Venezuela regime change (2026)
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The 2026 American operation against Venezuela, in which special operations forces seized the sitting president and rendered him to New York for trial, is one John Kiriakou analysed primarily as a legal question, and answered in two directions at once. In the weeks before it happened he argued at length that it should not, and could find no benefit in it for the United States; afterwards he conceded, against his own preference, that it appeared to be working.

The case against intervention, before it happened

No upside he could find

Weeks before the operation, Kiriakou's objection was economic before it was legal. "We're not at war with Venezuela. We have made a policy decision to not buy Venezuelan oil and to not refine Venezuelan oil anymore. So I don't see what the upside to this is." He turned the migration argument around as well: if the administration wants fewer Venezuelan migrants, "it would want to actually strengthen the economy of Venezuela and encourage them to go back. But that's really not what we're seeing."

His summary of the legal position at the time was a list of absences: "Maduro is the internationally recognized president. The United States and Venezuela are not in a state of war. To the best of my knowledge, there are no criminal charges yet pending against Maduro." His preferred resolution followed from it: "I think that they would have to allow him to leave. Allow him safe passage somewhere, Doha, Moscow, Havana, somewhere. Just let him go."

The wall of regional opposition

On the regional politics his argument is one of arithmetic, and he made it in nearly the same terms on more than one occasion. "When the major powers of the region, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, are 100 per cent against any American intervention in Venezuela, the Americans should sit up and take notice. When just about every country in the world has come out and said that they are against any American military intervention in Venezuela, then we should learn the lesson." Elsewhere: "When you have all of the region's powers, the Colombians, the Brazilians, the Mexicans, saying that they are 100% opposed to American intervention ... we're not going to get any help from any of the regional powers. I just don't see how this benefits the United States." Europe, he noted, was not supportive either.

Where the left and the right agree

Kiriakou treats Venezuela as the rare issue on which the two ends of American politics converge: "this is where the progressive left and the MAGA right meet and agree, no foreign interventions." He also treats it as different in kind from the earlier cases: "this is different from Iraq, Afghanistan, so many other places where the US has intervened. We're not at war with Venezuela. The Venezuelans are no threat to us."

He reads the pressure as a symptom of a fight inside the Republican party: the neoconservatives who ran the George W. Bush administration, "personified by John McCain and Lindsey Graham to a lesser extent, are making a comeback right now," while Donald Trump "seems to be a little bit confused as to what exactly he wants his legacy to be", the America-first policy he has espoused for years, or "the George W. Bush let's-invade-everybody policy."

Whose drugs, and whose war

Kiriakou's objection to the counter-narcotics framing is that it does not describe anything. "We're not at war with Venezuela. Venezuela hasn't done anything to us. They haven't attacked us. These drugs that we're supposedly destroying or intercepting or whatever aren't even meant for the United States, they're meant for Western Europe. And they're not Venezuelan drugs. Venezuela is the transshipment point for drugs coming from Colombia, Peru and Ecuador." The reason he thinks the pressure is being applied at all is the refining bottleneck rather than narcotics.

Guyana as a possible pretext

Among the motives he thinks are in play at the White House, State and Defense, he adds one that is not about Venezuela at all. Guyana "just discovered in the last 3 years or so that they are sitting on an ocean of oil. The Venezuelans say: no, that's our oil," and briefly pressed the border. "The United States might be able to use that as a pretext. Relations between the US and Guyana are very good. US oil companies are already there, looking for and drilling for Guyanese oil."

He raised the same discovery as a cost rather than a pretext: Guyana "has just discovered that it is also sitting on an ocean of oil, that it is just now starting to lift with the help of American, Dutch and British oil companies. What happens to the economic development of Guyana, which sits right alongside Venezuela?" His conclusion was unqualified, "there's nothing good that can come out of a military intervention", and his hope, that the deployment was "just bluster," was tempered by its size: a carrier battle group, "11 or 12 battle-ready ships ... only a couple of hours' flight to drop troops or special forces."

