Why We Toppled Maduro – Gil Guerra

While the administration’s Venezuela strategy over the past few months culminated in success, many Americans are likely still confused, skeptical, or cynical about our interests in Venezuela. The administration has tacitly or explicitly offered a medley of reasons for U.S. intervention, including drugs, oil, migration, regional stability, and power projection. Some of these are complementary, but some create contradictory goals for U.S. policy. Understanding why the administration has stressed some of these reasons over others is essential for understanding what happens next in Venezuela.

Countering drug trafficking has been the administration’s primary legal and rhetorical justification for action against Venezuela and in the Caribbean. Maduro stands indicted on drug-trafficking charges from 2020, and Attorney General Pam Bondi has unsealed new charges including narco-terrorism conspiracy. This gives the administration leeway to present military action in Venezuela as law enforcement rather than war, sidestepping congressional authorization requirements and stemming possible political backlash from its isolationist base.

This framing could play well domestically. Fentanyl has devastated American communities, and portraying Maduro as a narco-terrorist connects his removal to the addiction crisis that voters experience directly, even if Venezuela is not a major source of fentanyl. In fact, fentanyl is not even mentioned in the new indictment.

Despite this, the drug framing also has some basis in truth. Venezuelan military and government officials have profited from cocaine trafficking and provided sanctuary to Colombian traffickers. Maduro has played a part in transforming Venezuela into a criminal state by turning a blind eye to these activities and by allegedly participating himself as part of the “Cartel de los Soles.” 

And even if it sends a muddled message to single out Venezuela over countries with a greater involvement in producing and trafficking the drugs that cause American deaths, the very incoherence could have its upsides. Countries like Mexico and Colombia, which have reportedly been warned by the administration that they could be next, could feel pressured to allow the U.S. to conduct military strikes on cartels in their territory.

Nevertheless, the drug narrative has been catastrophically undermined by the president’s own actions. Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in federal court of facilitating hundreds of tons of cocaine shipments, makes the administration’s counter-narcotics rationale hard to defend with a straight face. Trump’s attempt to reconcile his actions and his rhetoric in this regard have been unsatisfactory, to say the least. When pressed by reporters in the post-operation press conference on the Hernández pardon, Trump stated: “He [Hernández] was persecuted very unfairly by Biden … he was treated like the Biden administration treated a man named Trump.”

One cannot wage war on narco-states while liberating convicted narco-presidents. The contradiction cannot simply be waved away, and risks undermining support for the administration’s policy towards Venezuela in the long-term despite providing the necessary short-term political and legal justifications for its actions.

At a press conference Saturday, Trump was characteristically blunt about his goals for the Venezuelan petroleum sector: He wanted American oil companies to enter Venezuela, spend billions repairing “badly broken” infrastructure, and restore production that had collapsed under communist mismanagement.

 The economic logic is straightforward. Venezuela possesses the world’s largest proven oil reserves, and a functioning Venezuelan energy sector would benefit American consumers, strengthen hemispheric energy security, and deny resources to Chinese and Russian competitors.

This argument could resonate at home. Americans understand economic self-interest, and framing intervention as partially about oil would answer the “what’s in it for us” question that haunts every foreign commitment.

But the oil framing will hamper American objectives nearly everywhere else. On the world stage, it confirms the criticism leveled at American foreign policy for a century—that Washington cloaks imperial resource extraction in the language of democracy and human rights. This in turn will make it more politically costly for our regional allies to work with us in managing a democratic transition in Venezuela, and hand our adversaries easy propaganda opportunities when our efforts inevitably stumble along the way.

The oil narrative is even more dangerous inside Venezuela. Chavismo, the disastrous left-wing populist movement that former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez founded,   gained steam partly thanks to the claim that American imperialists sought to steal Venezuelan petroleum—a conspiracy theory that resonated precisely because it contained a kernel of historical truth. Opposition figures associated with the United States will also risk being tarred as oil company puppets by resurgent Chavista figures.

The administration has also offered migration concerns as an argument for intervening in Venezuela. Curiously, however, it failed to make the strongest possible version of this argument. 

