Removing a dictator is not what anyone is upset about.
That needs to be said plainly, because a large share of the reaction to Venezuela has been intentionally flattened into a dishonest binary. Nicolás Maduro is not a misunderstood figure. He is not a noble anti-imperialist hero crushed by Western paranoia. He presided over a state hollowed out by corruption, repression, and economic collapse. You do not have to defend him, excuse him, or mourn his fall to ask serious questions about how the United States acted, what legal justifications were constructed after the fact, and what power arrangements are being assembled in his absence.
Reducing criticism of U.S. actions to “support for Maduro” is not analysis … it’s a rhetorical escape hatch. It avoids engaging with how power actually works. Opposition to a method is not allegiance to a man. In global politics, the how matters as much as the who, because methods set precedent, and precedent outlives villains.
The real question is not whether Maduro deserved to fall.
The real question is what is being built in the vacuum his removal creates.
Because this does not look like liberation.
It looks like exit positioning.
Exit positioning is what governments do when they believe their governing window is closing. It is what power looks like when legitimacy is no longer the objective and time becomes the enemy. It is the shift from shaping the future to insulating oneself from it. When leaders stop thinking about institutions they will inhabit and start thinking about arrangements that will survive them, priorities change. Governing gives way to locking in narratives, contracts, and leverage that will outlast elections, congressional backlash, and historical judgment.
This isn’t speculative psychology. Political economy has a name for it: terminal discounting. As an actor’s perceived time horizon collapses, the value they assign to future consequences collapses with it. Long-term legal risk, reputational damage, and institutional decay get heavily discounted. Short-term gains loom larger. Risk tolerance spikes. Behavior that would appear reckless under a long horizon becomes rational under a short one.
Mancur Olson captured this decades ago with his distinction between stationary and roving bandits. A stationary bandit expects to remain in place, so they invest in public goods and institutional stability. A roving bandit expects to leave, so they take what they can while they can. History is full of variations on this theme: aging autocrats draining state coffers as health fails, lame-duck governments rushing privatizations, regimes facing imminent loss trading sovereignty for short-term security. The pattern repeats because the logic is not ideological. It is mathematical.
Seen through that lens, Venezuela stops looking like a foreign-policy gamble and starts looking like a balance-sheet maneuver.
The first move in that maneuver is shock. A dramatic action collapses debate, dominates headlines, and creates an emergency frame. In those moments, complexity dies. The public is forced to choose sides before it understands the terrain. Legal arguments trail optics. Urgency becomes the substitute for justification.
But the goal is not chaos. Chaos is bad for contracts.
What follows shock is continuity without transformation. The administrative machinery of the Venezuelan state remains intact. There is no serious push for democratic rebuilding, constitutional reform, or institutional renewal. That absence is not an oversight. It is design. Reform introduces uncertainty. Elections threaten deals. Transparency complicates extraction. Stability … even brittle, morally compromised stability … is far more valuable than democracy if the objective is to lock in outcomes quickly.
This is why continuity leadership matters. Someone still has to sign.
The legal system then enters the picture, but not as a truth-finding institution. Law here is being used as an optics engine. Charging Maduro is not primarily about prosecution. It is about retroactive justification.
If the administration did not charge him, the maritime strikes become much harder to defend. They start to look like uses of force against a sovereign state without a declared war, without clear imminence, and without consent. That opens the door to allegations of international-law violations … questions of proportionality, jurisdiction, and civilian risk. Silence, in this context, is not neutral. Silence implies weakness in the justification.
Charging him closes that door rhetorically.
Once charges exist, officials can endlessly point to them. “We acted against a criminal enterprise.” “These were not civilian vessels.” “He was charged with narcotrafficking.” The evidentiary strength of those claims becomes secondary. The existence of charges alone reframes the debate. It muddies the water enough to blunt scrutiny.
A trial, however, would be dangerous. Trials require discovery. Discovery requires evidence. Evidence gets cross-examined, challenged, and potentially contradicted. A courtroom is the one place where narrative collapses under pressure.
That is why a plea arrangement … fast, narrow, and tightly controlled … is the optimal outcome. A plea produces an admission without discovery. It allows the government to put something on the record linking criminal activity to maritime operations without ever testing the claim. The admission does not have to be comprehensive. It does not have to withstand adversarial scrutiny. It simply has to exist.
