Venezuelan Transit: The Hybrid International Order and the Dismantling of Coalition Authoritarianism

1. Anatomy of the Venezuelan catastrophe: origins and driving factors

From democratic anomaly to structural and institutional exhaustion

More than half a century ago, in the 1960s and 1970s, Venezuela represented an exception, a kind of anomaly on the political map of Latin America. While military dictatorships predominated across the region, the country developed a competitive party system, relatively resilient democratic institutions and, crucially, maintained a mechanism for the rotation of power. This design, however, had a vulnerable point. The state relied primarily on oil rents rather than on the taxation of citizens. This reduced accountability, weakened institutional constraints and encouraged elite bargains over the distribution of resources instead of efforts towards long-term development. The democratic system was, in effect, held hostage by the rentier economy. The oil crisis of the 1980s and the prolonged period of low prices in the 1990s steadily eroded its resource base. As oil rents contracted, the cost of political compromises rose, corruption scandals intensified and perceptions of social injustice deepened.

By the end of the 20th century, this combination of economic volatility, gradual institutional degradation and the loss of trust in traditional parties had prepared fertile ground for a populist rupture. In 1999, Hugo Chávez came to power, successfully mobilising mass discontent under the slogans of social justice, sovereignty and the 'Bolivarian project'. This course, however, tied power even more tightly to the redistribution of rents. Social programmes, ideological mobilisation and tight control over the coercive apparatus were fused into a single institutional mechanism. A significant element of the Chavista model was its special relationship with Cuba. For Havana, Venezuela became a key source of financial flows, critically important for the survival of the Cuban dictatorship after the collapse of the USSR. In return, Caracas received medical personnel and, more importantly, military advisers and security service specialists who played a notable role in shaping the system of political control.

After Chávez’s death in 2013, however, the 'binding' effect of charisma disappeared, and the entire structure rapidly began to lose stability. The regime found itself in a position that in many respects resembled the late Soviet period. The ideological shell remained, but the resource base, institutional effectiveness and internal legitimacy were being rapidly depleted. A process of disintegration began, not an instantaneous collapse but a slow, protracted erosion of the system’s socio-economic and political foundations.

The contemporary Venezuelan tragedy, political, socio-economic and humanitarian, is best understood as the result of the overlap of several structural crises. First and foremost, it is the crisis of a classic petrostate, fully dependent on raw material exports and thus on revenues not linked to taxation, burdened by chronically corrupt and inefficient institutions and prone to the deindustrialisation of the economy. An authoritarian populist regime bound together and reinforced the elements of the 'resource curse'.

Over the past ten years, Venezuela’s average GDP growth has been around –9% per year, a figure unprecedented in peacetime. The existence of a vast shadow sector, black markets, drug trafficking, illegal gold mining and barter schemes for oil trade merely illustrates the scale of institutional decay. For all the unreliability of official statistics, available data indicate that the country has effectively lost half a century of development, and over the past forty years its economy has exhibited average negative growth. GDP per capita last year stood at around $3,757, which is 3.4 times lower than in 2013 and roughly corresponds to the level of 1985. According to forecasts for the current year, the decline will continue and the figure may fall below $3,000. Particularly telling is the fact that since 2000 economic collapses have recurred every few years, and since 2012 Venezuela has entered a mode of free fall, against the backdrop of high oil prices and relatively stable production and long before the introduction of serious US sanctions.

The claim that the Venezuelan crisis is an 'imported product' of external pressure does not withstand serious analysis. The crisis has an internal, institutional nature. The Venezuelan case illustrates the challenges of an authoritarian rentier state deprived of institutional flexibility. Future scenarios here are determined not by the will of individual leaders but by the depth of the system’s structural exhaustion and the level of elite fragmentation, factors that significantly narrow the space for a soft exit from the crisis.

The architecture of coalition-based authoritarianism

The Venezuelan regime under Maduro is unquestionably predatory in nature. Systematic and harsh repression of the opposition, including the use of semi-criminal armed groups that terrorise entire neighbourhoods of Caracas and provincial cities, rampant drug trafficking and pervasive corruption cloaked in pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric, and mass emigration, more than 8 million people have left the country, have all long been well documented.

