Caitlin Talmadge, faculty affiliate at the Center for Nuclear Security Policy (CNSP), discusses the US military intervention in Venezuela and Trump's lack of a plan to produce strategic and political success in the nation.
US President Donald Trump (2R) looks on as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine (2L) speaks to the press following US military actions in Venezuela, at Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida, on January 3, 2026.
The US intervention in Venezuela epitomizes the American way of war since 9/11: stunningly effective tactics by special operations forces, dangerously divorced from any coherent story about how they will produce strategic and political success.
The United States has once again successfully overthrown a foreign leader. But leadership decapitation does not automatically produce regime change, which requires reprogramming a country’s institutions, including its military, in order to change the country’s behavior. Regime change is harder, riskier, and more resource-intensive than simply extracting a dictator, and there is little evidence that the Trump administration has prepared to do it successfully. But without it or significant further military escalation, it is also unclear how much long-term policy change the United States can really expect from Venezuela.
Venezuela is twice the size of California with a population of nearly 30 million people, comparable to that of Iraq in 2003. In that war, the United States invaded with a multi-division ground force as part of an overall campaign involving hundreds of thousands of troops. Although the United States quickly toppled the regime in Baghdad, Iraq descended into a brutal civil war and insurgency that took years to arrest even with a long-term US ground presence in the country. The war produced refugees, widespread Iraqi civilian deaths, and tens of thousands of US. casualties—not to mention the Islamic State, whose remnants the United States continues to battle.
The United States has spent months amassing air, naval, and special operations forces in the Caribbean, but there is no large-scale ground force assembled to actually “run” the country. The president’s remarks dismissing opposition leader Maria Corina Machado made clear that he has little interest in a genuine democratic transition either.
All of this raises the question of how much policy change on drugs, immigration, and oil—the ostensible motives for the operation—will result from Maduro’s capture. His departure alone certainly will not bring overnight political liberalization or economic recovery, outcomes that at best would be years away even with adequate planning and resources.
The administration appears to believe that it can use the threat of further strikes to coerce remaining members of Maduro’s regime to cooperate with US. objectives. But what happens when they don’t comply, or when they do and it provokes internal resistance or civil war? Is the United States prepared to significantly escalate its military operations at that point? Will it engage in endless raids and targeted killings (the approach used in the global war on terror), launch a large-scale air campaign (which stands little chance of coercive success if history is any guide), or invade (a campaign that Marco Rubio has implied would require congressional authorization, and which the United States is ill-postured to execute )?
These and many other unanswered questions suggest that the weekend’s tactically impressive raid is unlikely to produce strategic and political success.
