Venezuela has entered the most dangerous and revealing moment of its modern history. The removal of President Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces has not produced democracy but a vacuum in which oil, power, and foreign control are being renegotiated in real time. As Washington moves to administer Venezuela’s energy assets and oversee its political transition, the Caribbean and the wider Global South are forced to confront a familiar question in a new century: who decides the future of a sovereign people when great powers deem their government inconvenient?
Trump’s logic in Venezuela is not democratic. It is transactional. President Trump has not framed the intervention as a mission to restore democracy or protect Venezuelan voters. Instead, he has framed it as stopping drugs, crushing gangs, and securing energy and economic interests. When he says U.S. troops will remain in Venezuela to “protect American oil interests while billions of dollars are made,” he is not speaking in diplomatic code. He is stating plainly that this is a resource-security operation. This doctrine is fundamentally different from Biden’s framing of Ukraine or Obama’s rhetoric about democracy. It is raw geopolitical capitalism.
That is why, for now, Delcy Rodríguez is not only compatible with Trump’s plans but central to them. Based on widely available public and diplomatic reporting, she is regarded as one of the most powerful figures within the Venezuelan state, serving as vice president, chief negotiator in international talks, and a key manager of economic and security coordination. Though she speaks in anti-U.S. terms, in practice she has spent years overseeing PDVSA, oil exports, foreign-currency flows, and navigating sanctions mechanisms, giving her a rare command of how Venezuela’s oil economy actually functions in the real world of multinational firms, finance, and enforcement.
Importantly, Rodríguez sits at the intersection of civil government and hard power. She can order PDVSA to keep pumping, tell ports and customs to keep operating, communicate with generals, manage foreign reserves, and control the bureaucratic arteries that feed the state. In a collapsing system, she is the switchboard. Without her cooperation, Venezuela will stop functioning within days. That is what the United States needs first: order, not elections.
Maduro is declared “illegitimate” because parts of the world do not recognise his elections. Yet the proposed remedy is not a Venezuelan vote but a foreign takeover of Venezuela’s government and oil industry. No ballots. No transition supervised by Venezuelans. No mandate from the people. Just force. President Trump has been explicit that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and he will oversee Venezuela’s administration and decide who is permitted to run the country. He has already ruled out María Corina Machado, the opposition’s most popular figure, saying she is not “respected or supported.” Even the opposition, in this framework, must pass through Washington’s filter.
It is also essential to be precise about what legitimacy means at this moment. María Corina Machado commands significant popular support and represents a powerful democratic aspiration inside Venezuela. But she has not held executive office or controlled state institutions. In the current phase of crisis, where violence, logistics, and economic continuity dominate, her role is political rather than operational. She may represent voter sentiment, but not yet institutional authority.
It is essential to state this clearly. María Corina Machado, while a dominant popular figure in Venezuela’s opposition movement, has never been elected to executive office through a national democratic process. In this phase of crisis, legitimacy at the ballot box is being subordinated to control over the instruments of the state.
In this second phase of the Trump administration’s intervention, it is clear that it is not democracy; it is risk management – minimising disruptions. That means negotiating with those who control weapons and logistics, not those who won votes. Delcy fits that role. María Corina Machado, at best, is postponed until it is safe to talk about elections, assuming elections are still allowed to take place at all.
That leaves the moral contradiction at the heart of this moment. A twice-elected president is removed in the name of democracy. An unelected foreign triumvirate then claims the right to run a sovereign state. Oil is secured. Troops are deployed. And only later, perhaps, are the people consulted.
Post-colonial societies are being asked to applaud this because it is happening to a government we dislike. We are being invited to endorse the very playbook that shattered our ancestors, convinced that this time it is righteous and that this time, mayhaps, it will not circle back to us.
What is unfolding in Venezuela is not just a Venezuelan story. It is a warning shot to the Caribbean and the wider Global South about how power is wielded when resources, geopolitics, and great-power rivalry collide. Today, it is Venezuela’s oil and its elected government that are being overridden by foreign force and foreign administrators. Tomorrow, it could be any small state whose politics or assets fall out of alignment with a major power’s interests. For post-colonial societies, the lesson is as old as history and as urgent as the present: sovereignty is never guaranteed by rhetoric, only by the ability to defend, define, and refuse to surrender it.