This policy brief examines the potential risks to Venezuelan security arising from the military action conducted by the United States in January 2026, which resulted in the capture of then-President Nicolás Maduro. The episode is treated not only as a bilateral event, but as a phenomenon with domestic, regional, and systemic implications, directly affecting Venezuela’s stability and the predictability of the international order.The argument is made that external intervention cannot be understood exclusively in terms of the internal political weaknesses of the Venezuelan regime, even though these form the backdrop to the crisis. The US intervention introduces a highly serious exogenous element by reinforcing the logic of exception in the exercise of hegemony, relativising central principles of international law, especially state sovereignty and the prohibition of the unilateral use of force. Domestically, Delcy Rodríguez’s rise to the interim presidency points less to a democratic transition and more to a strategy of survival management for the regime, based on economic pragmatism, increased internal control, and political instrumentalisation of the violation of sovereignty. At the regional level, it is noteworthy that Latin American institutional fragmentation broadens the space for extra-regional interventions and contributes to the securitisation of the Venezuelan crisis.In systemic terms, the Venezuelan case is considered a high-risk precedent for the international order, as it transforms legality into a selective resource. It appears that mitigating risks to Venezuelan security depends on coordination between domestic stabilisation, regional mediation, and reaffirmation of legitimate multilateral mechanisms, otherwise the exception will become the norm in the international system.
Allan Antunes (2026) studied this question.