Trump Says the U.S. Will ‘Run’ Venezuela. History Knows How This Ends

By Ephraim Agbo 

The spectacle has reached its climax. The strongman—long accused of narcotics trafficking, state plunder, and authoritarian brutality—has been seized, extradited, and placed before an American court. The image is one of closure, of decisive justice finally delivered. Yet history warns that this moment of apparent finality is almost always deceptive. The removal of a ruler does not resolve a national crisis; it merely exposes it.

The year is not 1989, and the defendant is not Manuel Noriega. But the questions that haunted Panama in the aftermath of Operation Just Cause now echo unmistakably through Venezuela: what survives when a regime’s figurehead is torn away by force? And more unsettling still—who benefits from what replaces him?

The parallel with Panama is not a crude analogy. It is a historical echo. It reveals that regime change, when externally imposed, is less an ending than a violent reordering of uncertainty.

The False Comfort of Decapitation

In Panama, the fall of Noriega produced the illusion of resolution. The dictator was captured. The Panamanian Defense Forces were dismantled. A civilian president, Guillermo Endara, was installed. From afar, the sequence resembled a clean surgical operation: remove the tumor, restore the patient.

But states are not bodies; they are ecosystems. Panama’s transition was born not in legitimacy but in trauma. Entire neighborhoods were destroyed. Civilian deaths were minimized in official narratives but etched deeply into national memory. The new political order functioned, but it did so under the unmistakable shadow of its origins. Sovereignty returned gradually, never fully disentangled from the conditions of its suspension.

Venezuela now stands at a similar juncture—but with far more daunting structural realities. Maduro’s arrest severs the symbolic head of Chavismo, yet the body remains intact and restless. Unlike Panama’s compact and hierarchical military apparatus, Venezuela’s power structure is diffuse, hybrid, and deeply criminalized. It is embedded not only in the armed forces and intelligence agencies, but in illicit gold mining, oil smuggling, narcotics routes, and transnational militias.

The first lesson Panama teaches, then, is brutally simple: decapitation is not dismantling. Removing a ruler does not dissolve the incentives, loyalties, and profit structures that sustained him. It merely forces them to adapt.

The Logic of Manageability

After Noriega, Washington faced an immediate dilemma: how to stabilize a shattered state without becoming indefinitely responsible for it. The solution was pragmatic rather than principled. The U.S. worked with “acceptable” elites—figures who could guarantee basic order, reopen the economy, and prevent collapse. Justice for past crimes became secondary to functionality. Stability was defined not as legitimacy, but as predictability.

Venezuela now offers the same temptation, only amplified. With Maduro gone, constitutional formalism elevates Vice President Delcy Rodríguez—a consummate regime insider whose sudden language of cooperation signals not reform, but survival. She offers what Washington values most in the immediate term: access to the bureaucracy, channels to the military, and a pathway to restart oil production without tearing down the state.

President Trump’s assertion that the United States will “run” Venezuela until a “safe transition” crystallizes this logic. It is not the language of liberation; it is the language of administration. It frames Venezuela less as a sovereign polity in recovery than as a system to be managed, optimized, and eventually handed off.

Panama demonstrates the long-term cost of this approach. The country stabilized, democratized formally, and grew economically—but its democracy remained thin, its inequalities persistent, and its foundational violence unresolved. The bargain succeeded operationally while failing morally. Venezuela, with its scale, polarization, and armed non-state actors, risks an even more fragile version of this outcome: a managed peace built on unhealed fracture.

Oil and the Politics of Forgetting

Panama’s post-invasion recovery was accelerated by a single, overriding asset: the Canal. Its efficient operation became both an economic engine and a political anesthetic. Growth substituted for reckoning. Infrastructure replaced memory. The past was not resolved; it was paved over.

Venezuela’s equivalent is oil. PDVSA is not merely an economic institution; it is the gravitational center of power. Whoever controls oil revenue controls the tempo and direction of the transition. A rapid reopening of the oil sector—especially under U.S. supervision—could stabilize markets, reduce migration, and restore basic services. But it would also risk laundering authority back to the same networks that hollowed the state, now rebranded as indispensable technocrats.

Panama teaches a sobering truth: economic normalization can become a form of amnesia. A state can be made functional long before it is made just. In Venezuela, oil may once again finance order without accountability, continuity without consent.

Four Futures, with History Watching

Viewed through Panama’s historical prism, Venezuela’s possible futures sharpen into four stark trajectories:

1. Managed Transactional Stability
   The most probable outcome. A U.S.-brokered arrangement with regime insiders restores oil flows and calms humanitarian pressures. Elections may occur, but power remains bounded by elite bargains. This is Panama’s path—stability achieved, democracy constrained, sovereignty qualified.

2. Fragmented Authority and Chronic Conflict
   Venezuela’s armed networks are more autonomous than Panama’s ever were. If no central authority consolidates control, the state may fragment into militarized zones governed by generals, colectivos, and criminal syndicates. This is the outcome Panama narrowly avoided—and Venezuela may not.

3. Sovereign Democratic Reconstruction
   The most legitimate and least likely path. It requires resisting the allure of quick stability, dismantling coercive networks, and empowering a unified democratic opposition. Panama’s experience suggests how difficult this is once transactional compromises are made early.

4. Geopolitical Proxy Contestation
   Here the Panama analogy collapses entirely. Noriega stood largely alone. Maduro does not. Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba have material and strategic stakes that extend beyond one leader. Venezuela risks becoming not a post-authoritarian state, but a contested geopolitical arena.

The Deeper Lesson Panama Leaves Unfinished

Panama survived its intervention. It rebuilt, normalized, and re-entered the global system. But it did so under conditions Venezuela does not share: smaller scale, weaker criminal penetration, and a geopolitical moment that permitted focused external management.

The transferable lesson is not optimism—it is restraint. Panama shows that externally imposed regime change creates space, but does not determine what fills it. It privileges the manageable over the legitimate, the efficient over the just, the short term over the structural.

Maduro’s arrest, like Noriega’s before it, is not an ending. It is an inflection point—one that transfers responsibility from a single man to a complex web of actors now shaping Venezuela’s fate. The danger lies not in intervention itself, but in believing that intervention resolves what only long, painful political reconstruction can.

History offers no assurances. It offers only this warning: the afterlife of regime change is always longer, more ambiguous, and more treacherous than the moment of removal. Venezuela now enters that afterlife. What emerges will depend not on how decisively power was seized—but on how wisely it is restrained.