Venezuela Two Months On: Trump's Pottery Barn

The United States captured a sitting president inside his own home and flew him out of the country in four hours. Now it has to figure out what to do with what is left behind. Operation Absolute Resolve on January 3 was, in strictly military terms, a flawless piece of work: CIA on the ground since August, Delta Force running the extraction, 150 aircraft launched from 20 bases, Maduro and Cilia Flores aboard the USS Iwo Jima before dawn and in a Manhattan courtroom two days later. Eighty-three people were killed, 47 Venezuelan soldiers and 32 Cuban security personnel, according to official figures from Caracas and Havana. Zero American casualties. As a display of military capability, there is nothing to argue about: nobody else on the planet can do this.

The trouble starts when Trump says the US is going to "run the country" until there is a proper transition. That is when Colin Powell's Pottery Barn rule kicks in: you break it, you own it. Two months on, the picture is as follows. Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as interim president on January 5 before the National Assembly, received Bolívar's sword and baton of command at the end of the month, and both Cabello and Padrino López have pledged loyalty to her. The Chavista structure remains intact, with a different face at the front. A former US ambassador to Venezuela described it precisely: Rodríguez is moving as slowly as possible, doing just enough to look like she is cooperating, and betting that the American electoral cycle will dilute the pressure.

María Corina Machado, the opposition leader Washington should be placing at the centre of any transition, was sidelined. According to The Washington Post, she committed the "ultimate sin" of accepting the Nobel Peace Prize instead of turning it down in favour of Trump. She was not invited to the table. Machado called Rodríguez "one of the main architects of repression" and said "nobody has faith in her." She is right on both counts, but in the realpolitik that matters less than having the military on your side, and Rodríguez has it.

The hemisphere split along predictable ideological lines. Milei in Argentina celebrated "the advance of liberty." Noboa in Ecuador called it a defeat for the "narco-Chavistas." On the other side, Lula said the operation "crossed an unacceptable line" and invoked "the worst moments of interference" in the region. Petro rejected "the aggression against the sovereignty of Venezuela and Latin America" and called for an emergency session of the Security Council, which convened on January 5 with Russian and Chinese backing. Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Uruguay and Spain signed a joint statement rejecting the unilateral action.

The unavoidable comparison is Panama 1989 versus Iraq 2003. In Panama, the US grabbed Noriega, installed the elected president Noriega had deposed, and left. It worked because there was a legitimate government waiting. In Iraq, the US destroyed the regime and discovered it had nothing to replace it with. Venezuela sits somewhere in the middle: there is a real but disarticulated opposition, a Chavista apparatus that has survived, and a Washington that does not appear to have a day-after plan beyond sending oil companies. America's ability to project force is obscene. The question, as always, is the same: what comes next?