The story everyone told in January was the raid. Two and a half hours, a compound in Caracas, a president flown to New York in a grey tracksuit. Six months on, the raid is the least interesting part of what happened, since the raid ended and the arrangement it produced did not. Nicolas Maduro is gone, an interim president signs the decrees, and the United States controls the oil revenue on which the country runs. What the capture inaugurated was not a transition. It was a template, and the template is the story now.

Call it the Caracas Model. A hostile government is decapitated in a single short operation, no occupation follows, and control is exercised afterwards through the target country’s own revenue stream rather than through boots on its ground. The local elite stays in place to sign papers and absorb blame. The intervening power holds the wallet. The label is a shorthand, but the pattern it names is not mine alone: the Center for Strategic and International Studies read the operation as a deliberate shift from democracy-centred regime change toward extracting economic and geopolitical concessions through coercion, and the Brookings Institution described it as a proof of concept for a muscular and unconventional foreign policy. It is regime change stripped of the two things that made the Iraq generation politically radioactive, the body bags and the twenty-year bill, and that is precisely what should worry observers. A method that carries little cost to the actor using it is one that actor is likely to reach for again.

The Caracas Model exports precisely for its lack of domestic cost

The mechanics are now a matter of record, described by the administration in its own words. The instrument of control is oil. The United States runs what Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called a quarantine on sanctioned shipments, seizing tankers under court orders, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright told a Goldman Sachs energy event that Washington would market Venezuelan crude, in his word, indefinitely. Rubio himself described the arrangement to the Senate as novel and conceded it was the best the administration could devise. Jose Manuel Puente, an economist at the IESA business school in Caracas, arrived at the sharpest formulation, telling Al Jazeera that Venezuela had become a state under tutelage whose income the United States had taken over. The interim president governs at the sufferance of the actor who controls her only source of revenue.

Rubio has been candid about the design in a way that deserves quotation. He told the Senate the arrangement was novel and the best the administration could devise, and that Washington was prepared to use force to ensure maximum cooperation if other methods failed. That sentence is the doctrine in miniature. Cooperation is extracted by economic control, and the threat of force stands behind the economics as a guarantee. The occupation has not been abolished. It has been relocated to the balance sheet, where it is cheaper, quieter, and far harder to end, given that there is no garrison to withdraw and therefore no obvious moment of departure.

The steelman for the model is strong, and honesty requires stating it at full strength. Maduro was an authoritarian who had, by credible international assessment, lost the 2024 election to Edmundo Gonzalez by a wide margin and stayed anyway. The alternative to the raid was an indefinite standoff with a criminalised state on the hemisphere’s southern approaches. And the Caracas Model, whatever its faults, spared Venezuela the ruin of a ground war and the United States the quagmire of nation-building. Compared to Iraq, a two-hour operation and an oil quarantine look like restraint refined into policy. On its own terms, the argument is coherent.

The turn is that the very features presented as restraint are what make the model exportable, and an exportable regime-change doctrine is not a virtue. Iraq deterred its own repetition precisely because it was ruinous; the cost was the constraint. Strip out the cost and you strip out the constraint. A method that decapitates a government in an afternoon and governs the aftermath through a revenue stream could be reached for whenever a target has an income concentrated enough to seize. Venezuela had oil. Others have a single port, a sovereign wealth fund, a pipeline, a customs regime. There is little reason to assume the Caracas Model stays in Caracas, and the administration has already gestured at a further candidate, with Rubio calling the Cuban government a serious problem in the same interview in which he defended the Venezuelan template.

Precedent attaches to the instrument, not to the target

Here the analysis has to separate two things that the events deliberately fused, since the entire political achievement of the Caracas Model lies in blurring them. One is the outcome, the removal of an illegitimate ruler. The other is the method, decapitation plus remote economic control without authorisation or occupation. A person can welcome the first and be alarmed by the second without contradiction, and the administration’s design depends on the audience failing to do exactly that.

The reason the distinction matters is that precedents attach to methods, not to outcomes. The next government removed this way may not be a criminalised autocracy that lost an election. It may be a merely inconvenient government, or a democratically legitimate one whose foreign policy has become an obstacle. The doctrine does not carry within it any test for who qualifies. It carries a capability and a demonstration that the capability is politically survivable. Once the method is established as usable, the identity of the first target stops governing the identity of the later ones.

