American pressure on Venezuela has not stopped, even amid a war the U.S. is fighting with Iran overseas.
Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, is trying to manage the demands of the Trump administration as she looks to hang on to American support more than two months after the toppling of Nicolás Maduro, observers say.
Venezuela is still on the administration’s radar, even though the U.S. now has a war going on in the Middle East.
“The Trump administration is hanging over her like a Damocles’ sword, pushing her to obey U.S. demands,” Imdat Oner, a senior fellow at Florida International University and a former Turkish diplomat who served in Caracas, said via email.
There are other signs that Washington’s shadow is looming over Caracas, with U.S. President Donald Trump sharing this week that he believes the U.S. has proven that its actions in Venezuela have worked.
Trump told reporters Monday he believed the “formula” that saw an internal candidate replace Maduro in Venezuela could be a model for what the U.S. would like to occur in Iran.
“I like the idea of internal, because it works well,” Trump said during a Monday news conference in Doral, Fla., while answering a question about Iran’s next leader, turning to Venezuela as a point of comparison. “I think we’ve proven that, so far, in Venezuela.”
Phil Gunson, senior analyst for the International Crisis Group (ICG) in the Andes region, said the flip side of this overt U.S. influence, is that Rodríguez “clearly has the full backing of the U.S., provided that she continues to play by Washington’s rules.”
Washington’s demands
Since Maduro was deposed, the Trump administration has taken control of Venezuela’s oil and continues to push Caracas toward U.S.-aligned policies for its oil and mining industries.
A steady stream of high-ranking American officials — including CIA Director John Ratcliffe, U.S. Energy Minister Chris Wright and U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum — have all travelled to Venezuela for meetings to advance U.S. interests there.
Oner says Rodríguez has “so far” been compliant enough with U.S. demands that the pressure on her may be lessening to some extent, as Washington is preoccupied with a war overseas.
“She is following a 180‑degree shift in policy from strong anti‑Americanism to a very friendly approach toward the American administration,” said Oner.
Yet, as the week came to an end, Rodríguez called on Trump to do something for Venezuela.
“I want to take this opportunity to also send a message to the president of the United States, Donald Trump, to make it clear that unilateral coercive measures against the Venezuelan people affect the peoples of our Latin America,” the acting president said Friday, after a series of meetings with officials from neighbouring Colombia.
“The call is for sanctions against Venezuela to be lifted.”
For the moment, Trump is publicly touting the arrangement that has the U.S. steering the oil coming out of Venezuela and deciding how it’s distributed.
“The relationship is extraordinary with Venezuela,” Trump said, stating Monday that 100 million barrels of oil had been “taken out of” Venezuela and brought stateside for refining.
The president cast the arrangement as being “like a partnership” that worked for both countries.
Burgum likewise told Fox News on Wednesday that the Trump administration’s actions had turned Venezuela “from a sanctioned adversary … into a strategic ally.”
The ICG’s Gunson, however, says U.S. control of Venezuela’s oil amounts to “a near-colonial approach,” which runs contrary to the long-standing pro-sovereignty and anti-imperial rhetoric of the government in Caracas over the past 25 years.
Despite that, he says Trump remains “a very popular” figure with some Venezuelans, who are just happy to see Maduro ousted.
“Venezuelans have reasons to be grateful to the U.S. right now,” said Gunson.
But serious problems persist: A UN fact-finding mission said Thursday that Venezuela’s “repressive state machinery” remains operational, even with Maduro gone.
The mission told the UN Human Rights Council in a report that “the structures that have sustained persecution for years have not been dismantled, nor have State policies been announced to begin that process.”
And it said 87 politically motivated detentions had taken place since Maduro’s ouster.
The 15-member United Nations Security Council met at UN headquarters in New York just hours before Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro appeared in a Manhattan federal court on drug charges, including narco-terrorism conspiracy. Most member countries explicitly condemned the U.S. for its actions, and Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in a statement read by UN political affairs chief Rosemary DiCarlo, said ‘I am deeply concerned about the possible intensification of instability in the country.’
A tumultuous year to date
The Trump administration began pressuring Caracas late last year, with a build-up of U.S. military assets in the region.
The U.S. also began seizing oil tankers, depriving Venezuela of control of valuable revenue.
That was followed by the U.S.’s dramatic move to strike targets in Venezuela, enter the country and forcibly remove Maduro from power.
Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were then brought to the U.S., where they face criminal charges.
Even with those dramatic events now over, Oner says Rodríguez still needs to stay in the U.S. president’s good graces.
“We can say she is still dependent on keeping Trump’s favour because the main challenge for her is the possibility of free and fair elections,” said Oner, adding that Rodríguez and her cohort could well lose power when that happens.
Her link to the presidency stems from Maduro, who was declared the winner of Venezuela’s 2024 election, despite the fact that the opposition is widely understood to have prevailed at the polls.
Rodríguez had previously been the vice-president under Maduro.
Meanwhile, opposition leader María Corina Machado, who won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, remains outside the government as the Trump administration backed Rodríguez after Maduro’s ouster.
And that didn’t change even after Machado presented Trump with her Nobel Prize medal, which he had openly coveted.
“It’s cruelly ironic,” said Gunson.