Depose Maduro

President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela campaigns on Sunday, July 28, in Caracas, July 18, 2024. Maduro’s government has for months been detaining foreigners, whom experts say will be used as bargaining chips as the autocrat begins a third term in office in January 2025. (Alejandro Cegarra/The New York Times)

By Bret Stephens

Donald Trump has set some grandiose foreign-policy goals for his second term, from buying Greenland to ending the war in Ukraine “in a day.” Here’s one goal that is overdue, morally right and in our national security interest: deposing the regime of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, through coercive diplomacy if possible or force if necessary.

Last week, Maduro was sworn in for a third six-year term after a fraudulent election last July that independent surveys show he lost by about 35 percentage points. His opponent, Edmundo González, is in exile; the head of the opposition movement, María Corina Machado, had to spend months in hiding. As many as 10 Americans are languishing in Venezuelan jails on dubious charges. The regime has treated past American prisoners as political hostages.

That’s not even the worst of it. As of November, the regime held an estimated 1,800 political prisoners. Since Maduro came to power, close to 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country, amounting to a quarter of the population; at least 600,000 are now in the United States. Malnutrition affects millions; the crime rate was among the highest in the world in 2024. This is a country that was once among the wealthiest in Latin America.

And Maduro continues to court our enemies, starting with Iran, which has reportedly established a “drone development base” at a Venezuelan air base.

What could bring the regime down? In his first term, Trump tried punitive economic sanctions. They didn’t work. The Biden administration eased some of those sanctions in hopes of better behavior from Maduro. It didn’t work. Last year’s election plainly didn’t work. A $25 million bounty for Maduro’s arrest, imposed this month by the United States, also won’t work, since it only serves as an incentive for Maduro to hold on more tightly to power.

There’s always the possibility of a coup, but the army’s senior ranks have remained loyal — for good reason: Senior officials have long been suspected of turning the country “into a global hub for cocaine trafficking and money laundering,” according to a 2015 Wall Street Journal article. There were also the stirrings of a popular revolt in 2019, but it fizzled: The regime seems to have learned from its friends in Havana that mass emigration is a good way of depleting a nation of its most discontented, energetic and talented citizens.

Economist Herb Stein famously said that if something can’t go on forever, it will stop. It’s a truism that isn’t really true. The so-called Bolivarian revolution that started with Hugo Chávez’s rise to power in 1999 (once cheered on by the likes of Naomi Klein and Jeremy Corbyn) should have failed a long time ago. It hasn’t. “Th’ abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power,” Shakespeare’s Brutus says in “Julius Caesar.” Maduro’s is a regime without remorse.

That means the only thing that will dislodge Maduro and his cronies is the combination of a powerful incentive and a credible threat.

The incentive is an offer that he and his henchmen go into permanent exile, probably to Cuba or Russia, along with a guarantee of amnesty for all Venezuelan military and intelligence officials who stay behind and pledge loyalty to a government led by the legitimate president. The threat is U.S. military intervention of the sort that in 1990 swiftly ended the regime of Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega. That could be followed by extradition and prosecution in U.S. courts: In Noriega’s case, it led to 27 years of imprisonment. American troops withdrew swiftly, and Panama has been a democracy ever since.

If this sounds bellicose, it’s by design: Maduro and his cronies will relinquish power peacefully only if they are convinced the alternative is worse. The point of a powerful threat is that it reduces the chances of having to carry through with it.

And if we must? Military intervention always entails risks, lost lives and unintended consequences, even against a weak military widely detested by its own people. It should be undertaken only if it is in an urgent and compelling national interest. Putting an end to a criminal regime that is a source of drugs, mass migration and Iranian influence in the Americas should not be a hard sell with the incoming administration.

It shouldn’t be a hard sell for liberals, either. The moral basis for deposing Maduro is clear: He stole the election, terrorizes his opponents and brutalizes his people. He shows no sign of letting up, much less letting go. Every other option for political change has been attempted. How much more suffering are Venezuelans supposed to endure, and how much worse does this hemispheric crisis have to get, before the nightmare finally ends?

The president-elect inspires a lot of nervousness, loathing and fear. Like it or, probably, not, that’s the man Americans elected. His choice for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, understands better than most Americans the real nature of these tropical despotisms. Ending Maduro’s long reign of terror is a good way to start their administration — and send a signal to tyrants elsewhere that American patience with disorder and danger eventually runs out.