On the lawfulness of the method the legal community has been close to unanimous, and the point is worth stating with precision because it does not depend on any sympathy for Maduro. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, and it admits only two exceptions: authorisation by the Security Council, or self-defence against an armed attack under Article 51. Neither applied. There was no Council resolution, and Venezuela had not attacked the United States. Marc Weller, who directs the International Law Programme at Chatham House, concluded the operation had no justification in international law and amounted to a serious breach of Venezuelan sovereignty and the Charter, and the UN Secretary-General called it a dangerous precedent. Legal scholars across American and European faculties reached the same verdict with rare consistency. The forcible removal of a head of state also breaches the customary principle of non-intervention, which bars coercive interference in another state’s choice of political system. The method was not a grey area. The administration’s own framing, that this was a law-enforcement mission to arrest a fugitive rather than a use of force, was rejected by the legal analysts who examined it, on the ground that a military operation of this scale against a sitting head of state on his own territory is governed by the law on the use of force whatever label is attached to it. A peer-reviewed survey of the scholarship found the community close to unanimous that the operation was unlawful.

Brussels blessed the result and averted its eyes from the means

This is where the continent this publication addresses comes in, and the record is not flattering. When Maduro fell, the European Union issued a statement supported by twenty-six member states that invoked the principles of international law, the UN Charter, sovereignty and territorial integrity repeatedly, and then, in the same short text, welcomed the outcome by restating that Maduro lacked democratic legitimacy. What the statement never did, across all those invocations of international law, was say that the method had violated it. The Union named the principles and declined to apply them to the one actor who had breached them.

The national responses ran the same evasion in miniature, and France supplied the clearest case. President Macron said his country had neither supported nor approved the method used, then in the same breath praised the removal of the Maduro dictatorship and demanded that power pass to Gonzalez. His own foreign minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, went further than the president and said plainly that the use of force had violated the principle of non-resort to force. So the French government both named the breach and banked the result, endorsing the outcome while disowning the means that produced it. That is not a position. It is the absence of one, dressed in the vocabulary of law. A method disowned in a subordinate clause and benefited from in the main clause has not been opposed. It has been accepted with an alibi attached.

The evasion is comprehensible. Maduro was genuinely illegitimate, the EU had said so for years, and condemning the American method would have meant defending an authoritarian’s sovereignty at the precise moment his removal was being celebrated. The politics of objecting were miserable. But the price of not objecting is that Europe has now, by its silence, helped to normalise a doctrine it will not always find aimed at defendants it dislikes. The Union set no marker on the method when the target was convenient, and a marker set only against inconvenient targets is not a principle. It is a preference.

The reckoning comes when the deposed is not an autocrat

Europe’s exposure to the Caracas Model is not hypothetical, and it is closer to home than the Venezuelan theatre suggests. The same National Security Strategy that framed the operation speaks of denying non-hemispheric competitors control of strategically vital assets, and the administration has paired the Venezuelan precedent with open designs on Greenland, territory of an EU-adjacent NATO member. The doctrine that a country’s critical revenue or resource can be seized and administered by a stronger power, with the local authority left to sign, is not a doctrine European states can be confident will always point south. Denmark has already heard the threat in plain terms.

There is a second cost, subtler and more corrosive. Europe has spent a decade building its foreign policy identity on the claim that it is the guardian of a rules-based order, the actor that upholds law when others reach for force. The Caracas statement spent that credibility in a single half page. An order in which the rules are invoked five times and applied zero times is not a rules-based order. It is an order in which rules are rhetoric, and every authoritarian and every revisionist power now has the European Union’s own document to cite the next time it wants to separate the law it praises from the law it obeys.

The task for Brussels is not to relitigate Maduro, who deserved to fall, and not to pretend the outcome was regrettable, because it was not. It is to say the thing the January statement would not: that the method was unlawful even though the outcome was welcome, and that a Europe which cannot hold those two thoughts at once has no standing to object when the method returns. On present evidence the Caracas Model is likely to be used again. The only question Europe still controls is whether, next time, it will have established in advance that it opposes the means, or whether it will once more discover that it minds the method only when it minds the man.