The recent capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has resulted in renewed interest on what ‘regime change’ looks like when done from the outside. A great deal of commentary has fixated on whether the action was justified or how we should judge it in relation to the international system Yet lying in the background is a more neutral question: what does a transition away from the Maduro regime likely look like?
It is useful to think through the future trajectories of potential regime change in Venezuela for a variety of reasons, although for other reasons it is slightly more complicated than one might expect. This essay therefore explicitly ignores all policy, decision-making, or assessment elements to ongoing events in Venezuela. Instead, it tries to put some meat on the analytic bones of how we should think about the coming days, weeks, and months.
What we are left with is a series of plausible options for political transition, the most likely of which so far seems to be what political scientists term a ‘pacted transition.’ That is, a gradual, negotiated reformatting of the regime that keeps at least some of the old elite in place for a time while beginning a ticking clock towards structural regime change.
Externally-Imposed Regime Change and Its Challenges
The recent intervention into Venezuela (involving kinetic strike on military assets and infrastructure as well as the non-voluntary exfiltration of a governing apex executive) has already been compared to prior US efforts at regime change.
The most fruitful example raised so far as been Panama in 1989, with the extraction of Manuel Noriega under the George H. W. Bush administration. Other, less helpful, examples raised include Iraq and Afghanistan. It is natural to look for analogies to current operations in previous efforts of what we can generically term ‘externally-imposed regime change.’
That is, the overthrow or conclusion of a regime (here understood simply as the key political elite broadly in charge of a country – or slightly more formally as the ‘decision-making and decision-influencing set of elites’) via coercive, violent force from outside the state. This compares domestic forms of peaceful regime change via protest and elite defection or violent regime change via coup, civil war, or revolution.
The problem is that externally-imposed regime change is highly heterogeneous in its characteristics and the universe of cases is both 1) relatively small if you restrict to the post-Cold War period or even 1945-onward; and 2) not particularly similar across cases.
At that level of category abstraction, it includes the American toppling of Saddam Hussein (leading to a decades-long occupation and transitional government) as well as the Stalinist imposition of communism across the Eastern Bloc in the 1940s. These are not the same thing, and lessons in how the US achieved regime change are of limited use in explaining the spread of communism 60 years before.
Similarly, many cases of regime change involve local actors with support from the US (LatAm/Asia) or USSR/Russia (E. Europe/Eurasia) or France (Africa), rather than direct, violent intervention by the outside actor. This was the case in many Latin American cases—we did not overthrow Allende, Pinochet did. We helped and made him more confident in ‘cutting the Gordian Knot,’ but we didn’t do it ourselves, unlike in Venezuela today.
It probably matters that such a coup was from the inside, but why exactly? This raises a set of obvious questions: when is a given observed case of regime change ‘externally-imposed’ vs. ‘externally-supported,’ does this distinction matter, and if so, in what ways?
Below is output from Google’s AI Search function to the query, “list of externally imposed regime change.” Even the very mediocre AI verbiage makes clear that these cases are not in fact all the same—you can cut them in different conceptual ways, depending on what question you’re interested in. Some of them may not even be coded correctly at all.
Figure 1. Very mediocre AI output from Goggle when you search “list of externally imposed regime change.”
This is all made worse by the fact that the Venezuelan case, as of 5 January 2026, is not self-evidently a full regime change. At least not yet.
At the time of this writing, only Maduro and his wife have been removed from power – the rest of the Bolivarian Republic’s regime elite are still in place, and the Vice-President is currently acting as President. What do you call a regime that took a haircut on its leader, but everyone else is still in place?
Maybe you say it is not a regime change at all and leave it at that. But, more likely for now, this also may simply be a function of taking a snapshot view of what will be a slightly longer process than an hours-long special forces operation. Sometimes we are a bit impatient with these sorts of things. Remember, even Iraq took a few weeks.
What Sort of Transition Should We Expect?
Let’s assume that the Venezuelan regime is nevertheless on its last legs. But we clearly don’t have great examples to work with on what comes next. What we can do is mix what we do know about externally-imposed regime change with more general lessons on power transition in authoritarian regimes. There are four basic patterns with reasonable likelihood:
- Imposed factional executive
- ‘Pacted transition’
- Military guardianship
- [secret fourth thing]
Imposed Factional Executive. The first is what many kind of expect: the exiled opposition leaders María Corina Machado or Edmundo González Urrutia become president by imposition, then presumably hold elections to confirm her/him and elect a new Congress. This would be directly imposing a chosen figure (with international legitimacy) to head a new government.
Although many initially thought this was the plan, to impose an executive is an extensive effort. It requires that significant prepwork has already been made for a smooth transition. The imposed executive needs to be inserted into the country and then needs to be allowed to assume power in a physical sense (even if backed or puppeted by decision-makers in Washington).
This means you need to arrange military defections and guarantees, quick handovers of various institutions to people chosen by the political opposition, and coordinating the activity of domestic opposition parties to support seizing said institutions.
It almost always requires boots on the ground. The Red Army in Prague or Budapest. US forces in Baghdad and Kabul. French paratroopers in N’Djamena or Bangui. Where else does a guarantee of immediate transition come from, if not backed by direct military force?
So far, this has not happened.
