When U.S. forces swooped into Caracas in January to seize President Nicolás Maduro, many Venezuelans inside and outside the country rejoiced. Maduro’s ouster seemed to signal the imminent end of a regime that had for years oppressed and immiserated its people. Thanks to bold U.S. action, a government that had rankled its neighbors and sowed instability in the region now appeared destined to fall.

But something peculiar happened. Unusual in the long annals of U.S. intervention in Latin America, the United States removed the dictator but kept the dictatorship. In the past, when Washington decided to intervene militarily to remove a regime, it delivered. Except perhaps for the foiled 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, U.S. military actions in Latin America catalyzed change, deposing regimes or defeating foes in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, and elsewhere. Democracy did not always follow, but the United States did remove its adversaries. In Venezuela, however, the United States got rid of Maduro but left in place his party and allies. Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, has become the country’s president. Venezuela’s long-suffering opposition now has reason to fear that Washington will do little to advance a meaningful political transition in the country.

U.S. President Donald Trump is in no hurry to dislodge the old order now that Venezuela under Rodríguez is accommodating Washington’s economic interests. U.S. oil companies have received licenses to resume operations in the resource-rich country, and according to the White House, the United States has already received tens of millions of barrels of Venezuelan oil. “We have a great situation going over there, with a wonderful president . . . Delcy,” Trump said in March. “And she is doing a great job, and they are all doing a good job.” He also welcomed back to the White House that month the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025. She had come to seek clarity about Trump’s plans for democratization and a political transition in Venezuela; in January, she had bestowed on Trump her Nobel medal—an award he has publicly craved for years. But in March, Trump and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered Machado little in the way of assurances, advising her not to return to Venezuela for the time being.

Democratization may very well not be on the horizon. The Trump administration is not prioritizing a political transition in Venezuela. The regime in Caracas already insists it is running a democracy. By officially styling Rodríguez as merely an “interim president,” the regime avoids the constitutional requirement of holding an election quickly to find a successor for Maduro. It has offered no timeline for future elections. Venezuelans could reasonably conclude that although their country’s relationship to the United States has changed, their government’s relationship to its people looks likely to remain the same.

But political liberalization is still possible. Maduro’s removal means the long-awaited end of the regime’s original rulers: the founding fathers of the dictatorship, Hugo Chávez and Maduro, are truly gone. Chávez died in 2013, and Maduro is now in a U.S. jail awaiting prosecution on charges relating to drug trafficking. The chances of a country’s democratization tend to increase when the founders of that country’s dictatorship disappear. The regime’s heirs end up facing forms of internal turmoil and unforeseen incentives that can precipitate political change. Venezuela’s own history offers examples of this process: democratic transitions eventually occurred after the long-ruling general Juan Vicente Gómez died, in 1935, and after the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez was deposed, in 1958.

Despite the current unpropitious circumstances, Venezuela could still return to democracy. It would happen slowly, traumatically, and most likely as the result of cracks within the dictatorship and continued inventiveness and doggedness on the part of the opposition. The problem is that those seeking greater democracy and freedom in Venezuela now face another challenge that their predecessors did not: they will likely have little help from the United States.

PERESTROIKA WITH NO GLASNOST

When U.S. forces extracted Maduro, they achieved what a decade of economic and diplomatic pressure could not: the removal of a brutal autocrat. The operation was, in some ways, a recognition that the policy of “maximum pressure” through economic sanctions had failed. Only a spectacular abduction managed to bring Maduro down.

The operation was impeccably executed. In a matter of hours, U.S. forces found, captured, and whisked away Maduro and his wife without suffering any American fatalities. The United States brushed aside Venezuela’s military defense systems, with Venezuelan officials essentially watching the incursion unfold, unable or unwilling to respond. It was the first overt U.S. military operation against a ruler in Latin America since the 1989 invasion of Panama—and probably the cleanest ever operation of its kind.

And yet the outcome of the operation was far murkier. The democratic opposition did not surge into the halls of power. Washington kept the dictatorship in place, belying the notion that the central motivation for action in Venezuela was to bring about regime change. Maduro’s number two, Rodríguez, has become Trump’s number one person in Caracas. As the new, U.S.-recognized president of Venezuela, she has retained all the institutions she inherited from Maduro and many hard-line members of the ruling party. Rather than regime change, this is regime preservation. Rather than dismantling the coercive apparatus that Maduro built, the United States has allowed it to endure.

This outcome is very odd. Every U.S. president since George W. Bush has decried the atrocities committed by the rulers in Caracas. Trump was probably the loudest critic, and his criticism was justified. Venezuela has the worst human rights record in Latin America: close to 20,000 politically motivated detentions since 2014, according to nongovernmental organizations; the widespread use of torture; a reliance on thuggish paramilitary groups to repress protesters and plunder neighborhoods; and deep ties with drug traffickers, criminal gangs, gold smugglers, shell companies, and even foreign guerrillas. Under Rodríguez, the regime........

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