Venezuela without Maduro has no endgame

SEVEN MONTHS after American forces captured Nicolás Maduro and airlifted him to a New York courtroom, Venezuela's government still has the same leadership, the same party colours and the same constitution - all minus one dictator. The White House says it is working toward free and fair elections. There is no timetable.

On the surface, that is a story about Democratic senators belatedly asking what happened to the democracy promise. In June, Tim Kaine of Virginia introduced the Venezuela Democratic Transition Act, legislation requiring the secretary of state to produce a strategy for elections this year. In a letter dated June 8th, ranking members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee pressed Secretary of State Marco Rubio on whether he had secured any commitment from interim president Delcy Rodríguez on the timing of a new vote. The question is reasonable. It is also slightly off-target. The bottleneck is not congressional inaction. It is a set of incentives in Washington that point in the opposite direction.

On January 3rd, Mr Trump announced that United States forces had carried out a raid and seized Mr Maduro and his wife. They now face narcoterrorism charges in the Southern District of New York. Mr Trump told reporters on the day of the operation that the United States was "going to run" Venezuela. Within hours, Venezuela's Supreme Tribunal - acting ex officio and inventing a new category of "forced absence" - declared Mrs Rodríguez, Mr Maduro's vice-president and an unbroken Chavista loyalist, to be acting president. The constitutional provisions that would have triggered elections within 30 days were set aside. Washington did not object.

The reason is not hard to see. Over the following months, the administration has built a system that works rather well for American interests without requiring a vote. An executive order created "Foreign Government Deposit Funds" in the United States Treasury, through which proceeds from Venezuelan oil are channelled. A series of general licences from the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control has progressively allowed American energy firms to participate in the full life cycle of Venezuelan oil production, from extraction to refining. On March 18th, the most far-reaching licence yet, GL 52, authorised transactions with the state-owned oil company PdVSA that had previously been prohibited. Payments must go through the Treasury. No transactions with Russia, China, Iran, North Korea or Cuba are permitted. American companies benefit from access to the world's largest proven oil reserves at a time when Middle East disruptions have driven Brent crude above $100 a barrel.

The incentive structure is thus clear. The United States gets Venezuelan oil at market prices, excluding rival powers, with Washington controlling the flow of revenue. Mrs Rodríguez gets to remain in power, her administration survives, and the oil keeps flowing. Elections, by contrast, are a risk. A genuinely free vote would almost certainly end two-and-a-half decades of Chavismo. María Corina Machado, the opposition figure who won the 2024 opposition primary with 92% of the vote and has since been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, has repeatedly expressed her intention to return and run. The White House has reportedly discouraged her return, fearing it could trigger civil unrest. Mr Rubio, whom the same newspaper has described as a "de facto viceroy" of Venezuela, runs the country from Washington.

To be sure, the administration defends its approach. Mr Rubio testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 28th that the goal is a three-phase process: stabilisation, recovery and transition. Elections belong to the final phase and cannot be scheduled until the groundwork is laid. He has stressed the need for a reformed electoral council, access to the media and freedom for political parties. No one would argue that elections without those conditions would be legitimate. The 2024 vote, in which the opposition presented paper tallies from over 80% of polling stations showing a landslide win that was never acknowledged, demonstrated the danger of rushing to a ballot without institutional guarantees. José Ignacio Hernández, a visiting scholar at Boston College Law School, has noted that Venezuela's autocracy still lacks separation of powers, judicial independence and the rule of law.

Yet Mr Rubio's insistence on no artificial timeline has begun to look less like caution and more like a holding pattern. The formal opposition talks that begin on August 1st, brokered with American help and led by Dinorah Figuera rather than Mrs Machado, are designed to produce milestone agreements within five months. That would put any concrete proposal somewhere near the end of the calendar year. The rebuilding of the electoral system, even the opposition estimates, would then take at least eight more months. An election in 2027, at the earliest.

The deeper problem is that the American occupation of Venezuela's oil revenues creates a vested interest in prolonging the interim period. The administration has publicly called for $100 billion of investment from energy companies to rebuild the country's infrastructure. American firms, shielded by licences that can be revoked at Treasury's discretion, are entering a country where the rule of law is still shaky and where the same government apparatus that managed the oil for years under Mr Maduro remains in place. There is a difference between transitional oversight and economic tutelage. The present arrangement sits uncomfortably close to the latter.

The June earthquakes, which killed more than 5,000 people and caused an estimated $37 billion in damage, have not changed this calculus. The public anger over the government's response is growing, but Mrs Rodríguez's position has not been shaken. The United States has provided humanitarian aid and welcomed the August talks as a "roadmap for political dialogue". It has not, however, set the clock ticking.

Congressional pressure matters, but it is limited. The war-powers resolution that passed the Senate by 52 votes to 47 in January, forcing the president to seek congressional approval before further military action in Venezuela, was a rebuke. Five Republicans joined all Democrats to advance it. Mr Trump called the senators who voted for it "ashamed". But the resolution did not pass with a veto-proof majority and was unlikely to become law. Mr Kaine's new bill would require a strategy from the secretary of state; it would not compel an election date. The House version would need to clear committee, pass the chamber and survive a veto. Given that even senators who supported the capture of Mr Maduro have expressed reluctance about further military commitment, the political will for a harder line is uncertain.

The concession here is that the administration's three-phase plan contains real elements of wisdom. Rebuilding an independent electoral body, restoring political freedoms and guaranteeing diaspora enfranchisement are not checkboxes; they are prerequisites for a credible vote. Chatham House, the international affairs think-tank, published a note in April arguing that democratic elections in Venezuela will not happen overnight and that groundwork is needed first. The argument has merit.

The trouble is timing without a deadline is no plan at all. Previous negotiation processes under Mr Maduro - the Barbados Agreement of 2023, the Norwegian-facilitated talks - all ended with selective implementation or non-compliance. The current interim government has fewer reasons to cheat, but it also has fewer reasons to hurry. Mrs Rodríguez has publicly resisted the framing that Venezuela is under foreign administration, even as her government depends on Washington's disposition of frozen assets and sanctions relief. Between the two sides currently sharing power, the balance is, for the moment, optimal. There is a familiar word for arrangements in which both parties have reason to preserve the status quo: entrapment.

The aim should not be a rushed election. It should be one with a date, a calendar and a set of milestones with public benchmarks. The United States should commit to a transition timeline of no more than 18 months, tied to the oil revenues it now controls. The Foreign Government Deposit Funds, which give Washington leverage, should also carry a sunset clause: after a specified period, funds flow directly to a Venezuelan treasury accountable to an independent electoral authority, regardless of whether elections have occurred. That would remove the economic incentive to maintain the tutelage. Mrs Machado should be allowed to return and participate in the political process. If her return risks instability, the answer is not to exclude her but to build the conditions - including security guarantees and freedom of movement - under which she does not.

Seven months on, the United States has accomplished what decades of sanctions could not. It removed Mr Maduro. It reoriented Venezuela's oil away from China and Russia. It installed a system of American oversight that works, at least from Washington's point of view. The question now is whether the American intervention will end with the restoration of Venezuelan self-government or with something that looks rather more like an economic protectorate. The incentive to rush is on the side of the Venezuelan people. The incentive to pause is on the side of American firms and a White House that prefers stability to democracy when the two come into conflict. Politics, unlike oil, cannot be indefinitely quarantined.