However, to understand both the past dynamics of the regime over the ten years of crisis and its possible future trajectory, what matters is not ideological labelling but an analysis of the nature and specific features of the authoritarian regime itself. This includes where sovereignty is located, how guarantees of loyalty are constructed, and how the resource base of power is reproduced. Crucially, the Venezuelan regime is not a classic personalist dictatorship. It represents a form of coalition-based, 'networked' authoritarianism in which the figure of the leader plays the role of a symbol and arbiter rather than that of the sole and sovereign source of power. Its relative resilience is ensured not by a rigid vertical of authority but by a balance of forces among several autonomous nodes of influence, each with its own resources, interests and survival logic. These nodes do not form a single hierarchical mechanism. On the contrary, the regime functions as a coalition of heterogeneous actors bound together through exchanges of loyalty for access to rents, immunity from prosecution and security guarantees.

The coercive structures and security services constitute the key binding element of the regime. Their task lies not so much in the classical provision of national security as in elite monitoring, the suppression of opposition and the prevention of intra-system conspiracies. The Cuban factor continues to play a significant role here, above all in counterintelligence, кадров filtering and ideological supervision. At the same time, the security services themselves are not monolithic. Internal divisions exist between 'political' and 'economic' factions, as well as between groups oriented towards preserving the status quo and those seeking options for a controlled exit in the event of the collapse of this system of power.

The armed forces, meanwhile, remain the most institutionalised yet simultaneously the most fragmented actor. The Venezuelan military does not constitute a unified corporate subject backing a common political project. Rather, it is divided by branches of service, levels of command, access to economic resources and external connections. Parts of the officer corps are deeply embedded in the rentier economy, ranging from the management of state-owned enterprises to participation in import logistics and the distribution of foreign exchange flows. Other segments of the military, especially at the middle and lower levels, bear the main social costs of the crisis and display growing discontent. This creates the conditions for asymmetric behaviour by the armed forces during a transition, from passive neutrality to situational alliances with new centres of power, but makes a single, unified military сценарий of behaviour unlikely.

The ideological core of the regime, concentrated in parts of the state apparatus, educational institutions and the university sector, performs a legitimising rather than a mobilising function. It reproduces the discourse of the 'Bolivarian revolution', anti-imperialism and social justice, but its influence on real decision-making is limited. Within this core, a split is also deepening between a dogmatic minority and a more pragmatic segment for which ideology becomes an instrument of career and institutional survival rather than a sphere of conviction.

Co-opted segments of business constitute a separate and extremely important node. This does not refer to the private sector in the classical sense, but to hybrid structures closely tied to the state through licences, access to foreign currency, import quotas and participation in quasi-state schemes. These actors are primarily interested in the predictability of rules, even if those rules are arbitrary and corrupt. In a transition scenario, this group may become one of the key beneficiaries of partial normalisation, but also a source of resistance to deeper institutional reforms that threaten its privileged position.

Criminal networks, including the drug economy, illegal gold mining and smuggling routes, form the most autonomous and least manageable segment of the regime. Their relationship with the state is based on mutual tolerance and the exchange of services. Access to territory and protection are exchanged for financial flows and political loyalty. For these actors, any transition represents an existential threat, as it carries the risk of losing immunity. For this reason, they possess a high potential to derail a transition process and are capable of sustaining prolonged low-intensity instability even if a formal change of power takes place.

Finally, paramilitary 'social militias' and armed proxy structures serve, on the one hand, as instruments of social control and intimidation, especially in urban agglomerations. On the other hand, their loyalty is personalised and predominantly material in nature, which makes them extremely sensitive to changes in resource flows. As central authority weakens, these structures may either disintegrate or fall under the control of local leaders, further intensifying the fragmentation of the security space.

Taken together, this multi-node configuration explains the paradox of the existing system. It can be relatively resilient to sharp external shocks and personal changes, yet highly vulnerable to the gradual unravelling of the coalition if the balance of interests is disrupted. This leads to another conclusion. The current crisis is above all an emerging crisis of the coalition itself, not merely a crisis associated with the 'nullification' of the leader’s figure. Any transition scenario under such conditions will inevitably be non-linear and mosaic-like, with asynchronous reactions by different nodes of power, temporary alliances and the risk of fragmented stabilisation. Political change at the 'top' may not coincide in time with the real redistribution of control on the ground. In this sense, the Venezuelan regime represents an illustrative example of late coalition-based authoritarianism, in which compromises between nodes become ever more costly and the structural risk of destabilisation is high.

