Washington’s New Doctrine Meets Caracas’ Old Regime; Five Likely Futures for Venezuela

Simeone Azoska
Geostrategist & Human Security Analyst
When the United States rewrites its National Security Strategy (2025) with “America First” as the organizing principle, countries sitting on oil, migration routes, and geopolitical fault lines should read it not as theory but as a draft of their future. Venezuela sits at the intersection of all three.

Simeone Azoska

The new strategy, shaped by a Trump White House bent on reviving a Monroe Doctrine for the twenty-first century, does three things that matter profoundly for Venezuela. Thus, it recenters the Western Hemisphere as a primary theater; it elevates energy security and border control to existential concerns; and it normalizes coercive economic tools and limited force as routine instruments of statecraft (Atlantic Council 2025; Brookings Institution 2025).

Overlay that with Venezuela’s reality; a disputed 2024 presidential election that much of the democratic world views as deeply flawed; a Government that has already survived a decade of sanctions; at least 6.7 million Venezuelans displaced across Latin America and beyond; and a simmering territorial dispute with Guyana in an oil-rich zone (Al Jazeera 2024; CEBRI 2024; International Organization for Migration 2024).

If you take the new US strategy seriously and treat it as the key driver of US foreign policy, five outcomes emerge as structurally plausible. None is inevitable, but together they define a narrow corridor in which Venezuela’s future is likely to unfold.

The first posibility is a Calibrated Containment: Maduro Survives Under a Tighter Siege. This is the most likely outcome (rough order of probability: 40%)
The basic logic of the new US strategy is not regime change at any cost, but risk-managed dominance in the Americas. The Western Hemisphere is framed as the priority front for countering migration, drugs, and Chinese/Russian influence (Atlantic Council 2025; El País English 2025). Venezuela is not just another authoritarian state; it is an oil super-reserve, a corridor for transnational crime, and a symbol of US resolve in its historic “backyard.”

Under this logic, Washington’s baseline posture looks like calibrated containment:
Sanctions and tariffs become a permanent architecture, not a temporary bargaining chip. The new tariff threat,penalizing any country that imports Venezuelan oil with a 25 percent duty on its exports to the US ,extends pressure beyond Caracas to third countries and companies. This is classic secondary sanctions by another name (Congressional Research Service 2025).

Limited, reversible concessions are tied to specific behavior. Biden-era easing of oil sanctions in 2023, granted in exchange for electoral guarantees for the 2024 vote, has already been rolled back by the Trump administration on the grounds that Nicolás Maduro failed to deliver credible elections (Winston & Strawn LLP 2023; Al Jazeera 2025). That creates a precedent: Caracas can rent, but not own, sanctions relief.

Deportation flights and migration deals continue even amid rhetorical escalation. Despite threats to “close” Venezuelan airspace and dramatic language about drug cartels, deportation flights and migrant repatriation have resumed, with thousands returned on US-chartered or state-run flights in 2025 (Reuters 2025; VisaHQ News 2025). That signals a transactional lane that both sides are willing to keep open.

From Caracas’s perspective, this is survivable. The Government has already adapted to years of sanctions by building shadow oil networks via Russia, Iran, and intermediaries; dollarizing parts of the economy; and fragmenting the opposition. Russia and China offer just enough financial oxygen and diplomatic cover to prevent collapse, but not enough to restore broad prosperity. This reflects in Roberto Patiño’s characterisation of Russia and China as providing “geopolitical cover” and “financial oxygen” to the Maduro regime (Poliakova,2025) and as expressed by the International Crisis Group’s assessment that external allies have done enough to keep the government afloat but not to reverse Venezuela’s economic collapse.

In this scenario, Maduro or a chosen successor remains in power, elections remain tightly managed, and the economy grows slowly from a very low base, driven by informal oil exports, mining, and remittances. The US, meanwhile, keeps tightening the screws whenever Caracas crosses a line on migration, drugs related events, or military adventurism without risking a war it does not need.

The cost is borne by ordinary Venezuelans, a continued brain drain, a semi-permanent diaspora of millions, and a political system largely embrased at home but whose rhetoric is increasingly calibrated in foreign media as a familiar Latin American pattern of authoritarian crony capitalism. From a cold strategic perspective, this is acceptable to Washington so long as migration flows are partly contained, drugs interdicted, and Chinese or Russian basing options kept off the table.

Second most likely (20–25%) outcome is Negotiated Transition Lite: Incremental Power-Sharing under Regional Pressure
The other path opened by the new US strategy lies less in Washington and more in Brasília, Bogotá, Mexico City, and Ottawa.

