and hoped that the Trump White House could serve as the necessary instrument.
But praise is not power, and symbolism is not governance. Whatever rhetorical sympathy the Trump administration expressed toward the Venezuelan opposition, it never embraced the premise that Machado and her circle could actually run the country. That skepticism hardened as U.S. planners confronted the practical consequences of Maduro’s removal. Venezuela is not a collapsed microstate; it is a large, polarized society with an entrenched political class, armed factions, and a population exhausted by years of instability. Installing an opposition government that lacked control over the security forces or the civil service would not have produced a democratic renaissance. It would have produced paralysis at best, anarchy at worst, and would almost certainly have required the backing of American guns and troops on the ground. Whether the Trump administration has learned all the right lessons from America’s wars in the Middle East is an open question, but it at least seems to have a definite aversion to the occupation and nation-building a Machado government would necessitate.
Instead, once Maduro was gone, the United States pivoted immediately toward continuity. Rodríguez, a figure inseparable from the chavista state, emerged as the acceptable face of the interim order. To the Venezuelans who had been celebrating Maduro’s capture, the decision looked perverse: After years of condemning the regime, Washington was just going to leave it in place. But the administration’s logic was straightforward. Rodríguez commands institutional loyalty. She can speak to the military. She can keep ministries functioning. Most importantly, her elevation reduces the likelihood that the United States will inherit direct responsibility for governing Venezuela. The alternative—a wholesale purge followed by an opposition-led reconstruction—would have required the sort of long-term foreign entanglement that Trump has studiously avoided in his foreign policy efforts.
For the Venezuelan opposition, this outcome is devastating. Their entire strategy rested on the assumption that American intervention would be total, transformative, and explicitly aligned with their own ambitions. They mistook the Trump administration’s denunciation of Maduro for an endorsement of his internal political opponents. But the United States intervenes to manage problems, not to vindicate allies. Once the immediate objective—removing Maduro as a disruptive actor—was achieved, the preferences of exile groups and opposition leaders became secondary.
For Americans, the Trump administration’s response is probably as good as can be achieved now that Maduro is out. By avoiding a complete dismantling of the Venezuelan state, the administration has limited American entanglement in the country, reduced the risk of state collapse, and significantly increased its leverage over the Venezuelan government. But it has also signaled—quietly but unmistakably—that American involvement has limits. Venezuela will not be remade in the image of Miami politics, nor will its future be dictated by opposition figures whose legitimacy depends on foreign arms.
Not that this will necessarily secure the desired results of the Trump administration. The current arrangement rests on fragile foundations. Cooperation from regime holdovers is conditional and self-interested. Figures like Diosdado Cabello, whose power derives from his control over Venezuela’s chavista militias, will tolerate the new order only so long as it protects them. Even currently compliant figures like Rodríguez may attempt to wait out U.S. interest in the region in hopes that they can buck American control off at a more auspicious time, betting on the Trump administration’s now-obvious reluctance to topple the government and occupy the country.
Whether American intervention will prove to be productive either for the U.S. or the Venezuelan people remains in doubt—the use of military force often creates as many problems as it solves—but what is clear is that María Corina Machado’s moment has passed, at least for now. Her international accolades and her pandering to Trump proved insufficient when confronted with the harsh realities of power. This does not make her cause unjust, but it does render it politically impotent. The United States simply has no interest in assuming a project as risky and costly as attempting a wholesale national reconstruction, no matter how popular the spokeswoman of such a project may be.
In the end, Venezuela offers a cautionary lesson for those who believe military intervention can conjure democracy from the ground. Force can remove certain obstacles; it cannot create effective states and institutions. The Trump administration’s decision to prioritize order over democracy promotion reflects at least a partial recognition of these limits.
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