Foreign Policy

There Was No Delcy Rodríguez in Iran

The Trump administration thought it was repeating the Venezuelan model in Iran—when it was doing something much more ambitious and risky.

Matthew Petti | 5.20.2026 11:15 AM

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(Illustration: Adani Samat. Photo: U.S. CENTCOM/Sipa USA/Newscom)

The operation to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January was as successful as it could have been. U.S. operatives seized Maduro from his palace without losing a single man, and Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez has been completely compliant with U.S. demands since then. Earlier this week, she handed over former Industry Minister Alex Saab to face trial in the U.S. for financial crimes.

U.S. President Donald Trump said publicly that he was expecting the same thing to happen when he attacked Iran alongside Israel, which assassinated Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, in February. "What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario," Trump told the New York Times a few days into the war. A couple of days after that, he said that he would be involved in picking Iran's new leader, "like with Delcy in Venezuela." An administration official told The Wall Street Journal that the new model for U.S. intervention would be called "decapitate and delegate."

Trump did not, in fact, get to choose Iran's new leader. The Iranian government crowned Khamenei's son Mojtaba the new supreme leader, which Trump said he was "not happy" with. The administration had originally hoped that Iran's National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani could be a "transitional candidate," a source told CNN, but decided to kill him after he led Iran's retaliation in the war. Later, administration officials told Politico that they were "testing" whether Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf could be the Delcy of Iran.

However U.S. officials........

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