By Robbin Laird
The Trump Administration decision to intervene in Venzuela was certainly a decisive act. But acts are not strategies. My own sense is that the intervention opened up new strategic possibilities.
To explore this idea, I had the chance on January 21, 2026 to talk with one of the most articulate analysts of the issue, Gilbert Guerra. Gil (Gilbert) Guerra, an Immigration Policy Analyst at the Niskanen Center whose work focuses on immigration and U.S. foreign policy, demographic trends in irregular migration, and assimilation; previously a senior associate at the American Enterprise Institute’s academic programs department and a 2024 Latin America Fellow with Young Professionals in Foreign Policy.
The Trump administration’s intervention in Venezuela has created what immigration policy analyst Gilbert Guerra characterizes as a critical opening: strategic space for fundamental change in U.S.-Latin American relations. Yet as Guerra emphasizes throughout a recent discussion, creating space is not the same as having a strategy. The intervention has disrupted decades of drift, but without a coherent framework for transformation, that disruption risks becoming merely another episode in a long history of American inconsistency in the hemisphere.
Guerra frames the Venezuela crisis as one deteriorating for years while successive administrations avoided meaningful action. Relations became increasingly fraught following Hugo Chavez’s election and democracy’s gradual erosion in the early 2000s, reaching a critical inflection after Chavez’s death and Maduro’s ascension.
Under Chavez, Venezuela’s economy could still sustain most Venezuelans, preventing mass exodus. But as the economy collapsed under Maduro, Venezuela transformed from a regional problem into what Guerra describes as “a playground for China, Russia, and to a lesser extent, Iran.”
The fundamental strategic error was assuming slowly accumulating costs were acceptable. “Because the costs that the Maduro regime was imposing were happening very slowly, and were happening over time, and were happening in a way that responsibility was in some way diffuse, made it so that we thought that those costs were acceptable,” Guerra explains.
During the 2019 crisis, when the first Trump administration considered military intervention, the dominant logic was the “you break it, you buy it” framework inherited from Iraq. This reasoning, Guerra suggests, fundamentally misunderstood the dynamics at play.
Guerra credits Maduro with considerable tactical skill in forestalling American action. The Venezuelan leader created the appearance of openness to negotiation while never intending to follow through. With the Biden administration, Maduro signaled willingness to hold elections in 2024 and claimed he would abide by democratic principles, “obviously knowing that Biden was going to be in a position where he couldn’t actually enforce the outcome of the election.”
What this maneuvering obscured was the broader strategic damage Venezuela was inflicting: massive refugee flows, regional organized crime, and providing China, Russia, and Iran with a hemispheric foothold. Yet because no single action constituted a direct attack on the United States, conventional strategic thinking struggled to formulate a response.
Guerra challenges treating Venezuela primarily as a regional issue, arguing it must be understood within major power competition. American strategic discourse has largely failed to grasp these connections, continuing to treat hemispheric issues as separate from major power dynamics.
My friend and colleague, Dr. Kenneth Maxwell has argued that China has been building an economic position resembling something akin to the UK’s 19th-century informal empire, while Russia has used Venezuela as part of its shadow fleet operations and energy export infrastructure. The intervention therefore disrupted more than Venezuelan internal politics. It challenged Chinese economic positioning throughout Latin America and undermined Russian ability to sustain its war in Ukraine through energy exports.
Guerra identifies two particularly significant aspects of the intervention itself. Tactically, reports suggest the United States may have employed new sonic weapons to incapacitate Maduro’s bodyguards. “If those reports are true, it’s interesting to me that this was sort of the first use case for it,” Guerra notes. “It might have been actually a way to just test out its actual capabilities.” Even if the reports prove false, Guerra suggests they function as effective psychological operations, forcing adversaries to reassess what capabilities the United States possesses.
The political dimension revolves around the presence of a Chinese diplomatic delegation in Caracas at the time of the operation. While the administration maintains the timing was coincidental, driven by weather conditions and Maduro’s location, Guerra emphasizes that “the Chinese don’t seem to believe in coincidences.” They continue to believe the United States deliberately bombed their embassy in Belgrade as a signal, and they are unlikely to interpret the Venezuela operation differently.
Critically, Guerra notes that the Russians apparently learned of the operation but did not warn the Chinese. “Regardless of whether or not it was a coincidence, the Chinese are certainly not going to interpret the operation happening while the Chinese diplomatic delegation was there in Caracas, the fact that we didn’t give them any warning, for example, the fact that the Russians are reported to have learned of the operation and also not give the Chinese any warning, apparently, about this, all those things are things that, to me, are very interesting about the actual operation itself.”
The significance extends beyond the immediate tactical success. The fact that 32 of approximately 100 people killed in the operation were Cuban bodyguards protecting Maduro raises fundamental questions about sovereignty and influence. “What were Cuban bodyguards doing in Venezuela in the first place?” Guerra asks. “Why wasn’t Maduro being protected by Venezuelan bodyguards?”
Guerra challenges what he sees as a fundamental intellectual dishonesty in how American foreign policy debates treat hemispheric intervention. “The United States is so ashamed and has been so cowed over the years by its history of what it sees as unjust interventions in Latin America, some of which were genuinely shameful, some of which I think were defensible, that we no focus on the fact that the Venezuelans are not in a position to determine the future of Venezuela.”
This shame, Guerra argues, prevents clear-eyed analysis of alternatives. If the United States does not act as the primary player determining outcomes in Venezuela, the alternatives are Chinese autocracy or Russian kleptocracy. “At least having the United States be the primary player who’s actually determining outcomes in Venezuela means that at some point in the future, there’s going to be a democratic election in Venezuela, and we’re actually going to give the future of Venezuela back in the hands of Venezuelans.”