2. International context and international consequences

The American perspective: pragmatic motives for removing Maduro

In the event of Maduro’s arrest and his transfer to US jurisdiction, what we would observe is not the complete destruction of the international order, as some argue, but its further profound modification. Norms are still formally preserved but are applied selectively and on a precedent basis. Sovereignty, jurisdiction, extradition, sanctions and even the concept of legitimacy become elements of a new grammar of power based on exceptions and special regimes. This is neither a classic extradition nor a complete arbitrary abandonment of law, but a hybrid mechanism in which criminal law, sanctions logic and foreign policy pressure are combined into an instrument for dismantling a specific political system and for shaping a regime of 'conditional legality'.

For the United States, the Venezuelan transition is not only, and not so much, a matter of democracy and human rights. In practical terms, it is perceived as a strategic task aimed at dismantling the 'arc of instability' Venezuela–Cuba–Nicaragua, in which Caracas serves as the resource core of anti-American mobilisation. For more than two decades, Venezuelan rents ensured the sustainability of this alliance through subsidies, preferential energy supplies and the servicing of external obligations. From this perspective, a transition in Caracas represents an attempt simultaneously to weaken the foothold of US adversaries and to limit the 'export of instability' in the form of migration waves, criminal flows and the expansion of cross-border grey economies.

In parallel, the issue concerns the restoration of a predictable energy framework in which pragmatic considerations are no less important than political ones. Venezuela’s 'heavy' crude oil is structurally compatible with a number of refineries in the southern United States that, since the 1990s, have been reconfigured to process such grades. This modernisation required, according to some estimates, more than $100 billion in investment. As a result, Venezuelan supplies for a long time represented not merely one source of feedstock, but part of the technological landscape of US oil refining, with established logistics chains, specific cracking configurations and the economics of petrochemical outputs.

Therefore, Washington’s interest in a transition in Venezuela is linked not only to the question of who governs, but also to what rules and guarantees will shape access to the extraction, transportation and processing of heavy crude oil, and how stable those rules will be. The Canadian alternative to these supplies, while significant, is constrained by infrastructure, and Russia has dropped out of the chain of suppliers of heavy grades to the US market.

From the US perspective, the Venezuelan transition thus appears as an attempt to bundle regional security with the task of optimising the energy sphere. The aim is to weaken the rent-based engine of anti-American alliances while simultaneously returning the heavy oil market to a more predictable and sustainable configuration.

One of the ideologues and key drivers of the current US administration’s policy towards Venezuela is Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In effect, he acts as the coordinator of a multi-level strategy to dismantle a configuration of power in the Caribbean that Washington finds undesirable, turning the Venezuelan track into a testing ground for instruments that sit at the intersection of foreign policy, sanctions coercion and managed transition. Rubio operates as a manager of transition in America’s strategic neighbourhood, stitching together several heterogeneous strands into a single framework: sanctions, limited military pressure, legal instruments, elite bargaining and energy logic.

Finally, the operation in Venezuela is a domestic political asset. It makes it possible to demonstrate to voters and elites within the United States not abstract 'toughness' but effectiveness, the ability to induce behavioural change in a 'hostile' country and to reset the regional balance. For this reason, even a partial, non-ideal but manageable success, such as stabilisation on minimally acceptable terms, a reduction in migratory pressure, a weakening of the Venezuela–Cuba–Nicaragua nexus and the redirection of oil supplies, could significantly strengthen Rubio’s position both within the Trump administration and in US politics more broadly.

Transition and allies: Cuba, Russia, China

As already noted, Venezuela’s relationship with Cuba is by no means reducible to ideology. It is an institutionalised exchange: oil and financial flows on one side, administrative, кадров and security support on the other. Cuban advisers are embedded in sensitive segments of the Venezuelan security apparatus, creating an additional layer of control and political loyalty. It is telling that the Cuban authorities have publicly acknowledged their losses during the operation to seize Maduro, which they claim amounted to more than one third of all fatalities. This confirms the depth of their involvement in protecting the regime’s top tier. For Havana, in turn, Venezuela remains a critically important source of external resources, and a 'Venezuelan transition' could become an external shock comparable in its destabilising effect to the collapse of the USSR.