The 2024 election left Venezuela with a perceived legitimacy deficit that even sympathetic regional leaders could not ignore. Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and others have demanded full publication of polling-station results and independent audits; Canada has gone further and recognized opposition candidate Edmundo González as president-elect (Dominican Today 2025).
At the same time, these governments have little appetite for either US-led regime change or an endless crisis on their doorstep. Their interest lies in de-escalation without humiliation, a negotiated outcome in which Maduroism may even lose its monopoly but the system’s inner circle retains some guarantees (Al Jazeera 2024).
Under a US strategy that prizes allies’ burden-sharing and “stability first,” Washington has an incentive to quietly empower such a regional initiative (Atlantic Council 2025). The tools are obvious:
Targeted sanctions relief conditioned on concrete steps ,release of political prisoners, electoral reforms, phased reopening to international monitors.

Security guarantees for Government insiders in exchange for accepting a staged transition, for example, local elections followed by national ones, amnesty laws, and safe passage into exile for a handful of figures.

A regional contact group backed by the European Union, the United Nations, and perhaps the Vatican, which has already called for “dialogue and truth” after the 2024 vote (Watkins 2024).

This would not look like a clean revolution. It would look like what might be called Transition Lite, the opposition wins real space in parliament, media, and local government; some sanctions are gradually lifted; but the security apparatus and key economic assets remain under Chavista influence for a period.

The risk is that both extremes reject it; hard-liners in Washington who prefer maximalist sanctions, and radicals inside Venezuela who see any amnesty as betrayal. Yet when systems have exhausted their capacity to deliver material improvement while still controlling the state security aparatus, elite pacts become possible.

If oil prices remain moderate and Russia is constrained by its own wars and sanctions, the bargaining power of the current Government will erode over the next three to five years. Under those conditions, a Trumpian NSS that prizes low-cost “wins” in the hemisphere could quietly treat a managed Venezuelan transition as a success story (Brookings Institution 2025).

Third most likely (15–20%); Hemispheric Cold Peace: A De Facto Spheres-of-Influence Arrangement
The new US strategy is explicit that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea form a de facto bloc of rivals to be constrained (Atlantic Council 2025). Yet in practice, resources are finite. Washington cannot fight a full-spectrum contest in Eastern Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East while also attempting to uproot every perceived authoritarian regime in Latin America.

One plausible outcome is a de facto hemispheric “cold peace” over Venezuela:
The US locks in its support for Guyana and the Essequibo boundary, treating the International Court of Justice process and Exxon-led offshore development as red lines (CEBRI 2024).

In return, it tacitly accepts that Caracas will remain aligned with Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran so long as it does not host permanent foreign bases or directly threaten neighbors.

Maritime interdiction and counter-narcotics operations in the Caribbean are stepped up under the NSS’s pledge to use “lethal force” against drug boats, while avoiding strikes on Venezuelan territory that could ignite a broader conflict (ABC News 2025).

In this configuration, Venezuela becomes a kind of sanctioned buffer state, too costly to bring fully into the US orbit, too risky to invade, but too important to ignore. Russian and Chinese presence in sectors like oil, mining, and arms sales deepens, but remains under constant US pressure, through sanctions, legal action, and diplomatic isolation (Atlantic Council 2025).
For ordinary Venezuelans, this is a frozen conflict in all but name. The Maduro Government survives; the economy stabilizes at a low level; some trade routes reorient toward Asia and the Middle East. The US focuses its positive engagement on neighbors;Guyana, Colombia, Brazil, the Caribbean, creating a ring of containment around Venezuela rather than direct transformation within it.

Structural realists would recognize this as a classic great-power compromise, with spheres of influence, informal but real, with occasional crises but no decisive showdown.

Fourth outcome is Limited Kinetic Escalation: Strikes without Invasion (a lower probability but non-trivial (10–15%)
The most alarming passages in commentary around the new NSS are not about China or NATO; they are about drugs and the Americas. The document, and the political rhetoric around it, pledges to treat drug cartels and narco-trafficking networks as quasi-military enemies and to use “lethal force” against them, including at sea (ABC News 2025).

In the Venezuelan context, that creates a dangerous gray zone:
• Many US officials already see elements of the Venezuelan state as fused with criminal networks, from cocaine transshipment to gold smuggling (Congressional Research Service 2025).

• Military deployments and naval exercises in the Caribbean have increased, officially aimed at interdiction and deterrence (ABC News 2025).

• Domestic US politics rewards visible toughness, strikes on drug boats, seizures, even cyber operations that can be showcased as “doing something” about fentanyl and border deaths (Brookings Institution 2025).