A pardon then wipes punishment while preserving the narrative. The talking point remains. The admission remains. Judicial exposure disappears. Critics will say the pardon proves the case was weak. Supporters will say mercy followed accountability. Meanwhile, the administration gets exactly what it needed: retroactive legitimacy for the strikes without a court ever examining the facts.
This is procedural containment. Law used as insulation rather than adjudication.
All of this aligns cleanly with terminal discounting. Litigation takes years. International inquiries move slowly. Congressional investigations stall, restart, and lose momentum. Even if accountability eventually arrives, it is likely to arrive long after the political actors who made the decisions are gone, retired, or irrelevant. When leaders believe that is true, they behave accordingly.
International backlash, in this framework, is irrelevant. The administration has already demonstrated that allied trust and multilateral approval are not meaningful constraints. Those costs are already priced in. Outrage carries no marginal penalty with its base. If legitimacy is already depleted, there is no reason to protect it.
What matters instead is controlling the narrative long enough for deals to be signed.
And this is where private equity becomes central.
The most consequential planning does not need to happen inside government. In fact, it is safer if it does not. Government records are archived, subpoenaed, and fought over in courts. Private capital’s internal communications are not. Investment-committee memos, election-scenario planning, regulatory-arbitrage analysis, deal sequencing … all of it lives outside NARA, outside FOIA, and largely outside public oversight.
The state opens the window.
Capital exploits it.
Oil plays a role here, but not as the long-term prize. Low prices suppress drilling incentives. Production can be maintained in harvest mode without major capital investment. Oil provides liquidity and near-term cash flow. It keeps systems functional. It buys time.
The real leverage lives downstream.
This is where the CITGO situation becomes critical. Downstream assets … refineries, terminals, storage, distribution … are chokepoints. They determine routing, pricing, and margin regardless of who owns the upstream resource. Control the outlet and you control the flow. A downstream acquisition allows private capital to hedge against domestic re-regulation without drilling a single new well. It converts geopolitical chaos into durable balance-sheet position. It is cleaner, safer, and far more resilient than upstream conquest.
And then there are the minerals … the longest play of all.
Private equity does not need immediate rare-earth extraction to control future rare-earth supply. The asset is not the mineral. The asset is the option. Exploration rights. Exclusive offtakes. Processing capacity. Export certification. Priority supply clauses. These determine availability years down the line.
The United States and its industries will still need these inputs regardless of who holds office. Defense systems, advanced electronics, energy infrastructure … demand here is policy-inelastic. Substitution is limited. Reshoring takes decades. If private capital controls the constraints, it controls leverage over future administrations. Quietly. Indirectly. Permanently.
That is why the minerals play matters more than oil in the long run. Oil pays the bills. Minerals shape the future.
And this is not unfalsifiable. There are things to watch.
If this is truly exit positioning, you will see infrastructure deals before drilling. You will see long-dated concessions with arbitration clauses outside Venezuela. You will see offtake agreements signed before production increases. You will see exploration rights emphasized over extraction. You will see “formalization” of illegal mining framed as cleanup while control consolidates. You will see downstream assets tied to Venezuelan supply. You will see narrative repetition without evidentiary escalation. And if political control changes in Washington, you will see how difficult and slow it is to unwind what was quietly locked in.
When accountability eventually comes, it will be diffuse and symbolic. Complex systems protect everyone except the figure at the top. Blame funnels upward. Years later, one name absorbs the weight while the rest dissolve into process, classification, and institutional fog. By then, the deals are old, the assets entrenched, and the leverage baked in.
That is not cynicism. It is pattern recognition.
So yes, Maduro is gone. That is not the issue. Power did not leave with him. It relocated. What is being built in his absence is not democracy, not reconstruction, not sovereignty restored. It is a set of constraints designed to survive electoral change and limit future choice.
That is why this moment deserves scrutiny.
The danger is not that a dictator fell.
The danger is that, in the process, legitimacy was replaced with optics, law was replaced with narrative, and the future was quietly contracted away … not to voters, not to institutions, but to structures designed to endure without accountability.
That is what exit positioning looks like when a government believes the end is already written.
Not a plan to govern.
A plan to endure.