Whether this shock would prove fatal for Cuba, however, remains an open question. Despite similarities with Venezuela, where regime resilience rests on an institutional linkage between the security services, the military and the party apparatus amid low economic autonomy of the civilian sector, Cuba’s key distinction lies in its chronic resource scarcity and dependence on external donors. For this reason, Cuban elites have historically constructed an especially rigid system of control over risks and leakages of loyalty. Venezuela, by contrast, particularly under Chávez, enjoyed a surplus of resources that made it possible to expand the ruling coalition through rents, but at the same time generated a higher degree of internal fragmentation and criminalisation.

A comparison between Cuba and Venezuela points to a more general conclusion. In resource-scarce regimes such as Cuba’s, elites are compelled to institutionalise discipline, build rigid filters and minimise autonomous centres of power, otherwise the regime quickly loses governability. In resource-abundant systems, rents make it easier to purchase loyalty and expand the coalition, but at the same time they multiply access points to resources, raise coordination costs and encourage criminalisation. Such a configuration may appear stable during periods of economic growth, but in a phase of shrinking rents it becomes vulnerable to fragmentation. As a result, the former may sometimes prove more resilient even under conditions of chronic scarcity, whereas regimes that have long relied on resource abundance pay for it with increased internal complexity and the risk of disintegration when the external environment deteriorates.

Russia’s support for Caracas was pragmatic in nature. It included arms supplies, the servicing of military equipment and personnel training, political and diplomatic cover, as well as participation in oil and trade schemes that partially compensated Venezuela for sanctions pressure and liquidity shortages. For Moscow, Venezuela was both a geopolitical asset that could be used to generate horizontal escalation against the United States and a showcase of sanctions resilience, a demonstration that a regime could remain afloat through external support even as its domestic economy degraded. This did not make Venezuela more viable, but it helped preserve coalition cohesion, as security actors and elites continued to receive signals that the regime had external resources and channels of support.

China’s role in its relations with Caracas was different, less coercive and less demonstrative, but financially far more substantial. Chinese banks and state entities, especially after the global financial crisis of 2008, developed a model of 'loans for oil', turning Venezuela into one of the largest recipients of Chinese lending. Estimates put the total volume of Chinese financing at over $60 billion. Beijing acted as a cautious long-term player, minimising direct political risk while seeking to preserve access to oil and ensure debt servicing, without turning itself into a ‘guarantor’ of the regime.

In the wake of the US operation in Venezuela, China publicly criticised US actions, appealing to the concept of sovereignty and declaring the role of a 'global judge' unacceptable. This reflected not sympathy for specific individuals, but sensitivity to US activism in a zone where Beijing’s economic stakes are relatively high. At the same time, the Venezuelan case is important for China as a precedent. It shows how a leading power can use legal and sanctions instruments to dismantle undesirable regimes while formally leaving international norms intact.

For China, which is reflecting on Taiwan, the key issue is not force as such, but the legal and political framing of coercion in the reconstitution of sovereignty. The Venezuelan scenario is not a direct trigger for pressure on Taipei. The Taiwan question is incomparably more complex in military, economic and international terms. However, the Venezuelan case adds another element to Chinese calculations. It reinforces the perception that the global order is increasingly operating in a precedent-based mode, where outcomes are determined not by universal norms but by the balance of power and control over legal interpretation. At the same time, an important signal for Beijing in this case is the unpredictability of Trump’s actions in the event of escalation around Taiwan.

3. Possible and probable transition scenarios

Internal perspective: reassembly or fragmentation?

In Venezuela’s case, a transfer of power is unlikely to resemble a linear transition from authoritarianism to some form of democracy. What is more likely is the disintegration and reassembly of the existing ruling coalition, in which institutional change will inevitably lag behind the transformation of real centres of control. Under a formally personalist but in reality 'networked' regime, the removal of the leader does not automatically produce even managed stabilisation, but instead triggers a profound reconfiguration of loyalties. This phase may last for several months or even years.