The argument the administration has settled on blames Maduro for intentionally flooding the U.S. with migrants. This serves the administration’s interests because it positions Maduro as the initial aggressor in conflict with the U.S. while painting a contrast with the Biden administration, which allowed this “invasion” to go unanswered.

But the more sophisticated version—one that Trump adviser Stephen Miller and other restrictionist strategists presumably understand—is that deportation without regime change is futile.

Deporting Venezuelans from the U.S. while Maduro remains in power merely creates a revolving door: Restrictionist administrations in the U.S. remove migrants, permissive administrations readmit them, and the underlying source of displacement continues generating new flows indefinitely. 

Recent history suggests as much. The first Trump administration declined to intervene against Maduro in 2019 at least partly out of concern of triggering refugee flows. But a Venezuelan refugee crisis happened anyway, which the U.S. wound up absorbing, especially during the Biden years.

The revolving-door argument has not featured prominently in administration messaging perhaps because it requires acknowledging that the favored restrictionist tool of deportation cannot solve migration pressures alone. 

The strongest case for regime change has also been the one the administration has been most reluctant to make.

Under the Biden administration, Maduro agreed to hold fair elections in return for relief on sanctions and the release of two of first lady Cilia Flores’s nephews who had been indicted on drug trafficking charges. Maduro violated this agreement by staying in power despite losing by a wide and clear margin in an election he attempted to influence, and demonstrated that he could not be trusted and was not willing to step down from office regardless of how many elections he lost or how much he lost them by.

In addition to reneging on promises he made during peaceful negotiations, he also turned Venezuela into a staging ground for American adversaries, and maintained power only through the support of Cuba, Russia, and China. The United States has exhausted every alternative—sanctions, diplomacy, humanitarian aid, election monitoring—and each has failed against the structural advantages that hostile foreign powers provide their Venezuelan client. The choice was not between intervention and peace but between intervention and permanent crisis.

This framing works inside Venezuela because it credits Venezuelan agency and allows opposition figures to embrace American interests in Venezuela without appearing as foreign puppets. The administration has nevertheless underplayed this case because it echoes the Bush-era regime change rhetoric that Trump ran against. Acknowledging that Venezuela required regime change would sound to the anti-interventionist elements of Trump’s base like the start of another Iraq war.

The irony is that this tension forced the administration toward worse arguments. Unwilling to make the honest case for regime change, it constructed pretextual justifications—drugs, terrorism, law enforcement—that will be more damaging to the long-term credibility of our policy towards Venezuela.

There is a final reason lurking in Trump’s rhetoric: the United States removed Maduro because it could.

Most charitably, the American show of power in Venezuela could restore deterrence. Demonstrating that America can and will use force against hostile regimes in its neighborhood sends a message to adversaries contemplating provocations elsewhere. Secretary of State Marco Rubio conveyed as much at the post-operation press conference, warning other actors not to “play games with Trump.” The operation’s surgical success—precise strikes, minimal casualties, rapid achievement of objectives—showcases military capabilities that rivals must now factor into their calculations. 

The uncharitable interpretation is that the operation was a brash exercise of power for its own sake. The president’s evident satisfaction in the operation, his declaration that America will “run” Venezuela, and his dismissal of opposition leader María Corina Machado suggest an appetite for dominance that makes for intoxicating politics but irresponsible statecraft. Power exercised without limiting principles invites resistance and erodes legitimacy.

The administration’s hodgepodge of narratives means there is no simple, credible rationale for intervention that Americans and Venezuelans alike can get behind. Yet this narrative incoherence is not merely a communications failure. It reflects genuine tensions between the arguments that work domestically, legally, internationally, and inside Venezuela. No single framing satisfies all audiences. 

Whatever criticisms follow, Trump’s decision to break the cycle of piecemeal sanctions, interminable diplomacy, and inevitable deterioration was the right call. The costs and risks of intervention were real, but so were the costs of indefinite acquiescence. And for the first time in a generation, an administration proved willing to weigh them honestly and act accordingly.