A scenario in which US forces strike vessels, airstrips, or facilities linked to Venezuelan networks , while insisting they are targeting criminals, not the state, cannot be ruled out. Nor can covert action; cyber-sabotage, support to dissident military factions, or more aggressive intelligence operations.
Full-scale invasion remains highly unlikely. The US public has limited appetite for another large war, and Brazil and other regional powers have already warned that a Vietnam-style conflict in Venezuela would be unacceptable (The Guardian 2024).

But history is full of cases where limited use of force created feedback loops nobody intended. A misidentified target, civilian casualties, or an overreaction by Venezuelan forces could trigger a spiral; tit-for-tat escalation, proxy attacks, or a move by Russia and Iran to provide more overt security guarantees.

In such a crisis, the NSS’s emphasis on the hemisphere and on “restoring deterrence” might push Washington further than it initially planned (Atlantic Council 2025). This scenario is less probable than calibrated containment, but the new strategic doctrine makes it materially more likely than it would have been under a purely diplomatic, sanctions-first approach.

Finally, a Wildcard but plausible (10–15%) outcome; Slow Implosion and Humanitarian Trusteeship
There is the scenario that nobody wants to own; state failure by exhaustion.Venezuela has already suffered one of the deepest economic contractions outside of war in modern history, massive hyperinflation, collapse of public services, and the exodus of millions (International Organization for Migration 2024). The Government has survived because the security apparatus has held together and enough external resources have flowed to keep the core elite loyal.
But three stressors could converge:

1. A sharp drop in oil prices or a structural decline in demand for heavy crude, undercutting the state’s main remaining hard-currency source.
2. A significant escalation in the Essequibo dispute that leads to skirmishes, sanctions, or disruption of offshore production, compounding economic pressure (CEBRI 2024).
3. Internal splits within the armed forces as younger officers see no path to professional legitimacy or prosperity and resent the enrichment of a narrow clique.
   If these shocks combine, the state could fray from the edges; more zones controlled by armed colectivos, criminal gangs, or local strongmen; border regions slipping out of effective central control; basic services in major cities failing more frequently.
   At a certain point, the crisis ceases to be primarily about democracy or ideology and becomes a humanitarian emergency on a scale that threatens the entire region. Mass flows over the Colombian, Brazilian, and Caribbean borders could spike beyond the capacity of host countries to absorb them (International Organization for Migration 2024).
   In that scenario, the same NSS that talks about “America First” also talks about preventing uncontrolled migration and regional instability (Atlantic Council 2025; Brookings Institution 2025). Under pressure from Latin American partners and domestic constituencies alarmed by new migrant surges, Washington might be drawn,reluctantly,into organizing some form of international trusteeship-lite:
   • A UN- or OAS-mandated humanitarian stabilisation mission focused on corridors, ports, and critical infrastructure;
   • A contact group managing emergency oil-for-food or oil-for-medicines schemes;
   • Intensive negotiations over a political settlement simply to have a counterpart to sign agreements.
   This would not look like post-war Iraq or Afghanistan; it would be more fragmented, more negotiated, less ambitious. But it would mark the end of Venezuela’s current trajectory and the beginning of a new, uncertain chapter in which sovereignty is partially traded for survival.

The convergent Point
If you strip away slogans, the new US National Security Strategy is a document about hierarchies of concern. China, Russia, and the Middle East absorb global attention; but the Americas are where failure is politically unforgivable. Migration, drugs, and visible humiliation in the Western Hemisphere carry a domestic cost no Washington administration can ignore (Atlantic Council 2025; Brookings Institution 2025).
Venezuela sits squarely in that zone of unforgivable failure. Its future will not be determined by moral outrage or rhetorical solidarity but by the intersection of three hard facts:
• It remains a critical energy asset, even in a transitioning world.
• Its collapse exports people and crime into the US domestic debate.
• It is a test case of whether rivals can plant enduring influence inside the US sphere without consequences.
Seen through that lens, the five scenarios above are not speculative fiction but structural possibilities. The most likely path, by far, is calibrated containment; a grim, grinding equilibrium in which the Government survives, the US manages rather than solves the problem, and Venezuelans continue to vote with their feet.
The other four outcomes, negotiated transition, cold peace, limited kinetic escalation, or slow implosion, depend on shocks; oil prices, internal splits, miscalculations at sea, or bold initiatives from regional powers.
What is missing, so far, is the emergence of a new political subject inside Venezuela capable of transforming the stalemate, something closer to a scenario where colonial subjects ceased merely to endure history and began to make it. That kind of rupture is, by definition, hard to forecast. But in a world where strategy has returned to the language of spheres, tariffs, and “lethal force,” it may be the only way Venezuela escapes the narrow corridor that US doctrine and great-power competition have built around it.

References
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source:www.senaradioonline.com