January 04, 2026

Trump’s Audacious Success

By: Richard Fontaine

This article was originally published in The Atlantic.

Nicolás Maduro and his wife awoke yesterday in a safe house on a heavily fortified military base in the center of Caracas. Courtesy of a brilliant, audacious U.S. military operation, the two ended their day in a New York City jail cell. The 1989 operation to apprehend the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega required 27,000 American troops and took weeks to carry out. Removing the Venezuelan president from power, and from the country, took just two hours and 20 minutes.

President Donald Trump characteristically described the operation as “big stuff,” and for once he was right. Maduro’s fall can and should serve American interests and transform Venezuela for the better. Maduro was corrupt and repressive. He was implicated in drug and human trafficking, and he stole his nation’s 2024 election. He was also an incompetent manager who ran an oil-rich economy into the ground. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country. The world should be better off after his departure.

One lesson of other regime-change operations is not to topple a government without a plan for what comes next. Yet what comes next in Venezuela seems as vague as the plan for running postwar Gaza under a Board of Peace.

Whether the world will be better off, however, depends on what happens next. Trump says that the United States will henceforth “run” Venezuela, with the details to be filled in later. One lesson of other regime-change operations is not to topple a government without a plan for what comes next. Yet what comes next in Venezuela seems as vague as the plan for running postwar Gaza under a Board of Peace.

The administration may well default to working with a compliant President Delcy Rodríguez and most of the existing government. Rodriguez, who was Maduro’s vice president, would, however, need to cooperate with Washington. In her first public remarks after Maduro’s capture, she demanded his release and denounced the United States. Even if that amounts to rhetorical fodder for the chavista base, governing Venezuela through existing structures will be no easy task. Without broader changes in personnel and policy, exchanging the country’s president for its vice president would hardly amount to regime change.

Read the full article in The Atlantic.

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