The secret history of regime change—and why Venezuela fits the pattern

Regime change is often sold as precision engineering. Remove the leader, manage the transition, restore order. Clean. Surgical. Final.

Lindsey A. O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War exposes why this story almost never survives contact with reality.

Between 1947 and 1989, the United States launched 64 covert regime-change operations. Most failed. Even the “successful” ones rarely delivered loyalty, stability, or legitimacy. Power did not dissolve nationalism; it inflamed it. Installed leaders discovered that domestic politics does not disappear simply because Washington prefers a different outcome.

The canonical cases are well known, yet their lessons remain unlearned. The 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran produced not durable compliance but revolutionary backlash. The failed 1958 effort to unseat Sukarno in Indonesia exposed the limits of proxy manipulation in a postcolonial society. 

The 1963 coup in South Vietnam, intended to strengthen American influence, resulted instead in the unintended assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and deeper instability. In Angola, decades of covert support for rebel groups neither secured victory nor legitimacy. 

These episodes reveal a consistent pattern: secrecy may enable action, but it corrodes accountability and strategic foresight. Regimes propped up from the outside either collapsed under popular pressure or turned hostile once they confronted the same social forces that undid their predecessors.

The most uncomfortable finding is also the clearest. The U.S. did not export democracy; it often replaced elected governments with authoritarian ones. Dependency, not shared values, produced compliance—and dependency bred fragility, resentment, and revolt.

This is why Venezuela matters. Not because it is unique, but because it is familiar. The belief that “this time will be different” accompanies nearly every failed intervention in the American record. History shows otherwise.

O’Rourke’s book is not anti-American. It is anti-illusion. Power cannot substitute for legitimacy. Secrecy cannot override society. And fear-driven interventions accelerate decline rather than prevent it. The Cold War may be over. Its covert reflexes are not.

From WMDs to narcotics and illegal migration: How allegations become weapons and oil the prize

Maduro at 2023 South American summit

History has a habit of repeating itself, first as justification and later as regret. Venezuela today stands where many resource-rich nations have stood before—accused, isolated, and finally struck, not because it is uniquely evil, but because it is inconveniently endowed.

Oil, in the modern world, is not merely a commodity. It is power in liquid form. And power, when held outside the preferred architecture of empire, becomes suspect by definition. The language changes with time—communism, terrorism, narcotics, migration threats—but the destination remains the same: regime collapse followed by resource realignment.

The latest allegations levelled by Donald Trump against Caracas arrive wrapped in familiar moral packaging. Criminal networks. Security threats. Hemispheric instability. These are serious words, meant to close debate before it begins. Yet history urges caution. It reminds us that certainty in geopolitics is often manufactured, not discovered.

Two decades ago, the world was told—repeatedly and confidently—that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The claim was treated not as a hypothesis, but as a verdict. Iraq was invaded. Its state dismantled. Its oil sector opened. The weapons, famously, were never found.

That absence did not reverse the war. It merely arrived too late to matter.

Venezuela’s story now carries an unsettling resemblance. The charges are different, but the structure is identical: demonize the regime, compress complexity into slogans, and present military action as a reluctant necessity. Propaganda succeeds not by lying outright, but by speaking with absolute confidence before facts have time to breathe.

If, years from now, investigations reveal that today’s accusations were exaggerated, selectively constructed, or strategically misleading, the damage will already have been done. Governments can be toppled in weeks; truth takes decades to recover its dignity.

The deeper reality is this: control over petroleum remains central to the maintenance of the American global order. This is not conspiracy; it is doctrine, openly articulated across decades of strategic literature. Energy flows shape alliances. Energy chokepoints define red lines. Energy independence for others is quietly viewed as strategic disobedience.

Oil-rich states that lack institutional resilience are not seen as partners. They are seen as opportunities.

The Venezuelan crisis is therefore not an aberration but a pattern—one that has touched Iran, Libya, Iraq, and others in different forms. The moral language shifts, but the economic geometry remains constant. Empire rarely announces itself as empire; it arrives disguised as concern.

For countries watching from afar, the lesson is sobering. Resource wealth does not guarantee sovereignty. It tests it. Weak institutions invite intervention; strong ones complicate it. The danger is not having oil. The danger is having oil without the capacity to defend political autonomy, economic competence, and narrative control.

Venezuela may yet be remembered not for what it did wrong, but for what it possessed. And history may again ask an uncomfortable question: was the real crime a security threat—or was it oil?