Venezuela Seems to Be Going … Well?

In the days after U.S. troops hustled Nicolás Maduro onto an aircraft in the dead of night, President Trump’s critics were aghast. Not only had the president bypassed Congress in launching an audacious operation to oust a foreign leader, but he was potentially thrusting the United States into a foreign quagmire akin to the counterinsurgent wars he’d once promised to end—ones that had resulted in mass migration, violent chaos, and civil conflict. Venezuela, Democrats and geopolitical analysts warned, could be Iraq 2.0.

Three months later, life in Venezuela has returned to normal, whatever normal is in a nation that has been gripped by turmoil and economic calamity for years. Caraqueños, as the capital’s residents are known, told me that the streets are quiet. The state has backed off its practice of making widespread arbitrary arrests. Government services and the bleak economic conditions that Venezuelans have been living under haven’t improved much, but there is a sense of optimism that Maduro’s departure brings the possibility of better days. Oil revenue is increasing. And Washington’s handpicked interim authorities, led by Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, have rolled out a succession of investor-friendly measures devised by their new North American patrons.

By the metrics the president cares about most—accessing oil and avoiding a protracted, politically damaging conflagration—Trump’s Venezuelan adventure is working. Three months isn’t much time to draw firm conclusions, and much could still go wrong for the United States, the regime, and the Venezuelan people. But for now, the aftermath of the January 3 operation, according to the Trumpian blueprint, is running close to clockwork.

A recent poll appears to bear this out. The survey, from AtlasIntel and Bloomberg, shows that nearly 80 percent of Venezuelans think their country is the same or better off now than under Maduro; 54 percent said that greater U.S. influence is positive; 52 percent say that the country’s civil liberties have increased. Trump could only wish for such favorable numbers at home.

With the relative success in Venezuela has come confidence—perhaps too much. Trump’s gambit in Latin America has emboldened the president to trust his instincts on other global targets. Less than two months after the raid on Caracas, he launched a massive military operation against Iran, which has gone anything but smoothly. (In his prime-time address last Wednesday, Trump praised the congenial local “joint-venture partners” helping him achieve his desired outcome in Venezuela and suggested that that was his model for Tehran.) Within weeks of the start of the Iran war, Trump was publicly ruminating that he wants to see Havana capitulate as Caracas did.

“Some of our worst concerns didn’t come true, but it’s only successful on Trump’s terms, and getting away with it doesn’t make it right,” Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, a Democrat and a Marine veteran who’d fought in Iraq, told me about Venezuela. “It makes it the new normal, and that should terrify every American, because it will encourage the president to try to do it again.”

[Read: Trump’s eye is already on Cuba ]

The conspicuous caveat in Venezuela, of course, is the lack of democratic rights for millions of Venezuelans. For years, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other proponents of replacing Latin America’s leftist strongmen made representative government a central goal. Today, Venezuela remains ruled by unelected leaders—different ones, proceeding cautiously for now, but cut from the same authoritarian cloth. Trump-administration officials told me that they are steering Venezuela toward elections by late 2027 and slowly introducing potentially combustible factors, such as the return of the opposition leader María Corina Machado. Whether their bet that a more gradual transition can deliver democracy and avoid the pitfalls that wholesale political change brought in Iraq, Libya, and Egypt remains to be seen.

“When you look back at all the foreign-policy disasters in U.S. history, this definitely ranks as a success, for now at least,” Phil Gunson, an International Crisis Group analyst who has lived in Caracas for more than 25 years, told me. But Gunson compares post-Maduro Venezuela to an unexploded bomb. “The chaos which the Trump administration neatly dodged on January 3 is still there,” he added, referring to the possibility for upheaval and armed conflict. “It could still happen.”

Democratic outrage was not just over Maduro’s ouster, which Trump justified as a simple law-enforcement operation to execute a U.S. warrant on drug-trafficking charges. It was also because of how the administration had treated lawmakers in briefings beforehand, denying plans to use the military to seize Maduro and rejecting the suggestion that air strikes on suspected drug-trafficking boats were a prelude to acting against the Venezuelan leader. (Those strikes were probably illegal, many experts in military and national-security law told me.)

