Trump claims victory in Venezuela while the regime's machinery keeps running
The capture of Maduro was a tactical triumph. But declarations of control mean nothing when you control nothing
Donald Trump announced on Saturday that America would "run" Venezuela. Hours later, Venezuela's defence minister appeared in uniform to call citizens to resist. The interior minister released video of himself flanked by armed police. The vice-president, now sworn in as interim leader, demanded Maduro's release and declared him the country's "only president."
One of these parties controls a prisoner. The other controls a country.
The gap between American declaration and Venezuelan reality is the defining feature of this operation. The United States executed a flawless extraction—more than 150 aircraft, Delta Force operators, a CIA team that had tracked Maduro's movements for months, a target seized from his fortified compound and delivered to New York within hours. No American fatalities. A dictator in handcuffs.
And yet.
The Venezuelan military remains at its posts. The secret police function. The armed neighbourhood militias called colectivos patrol their territories. Factions of Colombian guerrillas maintain their positions. Every institution that sustained Maduro's rule stands precisely where it stood before the first helicopter crossed the coastline. Trump captured a symbol. The machinery that made the symbol powerful continues to hum.
Fear in Caracas, celebration in Florida
By Saturday morning, Caracas was a city of closed shops and empty avenues. Noris Prada sat alone on a deserted street, scrolling her phone. "How do I feel? Scared, like everyone," she told a reporter. "Venezuelans woke up scared. Many families couldn't sleep."
Fifteen hundred miles north, in Doral, Florida—home to the largest Venezuelan diaspora in America—crowds wrapped themselves in flags and wept with joy. They sang both anthems. They chanted "Libertad!" They embraced strangers. For people who had fled economic collapse and political terror, who had watched eight million compatriots scatter across the hemisphere, Maduro's capture felt like deliverance.
Both reactions were genuine. Both were incomplete.
The celebrants in Doral understood something true: a brutal leader was gone, and the regime that tormented them had suffered a blow it might not survive. But Noris Prada, sitting in Caracas with the smell of the previous night's explosions still hanging in the air, understood something the diaspora could not feel from Florida. The soldiers were still there. The police were still there. The men with guns in the barrios were still there. Nothing had actually changed except that the president was missing.
Shannon O'Neil, who studies Latin American transitions at the Council on Foreign Relations, has watched American interventions promise more than they delivered. She notes that the 1989 Panama invasion—the comparison Trump's allies prefer—occurred in a country smaller than South Carolina, with 2.5 million people and existing American military bases. Venezuela is twice the size of California, with 28 million inhabitants, a rugged geography nearly impossible to secure, and a security apparatus fragmented across competing armed factions: formal military, secret police, colectivos, guerrilla groups.
Panama was a surgical removal from a cooperative body. Venezuela would be something else entirely.
The arithmetic of wishful thinking
Trump's press conference included a phrase that should have stopped everyone cold. The American presence in Venezuela, he assured reporters, "won't cost us a penny." The country would reimburse the United States from "the money coming out of the ground."
These precise words have been spoken before, about another country, with confidence equally serene.
In March 2003, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz explained to Congress why America need not worry about rebuilding Iraq. "We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." The Bush administration projected total costs of fifty to sixty billion dollars. When economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey suggested the figure might reach two hundred billion, he was fired for irresponsible speculation.
The actual cost exceeded three trillion dollars.
Economists Linda Bilmes of Harvard and Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate at Columbia, traced where the money went: military operations that stretched for years instead of months, equipment worn out by extended deployment, veterans' care that will continue for decades, interest on borrowed funds, oil revenues that never materialised at anything close to projections. The infrastructure was supposed to be quickly restored. It remained degraded for years. The occupation was supposed to be brief. It lasted nearly a decade.
Venezuela's oil sector is in considerably worse shape than Iraq's was. Production has collapsed from over three million barrels daily to roughly 900,000, a casualty of mismanagement, underinvestment, and decay. The technical challenge of restoration would require years and billions before significant revenue could flow.
Trump spoke of Venezuelan oil as a solution rather than an aspiration, a certainty rather than a hope. The confidence is familiar. So is the arithmetic. It did not add up in Mesopotamia. There is no obvious reason it should add up in the Caribbean.