The fact that the leader, Maduro, has ceased to perform the function of an 'upper broker' arbitrating between the security apparatus, economic beneficiaries and criminalised networks increases uncertainty and stimulates bargaining. Demand for security guarantees rises sharply. For parts of the military, security services, bureaucracy and business intermediaries, it becomes critically important to understand what package of amnesties or immunities may be possible and who can guarantee it. In other words, elite bargaining over the repackaging of guarantees concerns both the preservation of assets and income streams and the parameters of a future power configuration. At the same time, external actors, including the United States, Cuba, China and Russia, begin to adjust their stakes. Who and in what capacity is recognised as a legitimate leader or negotiator, who is granted a 'window' for a deal, and who is labelled a spoiler, non-negotiable and destabilising.

At the same time, the regime’s networked nodes, security groups, rent-distribution mechanisms, criminal structures and local 'militias', retain autonomy. Even if the leader is removed, many of them continue to control territory, financial flows and armed resources. The first phase therefore produces a 'decapitation paradox'. Formally, the 'apex' has been dismantled, but on the ground there is a risk of the diffusion of control and the strengthening of actors least interested in transparent institutional reconstruction. This is the source of the key fork in the road. Either a managed exit, if a new package of guarantees can be assembled quickly, or fragmentation, in which nodes begin to act autonomously.

One of the decisive factors remains the position of the armed forces. As noted above, however, the Venezuelan military is not a monolith but a marketplace of loyalties, and its behaviour is driven by pragmatic rather than ideological considerations. A scenario in which a substantial share of the military aligns with a new regime is realistic, but it will almost certainly be gradual and fragmented, accompanied by bargaining, obstruction and localised clashes. With high probability, stratification will occur within the armed forces. 'Cooperators' will seek forms of integration into the new reality, such as status preservation, conditional amnesty or participation in transitional governance. 'Spoilers', especially segments deeply embedded in the drug economy and illegal gold mining, will perceive the transition as an existential threat and may turn to sabotage and local violence.

As a result, even under a nominal 'transitional government', the country may enter a regime of local arrangements. Different regions and ports, different security commands and local groups, different rules. Venezuela already serves as a rear base for some Colombian insurgent groups, and the social militarisation and fragmentation of control over the periphery create conditions for prolonged low-intensity violence. This is not a classic civil war, but a long-lasting background of asymmetric violence, similar to Central America in the 1990s, where the state is formally restored but real control remains partial and contested.

The economic dimension of the transition continues to revolve around oil. In recent years, Venezuela has produced around 1 million barrels per day, three times less than in 2010. A return to previous volumes is possible over a three to five year horizon, while an increase to 5 to 6 million barrels per day would take roughly a decade. The oil sector remains, on the one hand, the only source of a rapid inflow of foreign currency and a potential anchor of stabilisation, and on the other, a source of risk for reproducing the old model if a new elite once again opts for rent redistribution rather than institutional reconstruction. The key constraints on the economy are not technological but institutional. These include the degradation of PDVSA, Venezuela’s state oil monopoly, legal uncertainty over property rights, the loss of managerial competences, sanctions and a crisis of investor confidence. Without the restoration of rules of the game, oil revival can stabilise the system but will not generate development.

Limited US intervention and five scenarios

The arrest of Maduro and his transfer to New York to face judicial proceedings set fundamentally new parameters for the transition. In effect, the former head of the regime is transformed into an 'asset of the investigation' and a tool of pressure not so much on him personally as on the entire networked ruling coalition. The discussed possibility of sending him to a third country in exchange for an instruction to elites to relinquish power voluntarily reflects a rational but cynical logic of 'managed exit'. On the one hand, this could accelerate elite drift. For a significant share of the military, security officials and economic actors, such a scenario reduces fear of retribution and facilitates coordination around a transition. On the other hand, even a formal 'instruction' issued by Maduro does not guarantee compliance. A substantial part of paramilitary structures, criminal networks and drug economy nodes operates autonomously in line with its own survival logic. For them, Maduro’s arrest may serve not as an incentive to exit but as a trigger for low-intensity violence.

At the same time, the United States is sending an ambiguous signal regarding its intentions. Trump states that the US will 'manage Venezuela' and allows for further coercive steps, including secondary strikes against the country’s political leadership in the event of non-cooperation. At the same time, Rubio emphasises that the United States will not assume day-to-day governance of Venezuela, but will exert pressure to steer developments in the desired direction. This dual communication reflects a division of roles. The president maintains strategic coercion, while the State Department seeks to reduce the cost of involvement and avoid the trap of 'occupation governance'.