What the agency would be doing

Asked to describe the American effort while an invasion was still hypothetical, Kiriakou first allowed that it might all be pressure: "this could be a bluff." Then he answered on the assumption that it was not.

At the soft end: "the CIA would be doing everything from trying to recruit or to influence the owners of the Venezuelan media to place anti-Maduro articles or opinion pieces, or pro-American articles or opinion pieces." At the hard end: "arming factions that may be available to them in Caracas." The operational shape he then sketched is set out in the four requirements of a coup.

On Maduro's legitimacy

Kiriakou declares his own priors before answering. "I consider myself to be a person who approaches these issues from slightly left of center, but I've never believed that Maduro was legitimate. I've always believed that he was pumping up these numbers, stealing these elections."

He withholds the corresponding endorsement of the opposition: "not to say that the right is the savior of the country. We don't frankly know what the Venezuelan right is going to look like once it begins to run things. But I've always believed that Maduro had serious legitimacy problems."

The legality of what happened

Illegal internationally

His objection to the act itself is plain: "you can't just send a team of special operations forces into a country, snatch a sitting president out of his bed, and render him to New York City to face trial for his life on charges that may or may not be real charges."

He then sets out the test. International law recognises three grounds on which one country may attack another: that the target "presents a clear and present danger to the safety and security of Americans or American installations"; that the target government invited the United States into its territory; or that the UN Security Council authorised it.

His conclusion: "The US had none of those three things. So it's a violation of international law for this operation to have taken place in the first place."

Legal domestically

The distinction he draws immediately afterwards is the one that makes the case unusual: "With that said, it's not a violation of US law." He points to "a very specific US law dating to 1985 that does allow US special forces to cross borders, snatch people, and bring them back to the United States to face trial."

"It seems to be working"

Kiriakou does not claim the operation failed. He judged the window for a Chinese or Russian response to have closed, leaving "Trump got what he wanted to get, in addition to access to 300 billion barrels of oil, the largest proven oil reserves on the planet." Pressed on it, he conceded the point against his own preference: "as much as I hate admitting it, this regime change seems to be working right now."

The absence he finds most telling is Chinese: "The Chinese have one aircraft carrier. They could have diverted that aircraft carrier at any point over the previous six months to the Caribbean. They didn't do that."

The sanctions that turned out to help

Kiriakou revises an earlier judgement in the same breath. In 2017 Trump's blanket sanctioning of the Venezuelan oil industry "appeared to make a mistake, a strategic mistake."

The reason it looked like one is the oil itself: Venezuelan crude is "famously dirty... famously full of sulfur," requiring vast chemical injection, generally convertible only into home heating oil rather than gasoline, because refining it further is "just too expensive."

Who he expects to be next

Asked in February 2026 about remarks on Cuba coming from the administration, Kiriakou gave a forecast he twice flagged as unwelcome to him: "I hate to say this, but I think the Cuban government is the next one that falls."

The reasons he gives are drawn from a visit rather than from analysis, his first trip to Cuba, two years earlier, which left him describing "an absolutely beautiful place, lovely people" who "want very much to get along well with the United States." He notes the density of the family connection as the thing that ought to have settled the question long ago: "literally not a single Cuban doesn't have family members living in the United States." Against that, he traces the diplomatic record, relations restored under Barack Obama, ended and the embassies closed under Trump, and then, under Joe Biden, "nothing. Biden did nothing."

Why the agency keeps losing in Latin America

Asked why the CIA has failed in the region for decades, Kiriakou gave a single cause: "it's because of this belief at the CIA, it's a very deeply held belief, that we are the good guys, and as soon as we cross that border people are going to throw flowers at us. And of course that's laughably wrong. There's no understanding of history. There's no understanding of the societies and the cultures of these countries. They don't want us there."

He enters one defence on the agency's behalf: "the CIA is not a policy agency, it's a policy support agency. So just like with the invasion of Iraq, if the White House says do it, you have to do it, even if you're opposed to it on philosophical grounds." The failure he does lay at the government's door is the same one every time: "it's easy to invade a country, it's easy to overthrow its government, it's exceedingly difficult to take care of things the day after."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Venezuela boat strikes