Some of the most pointed critiques came from Democratic lawmakers who had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, conflicts that many veterans now view as a waste of lives and resources. Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, writing on social media on January 3, said that he had seen his fellow Marines die and civilians killed in what he called the “unjustified war” in Iraq and that he faulted Trump for starting another potential misadventure.

I understood those concerns. As a correspondent in Baghdad, I’d watched Iraq struggle to emerge from the devastating insurgency unleashed by the 2003 invasion. In its rush to rid Iraq of threats from Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, the George W. Bush administration crippled the country’s institutions and paved the way for two decades of civil bloodletting. In Libya, during the 2011 revolution, I’d witnessed how the Obama administration’s failure to appreciate Libyans’ pent-up grievances and the country’s lack of cohesion helped create a failed state that persists today. No two countries are the same, and Latin America is not the Middle East. But regime change as a formula has a bad recent history.

Several Latin America experts, including those who held senior roles in the Biden and Obama administrations, told me that they support the Trump administration’s decision to work with existing Venezuelan authorities and to prioritize the reconstruction of the country’s energy sector. But they questioned the administration’s decision to set aside the results of the 2024 election, which had been won by the democratic opposition, and instead keep the interim authorities in charge until a new vote takes place. And they faulted the Trump administration for its failure to lay out a timeline for political reforms and elections, something they said undermines Venezuelans’ belief that democracy is an integral part of the U.S. agenda.

What many misjudged in January was the pliancy of Maduro’s lieutenants, first among them Rodríguez, and their readiness to work with the same Yankee government that has been an ever-present boogeyman in their long anti-imperialist struggle.

That acquiescence is most visible in Venezuela’s petroleum sector. Trump referred to oil 19 times during his morning press conference after Maduro’s capture. Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves. But a mix of sanctions, corruption, and mismanagement has kept its production far below its 1990s peak. Rodríguez, at Washington’s behest, has overseen rapid steps to loosen nationalist policies imposed under Chavismo, the leftist movement named for Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez. The National Assembly, controlled by Maduro and Rodriguez’s party, has passed reforms enabling foreign investors to work in Venezuela under more favorable terms. After the U.S. Treasury Department’s approval of measures that allow companies to do business with Venezuela’s state-owned energy company without running afoul of sanctions, Italy’s Eni and Spain’s Repsol announced new deals.

[Read: The hostile corporate takeover of an entire country]

The Trump administration’s management of Venezuela has widened. It started with regular phone calls between Rubio and Rodríguez. It now includes vetting regime spending requests from oil revenues, which are deposited in a U.S. account. American officials—including Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and General Francis Donovan, the head of U.S. Southern Command—have visited Caracas. Last week, the State Department announced that the U.S. embassy in Caracas, empty since 2019, had officially resumed operations.

For the Trump administration, the arrangement is pretty ideal: pliant local authorities running what resembles a private business with little institutional or democratic resistance in implementing the will of global investors. Burgum, speaking at an oil conference last month, recounted the discussion he and mining executives had had in Caracas with Rodríguez and her brother, Jorge, about proposed mining legislation. “Delcy said to the U.S. executives, ‘Well, tell us what you want in the bill. We’re introducing it on Saturday,’” Burgum said. “So then they take the feedback. It gets introduced. Her brother is the president of the senate. I said to him, ‘Is the bill going to pass?’ And he had a short answer: ‘Yes.’”

Energy experts told me that the scale of production and investment in the oil sector will likely fall short of Trump’s $100 billion goal. They expect output to rise, at best, by about 300,000 barrels a day in the next year or two, from roughly 1 million barrels a day now. The Trump administration will also need to find a way to push Russian and Chinese companies, which currently account for 22 percent of Venezuela’s oil production, out of their current contracts, Francisco Monaldi, director of Rice University’s Latin American energy program, told me. But the biggest obstacle may be international executives’ concern about Venezuela’s overall trajectory. After living through the turbulence of Venezuela’s modern history—Exxon had its holdings seized twice—executives want provisions for international arbitration, clearer royalty and tax regimes, and more information about where the country is headed.

One senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share his assessment, told me that the Trump administration had anticipated that economic improvements wouldn’t happen overnight. “This is not a GLP-1 for the Venezuelan economy,” the official said, referring to Ozempic and its equivalents, which produce rapid weight-loss results. Officials say that they know Venezuela is still a long game.

The fate of Venezuela has special importance for Rubio, who has made the restoration of democracy in his family’s native Cuba and other parts of Latin America a central part of his political career. Rubio spoke movingly in 2019, when a popular uprising against Maduro appeared to be on the cusp of success, about the freedoms every Venezuelan deserves. Voters who care about Latin America may credit Rubio for removing Maduro if the secretary of state makes another presidential run, but they will also weigh the longer-term outcome for Venezuelans.

So far, Rodríguez’s actions suggest an openness to political reform but not a rush to return to democracy. State agents are no longer stopping people on the streets to check their phone for anti-Maduro content, as they were in the initial days after his capture. Surveillance of activists continues, but not arrests at the same scale. The government has overseen the passage of a law providing amnesty to some political prisoners and has established a high-level commission to foster national reconciliation. Rodríguez has also ordered the release of scores of political prisoners, something the Trump administration has identified as a key metric. But watchdog groups say that the government’s release tallies are inflated, and Foro Penal, a respected human-rights organization, reported last month that roughly 500 political prisoners remain behind bars. Many amnesty petitions have been denied, particularly of people linked to Machado or her party. Pro-democracy activists say more action is needed to ensure meaningful change.

Last month, Rodríguez ousted one of the most notorious figures of the Maduro era, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López. But his replacement has been sanctioned by the United States for human-rights abuses. Rodríguez has also kept in place a figure central to Maduro’s repression campaign, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello. Like Padrino López, he is under U.S. indictment on drug-trafficking charges. Both men deny the allegations.

[Read: Marco Rubio’s empty victory in Venezuela]

Rubio has suggested that the prisoner releases—including people who might one day stand for election—are part of a slow but steady march toward democracy, the second of three stages he has laid out for Venezuela: stabilization, recovery, and transition. The emphasis is on slow. U.S. officials have warned Machado against returning to Venezuela too quickly and have elevated opposition figures seen as more open than she is to working with the existing authorities. Those figures include Enrique Márquez, a recently released political prisoner whom Trump invited to the State of the Union address. “One of the reasons they need to do this deliberately is to make sure they’re bringing the system along with them,” the senior U.S. official said. “If you try to layer something new on top of a system, or graft it onto something that already exists, you may very well have organ rejection.”

Rebecca Bill Chavez, who served as a senior Pentagon official during the Obama administration and now heads the think tank Inter-American Dialogue, told me that there is something to that argument. Machado’s immediate return could have alienated the armed forces and fractured the state. That said, Chavez said, pushing off elections too long could delegitimize the U.S. project in the eyes of Venezuelans. “We’re so far from out of the woods right now when it comes to basic political freedoms, basic rights,” she added.

Three months on, Senator Gallego still believes that Venezuela could become a foreign sinkhole like Iraq. “Even if the initial goal was met in Venezuela, it’s clear the administration is just winging it,” he told me in a statement. “As a Marine who fought in Iraq and lost many friends there, I know how rare it is for things to go this well and how dangerous it is to get stuck in another forever war.”

Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat who represents a district in South Florida, told me that she had been hopeful in January that Maduro’s arrest would lead to a clear transition to democracy. But, she said, the president’s primary motive—which she described as profit rather than liberation—has become all too apparent. She said that Cuban Americans won’t be satisfied with a similarly superficial change in Havana, should Trump make good on threats to impose U.S. will in Cuba too. “I want the old Marco Rubio to be leading an effort to ensure freedom for both Venezuelans and Cubans, the elimination of repression, the release of political prisoners, the ability to live in a free society—not just do the bidding of Donald Trump,” Wasserman Schultz said.

Trump has attempted two regime-change operations this year. One, in Iran, isn’t going well. The popular overthrow of the Islamic Republic that Trump hoped for hasn’t occurred, and the choking-off of global commerce at the Strait of Hormuz has no clear solution. The other, which has mostly slipped from Americans’ collective consciousness, seems to be working out. For now, at least.