The American experience of 'state-building' in complex societies, including Iraq and Afghanistan, has produced a hard institutional reflex: to avoid assuming responsibility for day-to-day governance and nation-building in the absence of a guaranteed security architecture and a legitimate local partner. Otherwise, such involvement quickly turns into a problem of community security, criminality, logistics, staffing and basic provision, in other words into an extremely costly 'open-ended contract' with no clear exit point.

Moreover, external governance legitimises the narrative of 'occupation', both inside Venezuela and across the region and global institutions. The more the United States assumes 'sovereign functions', the higher the political price and the stronger the incentives for opponents of the transition to mobilise.

Under conditions of a networked regime, it is impossible to 'take control' of a country by replacing a single individual and appointing an external administrator. Any external governing centre would inevitably face a dilemma: either negotiate with the nodes of power, thereby de facto legitimising parts of the old system, or attempt to break them by force, thereby entering a protracted conflict. Even advocates of a hard line in the United States, judging by Rubio’s statements, appear more interested in a model that combines targeted military pressure, sanctions leverage and political coercion towards an agreement, rather than daily 'governorship' over Caracas. Given this priority and the configuration of forces within Venezuela described above, five possible scenarios can be outlined schematically.

Managed elite exit (most desirable for Washington). This scenario assumes that the removal of Maduro triggers a 'chain of defections', that is shifts in loyalty. Parts of the military and bureaucratic elite opt for a deal and prefer a negotiated exit in exchange for security guarantees, amnesty and the preservation of limited influence. A temporary centre of power emerges domestically as a coalition of technocrats, moderate military figures and segments of business, provided repression by the winners is minimised. Its weak points are elite fragmentation, problems of enforcement and deep mistrust of legal guarantees under conditions of transnational justice.

Fragmented stabilisation (the most likely trajectory). The centre is weakened, but regime nodes retain control over parts of the economy and the security sphere. Washington maintains an external framework of coercion but prefers not to engage in micro-management. The emphasis is placed on gradual stabilisation through access to finance and oil projects. The result is the absence of a single transition centre, a series of local agreements, the coexistence of a formal state with autonomous zones of control and uneven economic recovery. In effect, a 'two-speed Venezuela' emerges. Some parts of the country and the economy stabilise relatively, while others operate in a grey zone dominated by autonomous actors, with long-term criminalisation of specific regions.

Rent restoration (stabilisation without transformation). A new elite coalition consolidates around the rapid restoration of rents without fundamentally touching the coercive apparatus. Limited liberalisation takes place domestically, while key security immunities are preserved and political competition is effectively frozen. This creates a risk of reproducing rentier authoritarianism under a new guise, with economic liberalisation without deep political transformation and short-term stabilisation combined with the long-term preservation of the root causes of the crisis.

Prolonged asymmetric instability (spoilers prevail over the deal). The removal of Maduro does not lead to the main actors of networked authoritarianism joining the winning side, but instead results in a loss of coordination and the exit of armed and criminal players from control. The United States may resort to targeted use of force and a tightening of the 'quarantine', while refraining from full-scale governance. Inside the country, violence escalates sharply, criminalisation deepens, grey markets expand and migration intensifies. The key risk lies in the long-term erosion of governability and the transformation of the country into a chronic source of regional instability. In this scenario, the coalition disintegrates without reassembly.

Externally managed stabilisation is the least likely and most ‘expensive’ scenario for the US. As noted above, it is improbable because of its prohibitive cost and the legacy of failed nation-building in Asia, and would be possible only in the event of a complete collapse of internal centres of power and the threat of an uncontrolled catastrophe.

The removal of Maduro is not the end of the regime, but the initiation of the dismantling of a complex ecosystem of coalition-based rentier authoritarianism. It exposes the limits of old models of power and the contours of a new grammar of coercion, in which modified law, sanctions and the politics of force are intertwined. The most likely outcome remains a protracted and uneven transition, marked by elite bargaining, risks of localised violence and structural constraints on recovery. The possibility of a more far-reaching institutional shift will depend on whether Venezuela’s oil resources can be transformed from a trap into an instrument of institutional reconstruction, and on how far the emerging form of international legality allows this to happen.