Trump Picked This Fight With Maduro. He Can’t Back Down.

The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado and the presidential candidate Edmundo González at a rally in Caracas, Venezuela, in July 2024. Credit…Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

On Wednesday in Oslo, officials are holding an award ceremony for the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to promote democracy in Venezuela. But in Washington her insistence that President Nicolás Maduro must go, and the Trump administration’s apparent agreement, has been making people nervous. Critics warn that ousting Mr. Maduro could turn the country into another Iraq or a Libya on the Caribbean — a collapsed state, carved up by armed factions, worse than the dictatorship it replaced. Better, they say, to live with an odious ruler than to risk another chaotic experiment in regime change.

This is the wrong analogy. It misunderstands what Venezuela has achieved and what is at stake for the United States in the struggle for Venezuela’s future. In light of the diplomatic pressure and military assets Washington has committed to the Caribbean, backing off now would not avoid disaster; it would constitute one. It would signal that a criminal dictatorship masquerading as a state can stare down the United States and win.

Venezuela has done what Iraq and Libya, also under the thumbs of dictators, didn’t get the chance to do: It has cast its votes for a new government. The opposition candidate Edmundo González is widely believed to have won the country’s 2024 presidential election. Tally sheets gathered and preserved by tens of thousands of volunteers across the country showed Mr. González leading by almost 40 points, winning in every state and in about 90 percent of Venezuela’s 335 municipalities. Independent analyses validate the veracity of these results.

Assuming these figures are accurate, this was not a marginal, contested outcome. It was a societal landslide achieved despite regime repression, persecution and the disenfranchisement of up to three million eligible voters in the country, as well as most of the eight million or so Venezuelans living abroad.

This is what Ms. Machado means when she insists that her movement is “not asking for regime change” but asking for “respect of the will of the people.” The comparison so often made in Washington these days between Ms. Machado and Ahmad Chalabi, the longtime exile who persuaded George W. Bush that Iraq would be a cakewalk, gets things backward. Iraq’s political order after the 2003 U.S. invasion was designed in a hurry under American occupation and essentially imposed from the outside. Venezuela’s new order-in-waiting has already been chosen by the country’s people.

The opposition does not hold the guns. It may command democratic legitimacy and popular support, but it has no militias, no armed insurgency and no territorial control. The armed forces remain the single dominant coercive institution in the country. This configuration makes civil war unlikely — you need at least two comparable armed factions for that — but also makes regime change from below next to impossible. That is why credible military pressure matters; in its absence, there is no reason for insiders to break with the regime.

President Trump has not publicly stated that the goal of his Caribbean campaign is to oust Mr. Maduro. If that is his ultimate objective, he and Ms. Machado will need to collaborate to rebalance the incentives of those in power in Venezuela. On top of military pressure, they should develop multiple credible offramps that drive a wedge between the ruling clique and the broader security and bureaucratic apparatus.

This differentiated amnesty approach could see Mr. Trump offer a narrow window of safe passage to protected exile for those responsible for crimes against humanity, and Ms. Machado could extend broad domestic amnesty to the wider universe of officers and officials whose complicity never crossed that threshold. Her commitment to amnesty would be credible, as any new democratic government would need the collaboration of members of the armed forces, the police and the bureaucracy to gain and maintain control of the state.

The message would be simple: The small circle around Mr. Maduro has a time-limited offer to leave under strict international guarantees; the vast majority of officers can stay, keep their salaries and pensions and help manage an orderly transition to democracy. If enough of the most compromised figures would accept the offramp to exile, fearing military action or betrayal, the regime would disintegrate. If insiders wouldn’t meet initial offer deadlines, the United States could use progressive, targeted action to credibly convey that offramps remain the best option without having to put U.S. boots on the ground.

What, then, of the fear that a post-Maduro Venezuela will collapse into chaos? Any violent resistance to a new government would probably come from small criminal factions — guerrillas, prison gangs, paramilitary units, mining mafias and drug-trafficking networks embedded in parts of the state.

With the disputed 2024 election results, a hypothetical Chavista insurgency would struggle to recruit or claim a legitimate mandate, limiting its political threat and making something like a nationwide civil war unlikely. For a fledgling democracy to have to confront armed groups would be challenging, but it would not be unprecedented in Latin America — or even in Venezuela, where a Cuban-promoted insurgency was defeated by the country’s nascent democracy in the 1960s.

The real danger lies in the status quo. The Maduro regime has helped turn Venezuela into a safe haven for U.S. rivals, a launchpad for criminal activities far beyond its borders, an important logistics hub for drug trafficking and a home to Colombian guerrillas operating with regime acquiescence. This is not a frozen problem. It is a metastasizing one, just a few hours from Florida.

The United States has deployed major military assets to the Caribbean and is investing heavily in diplomatic pressure. The Trump administration’s message, so far, has been that a narcoterrorist state is not something Washington will accept on its doorstep.

If, at this point, the United States flinches — if it allows Mr. Maduro to declare a victory in an election that independent analysts say was stolen, ride out sanctions and wait out a carrier strike group — the precedent will be read carefully in Moscow, Tehran, Beijing and beyond. Strategic defeat is not just losing a war. It is yet more proof that U.S. red lines are written in disappearing ink.

No one should romanticize what will come after Mr. Maduro. Venezuela’s transition may well be flawed and conflictual, and any transitional justice arrangements could certainly prove disappointing for the victims of Mr. Maduro’s crimes. But the relevant comparison is not between an Iraq-style morass or a Libya-style civil war and overnight democratic peace. It is between a messy but manageable democratic transition led by a legitimate government and the entrenchment of an autocratic and repressive regime that has welcomed the worst international forces into our hemisphere and abused the human rights of its own people.

For Venezuelans, even an imperfect democracy, led by the president they elected and supported by the international community and a returning diaspora, would be an enormous improvement. For the United States, helping Venezuelans enforce their vote is no longer an option; it is a test of whether a criminal dictatorship allied with America’s worst adversaries can be allowed to win a staring contest, with the whole world watching.