This pattern of overlooking the role that outside great powers have always played in Latin America distorts contemporary analysis. Critics question why the United States should determine what happens in Venezuela while ignoring the fact that Chinese and Russian involvement has already removed Venezuelan self-determination from the equation. The question is not whether outside powers will shape Venezuela’s future, but which outside power and to what end.
Guerra outlines contrasting possibilities for Venezuela’s future. The pessimistic case centers on the acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, whom the administration has empowered. Rodriguez “has historically been more tied to the Russians, has historically been seen more as an ally of the Cubans, has had more of an international intrigue and relationship, perhaps than other regime figures, has historically been seen as more of a hardliner.”
In this scenario, Guerra worries the administration may be “over learning the lessons of de-Baathification in Iraq.” The risk is creating a Venezuela that remains under control of “far left anti-American forces who are more or less buying their time until the Trump administration exits office.” Rodriguez could employ the same tactics Maduro used, stringing along negotiations about economic reorientation without ever delivering meaningful change.
The optimistic scenario aligns with what Secretary of State Marco Rubio has outlined: a transitional period focused on stabilization, preventing coups, followed by free and fair elections. Guerra notes that opposition leader Maria Corina Machado has been sidelined, partly due to personal dynamics with Trump and partly because “she doesn’t actually control the weapons inside of Venezuela. She doesn’t actually control any kind of armed force in Venezuela.”
Nevertheless, Guerra remains hopeful for elections where Machado could run freely and win with majority support. This would require navigating complex questions about oil infrastructure reconstruction, Chinese debt, and the role of Venezuelan armed forces. Trump has “already undercut her somewhat by publicly disrespecting her and by publicly saying that she doesn’t have support in Venezuela,” which complicates this path.
Guerra sees the intervention’s impact extending far beyond Venezuela itself. Russia’s position across Latin America is weakening significantly. Cuba faces near-collapse as Venezuelan oil support dries up. Nicaragua has curtailed anti-American activities out of fear of being targeted next. Mexico has seen increased exposure of Russian spy rings and faces greater pressure for cooperation.
For China, the setbacks are equally significant. “The direction that politically the region is taking, you see the rise of a lot more Western alliance, more right-leaning politicians in the region,” Guerra observes. He points to recent electoral victories in Chile and Argentina, and particularly to Honduras, where the winner “has announced that he is going to switch recognition by Honduras from Beijing back to Taiwan.”
This would represent a major diplomatic reversal, “the first time that someone switches the recognition back their way from all the diplomatic effort that they’ve spent.” Combined with upcoming elections in Colombia and Peru, Guerra sees potential for region-wide rejection of Chinese influence. “If these trends hold, you see actually the region independently and willingly rejecting any kind of a Chinese alternative or a Chinese-led more Pacific order to actually align closely with the United States instead.”
We then turned to the critical drug issue and the role of the cartels in both deciminating the politics of several Latin American countries and killing Americans in large numbers. Guerra emphasizes that violence remains the only language many drug organizations understand. Root causes approaches and educational programs cannot compete with the incentives and social structures these organizations offer.
He challenges the default assumption made often in U.S. policy circles that drugs represent an inevitable problem for which the United States bears primary responsibility. This resonates particularly with Hispanic Americans. “People who come here, who have these backgrounds, actually hate that more than maybe sometimes Americans do. They’re sort of more anti-drug, or at least harder on drugs, because they’ve seen it firsthand.” Having witnessed how cartels devastated their countries of origin, Hispanic immigrants often support stronger action precisely because they chose America to escape that reality.
In short, Guerra’s central concern is that the intervention has created opportunity without strategy. “We can look at this intervention as triggering events that could craft a very different policy in the region, for the United States vis-a-vis China and Russia and others, but we really need that policy.”
The Trump administration’s personalistic approach to foreign policy creates more its own barriers to doing so. While Trump has correctly characterized problems that previous administrations ignored, characterization is not the same as strategy. The administration needs what only Secretary Rubio might provide: strategic thinking that moves beyond disruption toward coherent transformation.
It is clear that we need desperately to craft a strategy, and that strategy needs engagement. And the Congress has to be engaged and the private sector has to be engaged.
This requires moving beyond partisan point-scoring to genuine debate about American interests and how to advance them. As Guerra frames the challenge to critics: “You can criticize it all you want, but if you want to criticize it, then next time you’re in power, go out there and do the same thing, but do it better. But don’t sit on the sidelines again and tell us that we have to accept endless drugs, endless unlimited migrations, endless proliferation of dictatorships in the hemisphere, unless you’re going to actually also do something about it.”
Guerra’s analysis reveals the Venezuela intervention as simultaneously necessary and insufficient. Necessary because accumulated costs across migration, drugs, great power competition, and regional stability had reached crisis levels. Insufficient because disruption alone does not constitute strategy.
The intervention has demonstrated that bold action can reshape regional dynamics, weakening both Chinese and Russian positions throughout Latin America while creating potential for democratic transitions. But potential requires strategy.
Guerra calls for serious strategic discourse about American policy in Latin America during great power competition. This means moving beyond both risk-averse incrementalism and personalistic disruption, recognizing that the Western Hemisphere is central to global power dynamics, not separate from them.
The intervention has opened strategic space for transformation. The harder work of defining that transformation remains.
Gil Guerra is an Immigration Policy Analyst at the Niskanen Center, where he focuses on immigration and foreign policy, the demographics of irregular migration, and assimilation processes. He is also a contributing writer at The Dispatch.
