A person flutters a national flag in Caracas on January 3, 2026, after US forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. (Photo by Federico PARRA / AFP via Getty Images)
ONE MONTH AGO, THE UNITED STATES launched a dramatic military operation in Caracas that ended with the capture of Nicolás Maduro and his wife. The military strike was fast, precise, and unmistakably American in its execution. Within hours, President Trump and various cabinet officials stood before cameras to declare success, describe the removal of a criminal regime, and suggest the beginning of a new chapter for Venezuela. They implied the end of Venezuela’s long-standing authoritarian leadership.
So, one month in, how are things going?
To answer that, it helps to rewind and review. In the months leading up to the January 3 operation, the United States steadily escalated air, naval, and intelligence operations across the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, destroying vessels accused of narcotics trafficking and seizing tankers carrying sanctioned Venezuelan oil. These actions—conducted under questionable legal authorities, no Congressional approval, and with limited public explanation—created the operational conditions that contributed to the eventual decapitation raid.
When the operation finally came, it combined air power, special operations forces, and intelligence assets to remove the Venezuelan regime’s top leader in a single night. Tactically, it was executed with precision. But the immediate aftermath revealed a strategic uncertainty. Even in the administration’s first press briefings, it was unclear who was in charge in Caracas, what authority Washington claimed to exercise, and what political end state the United States was pursuing. That ambiguity has not improved with time.
While the tempo of overt U.S. military action has slowed and kinetic operations have receded into the background, economic leverage against Venezuela has not abated. Maritime interdictions of Venezuelan oil shipments continue, and U.S. officials have been explicit that control over oil revenues is still its central instrument of influence.
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Inside Venezuela, the leadership vacuum created by Maduro’s removal was filled immediately—and apparently with the Trump administration’s blessing—by Delcy Rodríguez, who had been vice president under Maduro. Her government has behaved less like a coherent transitional authority and more like a political chameleon, adjusting its message depending on the audience. When engaging Washington, Rodríguez emphasizes cooperation, oil-sector reform, and selective humanitarian gestures. When addressing domestic constituencies and regional partners, she stresses sovereignty, independence, and resistance to foreign control.
Rodríguez’s government has advanced legislation loosening state control over the oil sector and opening pathways for foreign investment, reforms long sought by international energy firms and now encouraged by U.S. officials. At the same time, there has been no serious articulation of how her government will address corruption, how she’ll transition stolen wealth back to Venezuela’s citizens, or how she will dismantle Venezuela’s entrenched oligarchic networks and crooked security forces. She has announced limited amnesty for some political prisoners, but there is no roadmap for elections, no timetable for constitutional reform, and no credible mechanism for accountability.
In other words, Rodríguez is paying lip service to reform, and liberalization, while doing little to nothing to change the structures of power in the country.
Signals from the U.S. government have been equally mixed. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently insisted there are no current plans for additional military action, while simultaneously reserving the right to use force if the interim government fails to meet American expectations. President Trump, in even less diplomatic language, has threatened Rodríguez with a fate worse than Maduro’s—possibly assassination—if his vague demands aren’t met. Venezuelan airspace was reopened last week, yet State Department travel warnings persist.
In the month since the Caracas raid, U.S. officials aggressively courted energy executives, urging investment to rehabilitate Venezuela’s oil sector. The response was polite, interested, and cautious. U.S. companies have signaled some interest in long-term interest but remain unwilling to commit serious capital absent clear legal protections and a stable Venezuela. The hesitation reflects institutional memory, as this country’s oil sector has repelled investors for decades despite its vast reserves. The removal of one leader has not erased that history.
Regionally and globally, reactions are also unsettled—and instructive. Argentinian President Javier Milei openly celebrated Maduro’s removal and welcomed prospects for deeper U.S. engagement, particularly in Venezuela’s oil industry. Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Uruguay issued a joint statement condemning the U.S. operation as a violation of international law and a destabilizing precedent. Most governments echoed concerns about sovereignty, and the normalization of regime change by force, even admitting the target was widely disliked; these were not defenses of Maduro but warnings about method and precedent. The Caracas raid, combined with the Trump administration’s bellicose and bullying rhetoric toward Canada and Greenland, is divided less by the faults between democracies and autocracies than by that between those who oppose American power and those who hope to use it to their advantage.
Globally, China and Russia have drawn their own conclusions. Beijing condemned the intervention outright and has recalibrated its energy portfolio. PetroChina has paused purchases of Venezuelan crude now marketed under U.S. control, indicating that this is more than a commercial adjustment. It reflects strategic repositioning and reinforces Latin America’s renewed status as contested terrain in great-power competition. Russia, meanwhile, denounced the strike as a violation of sovereignty while exploiting it rhetorically to bolster claims of Western hypocrisy—even as it increased the level of its strikes in Ukraine. The contradiction is obvious, and the value is not lost on Moscow.
These dynamics were evident at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, where Venezuela’s future was a recurring subject of discussion. Analysts questioned whether Washington’s stabilization-recovery-transition narrative offers a credible pathway to durable governance or merely an indefinite holding pattern enforced by leverage. Some suggested oil output could grow modestly in the short term—perhaps by as much as 30 percent—but invariably noted the barriers: legal chaos, degraded infrastructure, safety concerns, and regulatory opacity.
All this is to say that one month after a militarily successful decapitation strike, the United States has altered the political landscape in Caracas without defining a coherent end state. Venezuela remains unstable. Its government lacks legitimacy and coherence. Corruption and oligarchic power structures remain intact. Allies are uneasy. Adversaries are adapting. Washington continues to oscillate between coercion and engagement without clearly articulating what success entails.
The apparent ease with which air power and special operations forces can remove a foreign leader risks reinforcing a dangerous lesson—that decapitation is quick, decisive, and rewarding. Venezuela, near our shores, was particularly vulnerable. But, to take another of America’s second-tier adversaries as an example, Iran is not Venezuela, as Tehran’s leadership is embedded in far more resilient institutions, the population is much more combustible, and the regime enjoys deeper coercive capacity while embedded in a vastly more complex regional environment. What appeared straightforward in Caracas would be exponentially more difficult—and destabilizing—in Iran.
Venezuela is a case study of the limits of tactical success in the absence of strategic clarity. One month in, the United States has demonstrated extraordinary military capability and troubling uncertainty about what comes next.
There is no indication that the United States has achieved its desired end state. Instead, the current moment appears to be a rather shaky operational pause. And history suggests that pauses without a view toward a final objective rarely end well.