Pacted Transition. The second option is more gradual, and indeed somewhat unusual in the realm of externally-imposed regime changes. Gradual regime change is usually termed a ‘pacted transition,’ referencing that the process of regime change is not sudden, but the result of a negotiated pact – one that can take months or even years to achieve.
The pacted transition was a common means of democratization in Latin America in the 1980s, with a variety of juntas undertaking slow, negotiated processes of giving power first back to civilians, and then scheduling free elections on a set timetable. The key was negotiation between the ‘moderate’ (read: institutionalist) opposition and the ‘moderate’ (read: open to change) regime elites, sometimes termed “softliners.” This process involved marginalizing, or in some cases even dismissing/exiling, hardline figures while similarly ignoring radical opposition voices.
The result of these elite pacts between softliner regime elites and moderate oppositionists was movement toward new constitutions being written and a gradual exchange of personnel – the opposition figures into power, government figures into either retirement or as a new political opposition.
As you can imagine, this process often involved difficult compromises that exchanged the gradual, voluntary relinquishment of power by regime elites with legal guarantees of immunity and non-prosecution. We also saw dynamics like this in Eastern Europe during the fall of communism and in East Asia during the era of ‘democratization from strength.’
The critical feature of any pacted transition is that it requires much of the Maduro regime to stay in place while roundtable negotiations are set up with the opposition for a gradual, rather than sharp and quick, handover.
This safeguards the regime elite to make it less likely things fall apart into violence or state collapse. Which as you can imagine is a real concern, but also has major frustrations intentionally built into the process.
Pacted transitions have no set timeline or single model of negotiations, nor do they necessarily result in the same degree of democratization (however one would like to define exactly what that means). We do know they are more likely when the opposition is institutionalized and coherent, with support from powerful religious or trade groups.
Fortunately, the Venezuelan opposition has experience with being relatively well-coordinated (certainly better than many modern E. European and Eurasian cases that I know well), which is promising.
Military Guardianship. Regime change, especially when supported rather than imposed from the outside, often comes from coup. In this case, with external backing some group of general officers (or even colonels, if your level of development is a bit lower) takes over the regime and declares an emergency junta to safeguard the nation and prepare for an undefined transition down the road.
The benefit of regime change via coup-from-within is that it cleans part of the government of old regime elites while keeping others. In that case, usually the elites most personally connected to the old leader are dispatched, as well as any vying power center, while military and security elites, alongside civilian technocrats, tend to stay.
What is interesting is how much this path does not yet seem to have been taken. Standard characterizations of the elite ecosystem within Venezuela stress three key pillars: the sibling duo of acting president Delcy Rodríguez and her brother Jorge (speaker of the National Assembly), Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López. The latter two have considerable coercive force at their command, in theory.
Either Cabello or Lopez would be potential choices for running an internal coup, or better yet one of their deputies or (secret) rivals. Some reporting suggests the US was in contact with Padrino López and he turned it down, although take all of this with various grains of salt. And as much as these could be potential putschists, they could also be the first sign of a defection cascade that would strengthen softliner hands and accelerate transition, especially if they flee abroad.
We do not seem to be going down any variant of the Pinochet route so far.
A Secret Fourth Thing. A final idea would be to take the President’s words that we will “run” Venezuela literally and imagine some kind of rulership directly from DC. Perhaps a viceroyalty run out the State Department at a distance, partially privatized through oil companies.
From the perspective of some commentators, this might even involve keeping the acting president and much of her fellow regime elites in office—at least for a while—as they act as conveyor belts for Washington to reorganize the country’s economy to its liking.
The actual wording about ‘running’ Venezuela (and then saying almost nothing after that) mostly seems to be an artifact of a journalist’s question rather than comprising the layout of a plan itself. And given the very short timeframe, it is not unreasonable to keep plans close to the chest—while it is unreasonable to make assumptions from such limited data.
But in any case, it is worth noting that we could end up with a very truncated pacted transition that keeps even more of the regime elite in place than usual, and with certain specific connections to the externally-imposing country that we often fail to model otherwise.
Post-transition politics in democratizing countries is always more complicated, more compromised, and less idealistic than you’d like to think. Many former regime elites find themselves back in power quickly, either rebranding as centrists and technocrats or simply winning a subsequent election a few years down the road. The people you thought would be running the show can be pushed aside by events quite suddenly, while sometimes institutional change is far longer in coming than expected.
In any case, that is all ahead of us. And these paths are ideal-types. Reality will be a mix of one or more, or may decide on a different course altogether.
‘Pacted Transition’ is the Key
Even so, one is left with the idea of the pacted transition as among the most likely, and certainly most feasibly successful, model of regime change on offer. Given the capture of Maduro was the barest minimum of a ‘decapitation strike’ possible, there are simply not assets in place for an immediate imposition of opposition leadership into the executive. Negotiations between Washington DC, official Caracas, and the opposition in exile are far more likely given the current aggregation of forces, at least given our considerable limitations on what we have observed so far.
This state of affairs could absolutely change in the coming weeks, especially if there is a massive defection of elites from the old regime or if the country descends into violent rebellion as parts of the security services and military beginning to scope out territory. Once there is a major fracturing of the elite, a slow and gradual transition could easily quicken. Indeed, there is a sequential logic whereby an attempt at a pacted transition is made—and if failed—more direct measures either along further imposition or wrangling up an aligned coup could readily become option B.
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