Venezuela

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Trump Says ‘We’re Going to Run’ Venezuela and ‘Take’ Its Oil: Now What?

By Intelligencer Staff

UPDATED 10:30 A.M.

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Revelers hold the Venezuelan flag as they celebrate outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where captured president Nicolas Maduro is currently being held. Photo: John Lamparski/AFP via Getty Images

For months, the Trump administration has been escalating its aggressive military campaign against alleged Latin American drug traffickers and Venezuela, while attempting to force the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, from power. Now he’s in a Brooklyn jail cell. On Saturday, the U.S. conducted airstrikes, captured Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and will now, according to President Trump, run the country and take over its oil industry — though it’s far from clear how that would actually happen. Below is what has happened, along with collected analysis and commentary about what it all means.

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UPDATED JAN. 4, 2026, 10:30 AM EST

No, the U.S. is not running Venezuela

Though Trump repeatedly said on Saturday that the U.S. is going to “run” Venezuela and take its oil resources, it’s now pretty clear that isn’t actually happening. At best, Trump and administration officials think they’ll be able to exert leverage over Venezuela’s existing government, sans Maduro.

The New York Times reports that after Maduro rejected an offer to give up power and live comfortably abroad in exile, Trump and his advisors decided his vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, would be an acceptable alternative:

Weeks [ago], U.S. officials had already settled on an acceptable candidate to replace Mr. Maduro, at least for the time being: Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who had impressed Trump officials with her management of Venezuela’s crucial oil industry. The people involved in the discussions said intermediaries persuaded the administration that she would protect and champion future American energy investments in the country.

“I’ve been watching her career for a long time, so I have some sense of who she is and what she’s about,” said one senior U.S. official, referring to Ms. Rodríguez. “I’m not claiming that she’s the permanent solution to the country’s problems, but she’s certainly someone we think we can work at a much more professional level than we were able to do with him,” the official added, referring to Mr. Maduro. …

U.S. officials say that their relationship with Ms. Rodríguez’s interim government will be based on her ability to play by their rules, adding that they reserve the right to take additional military action if she fails to respect America’s interests.

On Saturday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio didn’t seem all that concerned about Rodríguez’s anti-U.S. pro-Maduro rhetoric during an earlier state television broadcast. He has since clarified, across multiple interviews, that the administration expects continued limits on Venezuelan oil exports, the threat of further U.S. military action, as well as maintaining the U.S. military buildup in the region, to work as leverage on the regime. On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Rubio said that Trump meant “running policy” when he said the U.S. would “run” Venezuela.

And while Rubio is continuing to insist that the current regime is illegitimate and that he and the U.S. care about Venezuelan democracy, there’s so far no evidence Trump himself cares. (The Washington Post reports that Trump has effectively added viceroy of Venezuela to the Rubio’s long list of responsibilities.)

Also, Pentagon officials have told the New York Times that there are no American military personnel in Venezuela right now.

In other words, the Trump administration hopes it can force Rodríguez to make the policy changes they want, including allowing U.S. oil companies to set up shop there again. That doesn’t mean that is actually going to happen, or that the U.S. can or will make it happen.

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UPDATED JAN. 3, 2026, 11:01 PM EST

So about all that Venezuelan oil wealth

The Washington Post reports that risk-averse American firms are unlikely to rush through the breach to go after Venezuela’s estimated 300 billion barrel oil reserves (assuming there actually will be a breach to rush through):

“Every major oil company in the world and some of the smaller ones will look closely at this because there are very few places on Earth where you could increase production so much,” said Francisco Monaldi, director of the Latin American Energy Program at Rice University. “But first you need political stability and clarity.”

He said restoring peak oil production there would cost up to $100 billion and take about a decade. And that is assuming there is enough political stability for companies to operate unencumbered during that entire period.

There are other obstacles. The oil in Venezuela is a heavy form of crude that is more difficult to process and carries a heavier carbon footprint than oil pumped elsewhere. Venezuela’s power grid is on the brink, creating an uncertain outlook for oil production, which requires massive amounts of energy. Also, Russian and Chinese firms partnered with Venezuela after U.S. companies left the nation, complicating the reestablishment of U.S. firms. …

In this era of relatively low oil prices and uncertainty about how robust future demand will be amid an on-again, off-again global energy transition from fossil fuels, firms are anxious about reinvesting tens of billions of dollars more in pumping in Venezuela absent assurances that their investments would be secure for at least a decade, according to industry analysts.

Again, it’s not clear how long the Trump administration plans to “run” Venezuela if and when it begins to run Venezuela, or if nation building is even a part of its plan to take over the oil industry, or how you can assure anyone of a ten-plus-year plan when you’re one year into a four-year term and the next presidential administration may take over with a mandate to undo almost everything you’ve done.

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UPDATED JAN. 3, 2026, 10:14 PM EST

Is Venezuela’s military, or at least some key part of it, on board with ousting Maduro?

The Atlantic reports that it’s likely the U.S. had some help from inside, but if so, how many, who, and what they plan to do next is not yet known:

How much opposition Venezuela’s military put up to defend Maduro is not clear. But the low number of U.S. casualties suggests that Washington likely had at least some support from within the Venezuelan military, helping make the operation a success, former and current officials told us. “An action like this would not be possible without significant help or at least intentional ‘self-restraint’ from the local military,” a Pentagon adviser and Special Forces veteran told us.