The curious treatment of the opposition
When a reporter asked about María Corina Machado—the Venezuelan opposition leader, Nobel Peace laureate, whose movement won roughly seventy per cent of votes in the 2024 election—Trump was dismissive. She lacks "the support within or the respect within the country" to lead, he said.
This claim contradicts virtually all available evidence about Venezuelan public opinion. It also contradicts the election results that Trump's own government cited as proof of Maduro's illegitimacy.
Instead, Trump indicated he had been communicating with Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro's vice-president, now the regime's chosen successor. He described her response as "gracious." He suggested she understood she had little choice but to cooperate.
The optics are strange. An operation framed as liberating Venezuela from dictatorship ends with the American president dismissing the leader Venezuelans actually chose while courting the dictator's hand-picked deputy. Rodríguez, daughter of a Marxist guerrilla, served Maduro loyally for years. If the goal was restoring democracy, working with her is a peculiar strategy. If the goal was securing oil access, it makes considerably more sense.
Roxanna Vigil, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noticed what Trump emphasised and what he omitted. "The president did not indicate the U.S. government would prioritise new elections or offer a concrete vision of a future democratic Venezuela. Instead, he emphasised that U.S. oil companies would go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure and start making money."
The Venezuelan opposition spent years building resistance, won an election, earned international recognition. Now it finds itself sidelined by both the regime it fought and the foreign power that removed its leader.
The vocabulary of control
What does it mean to "run" a country you do not occupy?
Running a country requires controlling territory, commanding institutions, issuing orders and having them followed. It means collecting taxes, disbursing funds, maintaining infrastructure, providing services. By Saturday afternoon, the United States possessed none of these capabilities in Venezuela. The word appears to describe intention rather than fact, aspiration rather than reality.
Marc Weller, who directs international law programmes at Chatham House, finds the formulation baffling. It is, he observes, "difficult to find a legal label that describes that arrangement." What Trump seems to mean is not armed occupation but ongoing political pressure backed by the threat of further force. The regime understands this. Threats work only when followed by action. Sustained action in Venezuela would require resources and political appetite that may not exist.
Meanwhile, the colectivos still patrol. The military still holds its positions. The institutions still function. America possesses a prisoner and a naval presence offshore. The Venezuelans possess everything else.
The gap between capture and control
The recurring American difficulty since 1945 has been translating tactical military success into strategic gain. Max Boot, who studies national security at the Council on Foreign Relations, identifies the pattern plainly. "President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claim to have fixed the supposed problem by focusing on 'lethality' above all else. But in the case of Venezuela, they are likely to learn the same lessons about the limits of U.S. military power that their predecessors learned in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other battlefields."
No one disputes Saturday's operational achievement. The execution was exceptional. But American forces have never struggled with the opening phase. They struggle with what follows.
Elizabeth Dickinson, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, assessed what the capture actually accomplished. "Removing Maduro did not necessarily change the fundamental equation of control." The regime's base—everything that held the government together—remains in place. The hardliners who enforced Maduro's rule remain at their posts. The institutions he built to sustain power remain functional.
In Caracas, ordinary Venezuelans grasped this immediately. An electrician named Alfonso Valdez watched American helicopters depart with his country's president aboard. "They impose the law," he said of the Americans. "They are the police of the world."
But police must patrol the streets they claim to control. They must answer when citizens call. They must maintain order, collect evidence, adjudicate disputes. The United States has done none of these things and shows no sign of planning to.
What remains
This operation may eventually be judged a turning point. If Venezuela transitions to democracy, if the opposition gains power, if oil flows again and refugees return, the capture of Maduro will be remembered as the hour when everything changed.
But none of that is assured. The statements from Mar-a-Lago suggest no plan to achieve it. The dismissal of the democratic opposition, the embrace of regime successors, the magical thinking about oil revenues, the confident declarations of control over territory America does not hold—these are not the marks of careful strategy.
Noris Prada remains in Caracas, scared like everyone else, waiting to learn what comes next. The defence minister remains at his post. The colectivos remain in the barrios. The machinery keeps running.
America has captured a dictator. Whether it has captured anything more remains, for the moment, genuinely unclear.