The military’s longer-term response to Maduro’s ouster will likely be key to the fate of the nation. Recent history in Iraq and Afghanistan does not bode well for U.S. efforts at nation building, but much will depend on the choices that Venezuelan military leaders make about where their loyalties lie. The big question, the former Pentagon official said, is whether the U.S. can stave off the unrest and regional instability that could result from the sudden power vacuum left behind when Maduro was removed after nearly 13 years in power.

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UPDATED JAN. 3, 2026, 9:47 PM EST

Hasta la vista, international law

The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner spoke with Oona Hathaway, the director of Yale Law School’s Center for Global Legal Challenges, about the legal rationale for the U.S. capture and prosecution of Maduro. They got into the weeds of the Trump administration’s ongoing claim that Maduro isn’t the legitimate leader of Venezuela, even though he’s been running the country for 13 years, and how that may be what they ultimately argue in court: that because Trump doesn’t recognize him as a head of state, he doesn’t have immunity from U.S. charges under international law. Here’s a key excerpt, with Chotiner’s question in bold:

The idea that Trump can basically decide who is the head of state of a given country is absurd and terrifying to me. At another level, there does seem to be something absurd and even terrifying about the idea that someone who is not elected can become the leader of a country and then will be recognized as the leader of that country and receive the immunities afforded to heads of state. How do you think about that?

It’s an area of law that is unsettled and can create real problems. The dangerous thing here is the idea that a President can just decide that a leader is not legitimate and then invade the country and presumably put someone in power who is favored by the Administration. If that were the case, that’s the end of international law, that’s the end of the U.N. charter, that’s the end of any kind of legal limits on the use of force. And if the President can do that, what’s to stop a Russian leader from doing it, or a Chinese leader from doing it, or anyone with the power to do so? We’ve been supporting Ukraine, and its war against Russia, and Putin has been making very much the same argument about Zelensky.

You’re right to point out, however, absolutely, that there’s something that seems also wrong from a democratic perspective about the idea that whoever manages to control a country somehow gets to be in charge of it, even if they’re not legitimate, even if they haven’t won the election. This has been a real source of tension in international law. Who gets to decide who is a legitimate leader? Who gets to make the decision that they should use military force to address that problem?

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UPDATED JAN. 3, 2026, 9:20 PM EST

This is nothing like Iraq, says war aficionado Pete Hegseth

During a long interview on CBS Evening News — his first ever appearance on the network now that it’s under new management — the Secretary of War and/or Defense insisted that the Venezuela invasion is the “exact opposite” of the Iraq invasion.

In Iraq, he said, “We spent decades and decades and purchased in blood, and got nothing economically in return,” but in Venezuela, “president of action” Trump has a strategy to make sure the U.S. gains access to “additional wealth and resources, enabling a country to unleash that without having to spend American blood.”

“This was a bold and audacious move, but it was thought through. It was well orchestrated. Our military had time to set it up, to provide the resources, and then he took that bold stroke. And through it, we flipped that very dynamic, and Americans will benefit,” Hegseth explained.

Mission accomplished, in other words — provided everything these regime-change planners just said would happen actually happens, and this time America takes the oil, and this time no Americans die.

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UPDATED JAN. 3, 2026, 9:01 PM EST

Did Trump break the law?

In a post at Executive Functions, legal scholar Jack Goldsmith explains why, like it or not, U.S. presidents can now effectively do whatever they want when it comes to their war powers:

As I have argued before, there are few if any effective legal constraints on unilateral presidential uses of force. Everyone has an opinion about what those limits should be. Academics and politicians regularly maintain that this and that presidential use of force is unlawful, even though the legal framework for analysis, especially under domestic law, is contested.

But here is the reality. Congress has given the president a gargantuan global military force with few constraints and is AWOL in overseeing what the president does with it. Courts won’t get involved in reviewing unilateral presidential uses of force. And no country plausibly could stop the U.S. action in Venezuela.

That means that in practice the only normative legal framework for presidential war powers that matters derives from executive branch precedents and legal opinions. The Justice Department, if asked, easily could have drafted an opinion based on these precedents and opinions to justify the invasion of Venezuela. …

As I wrote in connection with the Soleimani strike: “our country has—through presidential aggrandizement accompanied by congressional authorization, delegation, and acquiescence—given one person, the president, a sprawling military and enormous discretion to use it in ways that can easily lead to a massive war. That is our system: One person decides.”

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UPDATED JAN. 3, 2026, 8:40 PM EST

What if the regime just gets worse?

Warns Caracas Chronicles founder Quico Toro at Persuasion:

Maduro is gone. It’s tempting to think that, without him, the regime will implode. But Maduro’s was never the kind of personalist system that depends on a single leader. It was always more of a team effort, with a constellation of influential figures like Rodríguez and Cabello teaming up with Cuban intelligence to keep dissent at bay. In other words, the kind of regime that could very well survive decapitation. And if it does, Venezuelans will get the worst of it.

For three decades, the most trustworthy principle for interpreting Venezuelan affairs has been a simple heuristic: whatever outcome makes Venezuelans’ lives most miserable is always to be treated as the odds-on-favorite. …

Donald Trump and Marco Rubio will take a victory lap today. They deserve it. They’ve struck an enormous blow against a genuinely evil regime. But they’ve not overthrown it. Chavismo is very much still in control of Venezuela. Bloodied, weakened, humiliated, yes, but still in control, and newly motivated to exert even more state terror in a bid to stay in power."