Venezuela and the Failure of the Feel-Good Solution

The Comforting Illusion

There is a comforting idea, endlessly repeated in policy circles and editorial pages, that Venezuela’s crisis can be solved by simply “letting Venezuelans govern themselves.” It is a morally attractive position. It sounds respectful, democratic, and humane. It is also an idea that has been tried repeatedly for decades — and has failed every time.

Venezuela is not trapped because the world has denied it freedom. It is trapped because freedom has been declared, celebrated, and abandoned again and again without the institutions, constraints, or enforcement mechanisms that make self-government real rather than symbolic. The result is a political treadmill: elections, transitions, promises, collapse — followed by another round of the same.

Bolívar’s Warning

This is not a new problem. Simón Bolívar saw it two centuries ago.

In his 1819 Address at Angostura, Bolívar warned that liberty without discipline would destroy itself. He famously observed that it is “harder to maintain the balance of liberty than to endure the weight of tyranny,” and lamented that newly independent societies often confuse independence with governance. Near the end of his life, disillusioned and exhausted, he wrote that those who had served the revolution had “plowed the sea.” These were not the words of a man hostile to freedom; they were the words of someone who understood how fragile freedom is when institutions are weak and power is unconstrained.

Modern Venezuela has proven him right.

The Hollow Democracy

After the fall of military dictatorship in 1958, Venezuela embarked on what many once considered a democratic success story. The Puntofijo system delivered stability for decades, fueled by oil wealth and power-sharing among elites. But it never built a state capable of enforcing accountability beyond oil revenues. When those revenues faltered, the system collapsed under corruption, inequality, and popular resentment.

The rise of Hugo Chávez was not an accident. It was the consequence of a hollow democracy that had lost legitimacy. Chávez promised empowerment and justice, but systematically dismantled checks and balances, politicized the military, and blurred the line between party and state. His successor, Nicolás Maduro, completed the descent: destroying electoral credibility, weaponizing courts, tolerating or partnering with criminal networks, and presiding over one of the worst economic collapses in modern history.

Each time Venezuela has been given another chance at self-governance — another election, another dialogue, another opposition victory, another negotiated transition — the underlying structure has remained unchanged.

The Treadmill

Power remains personalized. Courts remain subordinate. Contracts remain unenforceable. Armed actors remain embedded in politics. Corruption remains rational behavior. Capital flees. Professionals emigrate. The state shrinks into a shell.

This is why the insistence that “this time will be different” rings hollow. Nothing fundamental is different now than in earlier attempts. The same structural weaknesses persist. The same incentives apply. The same outcomes follow.

Capital Is Not Sentimental

Investors understand this far better than politicians and activists do. Capital is not sentimental. It does not respond to slogans, flags, or promises of reform. It responds to enforceable rules. Capital is the canary in the coal mine for institutional decay. Venezuela has demonstrated, across multiple governments and ideologies, that property rights can be reversed, contracts voided, and laws rewritten when political winds change. No serious investor believes this can be solved by goodwill or monitoring missions. Until authority is constrained by something stronger than personalities, investment will remain minimal and opportunistic.

Why Puppet Regimes Fail

This is also why puppet regimes do not work. Governments that survive only through external backing lack domestic legitimacy and internal discipline. They become temporary caretakers, not builders of durable systems. Venezuela has already lived through this experiment in various forms: leaders recognized abroad but powerless at home; transitions announced but never enforced; parallel authorities competing while the country decays. Each iteration deepens cynicism and confirms the belief that politics is theater.

Sovereignty as Fiction

The uncomfortable truth is that sovereignty in Venezuela has become largely symbolic. In practice, the country has functioned less as a self-governing state than as a corridor for drugs, a platform for hostile foreign actors, and a source of regional instability. Criminal networks, not institutions, exercise real power in many areas. Elections legitimize outcomes after the fact rather than determine them. Appeals to national dignity mask a reality in which ordinary citizens have little protection from the state or from those operating within it.

Willful Denial

Pointing this out is often dismissed as pessimism or neocolonial arrogance. But ignoring it has not made it go away. Pretending that self-government automatically follows independence has produced one failure after another. The “feel-good” solution — let Venezuela govern itself, hold elections, respect sovereignty — has been tried so many times that repeating it now borders on willful denial.

This does not mean Venezuelans are incapable of democracy. It means democracy cannot survive in a vacuum. Wanting freedom is not the same as sustaining it. Bolívar understood this distinction. So did every successful post-conflict reconstruction effort in history.

The Real Question

The real question is not whether Venezuela deserves self-government, but whether it currently has the institutional capacity to exercise it responsibly. At present, the answer appears to be no. And continuing to act as if the answer were yes merely guarantees that the cycle will continue: collapse, transition, collapse again.

I argue that the only solution is for Venezuela to become an unincorporated U.S. territory. That proposal is extreme, legally fraught, and politically explosive — and it would likely provoke resistance that undermines the very stability it seeks to impose. But the impulse behind it should not be dismissed lightly. It reflects a recognition that Venezuela needs constraint before it can sustain autonomy, enforcement before it can enjoy freedom, and rule of law before elections can mean anything.

What we have instead is President Trump’s improvised custodianship — good for a photo op, but incapable of solving anything structural. Removing Maduro was dramatic; the aftermath has been predictable. Delcy Rodríguez steps in as acting president. The military remains embedded in politics. Chavismo survives without Chávez or Maduro. Oil executives tell Trump that Venezuela remains “uninvestable” because the legal framework is unchanged.

The treadmill keeps turning. Trump’s transactional approach — focused on oil access and drug interdiction rather than institution-building — repeats the same mistake as every prior intervention: it manages symptoms while leaving the disease intact.

Meanwhile, Nobel Peace Prize-winning opposition leader María Corina Machado arrives bearing gifts, hoping to be placed in power or at least granted a legitimate election. But what purpose will that serve? Another feel-good moment that puts us back on the treadmill.

The Failure of International Policy

The real failure of international policy has been its refusal to confront this reality honestly. The world oscillates between disengagement and symbolic support, between sanctions and negotiations, without ever imposing a structure strong enough to outlast political turnover. Everyone agrees Venezuela needs institutions, yet no one is willing to insist on mechanisms that cannot be immediately undone by the next strongman or crisis.

If Venezuela is to escape the treadmill, it will require something far more demanding than another declaration of self-rule. It will require binding limits on power, credible enforcement of law, and external guarantees that cannot be captured or negotiated away. What should no longer be debated is the fiction that simply “letting Venezuela govern itself” is sufficient.

Plowing the Sea

Bolívar warned that liberty without structure would collapse into chaos or tyranny. Two hundred years later, Venezuela stands as living proof. The tragedy is not that freedom has been denied, but that it has been proclaimed repeatedly without the discipline required to preserve it. Until discipline precedes liberty, Venezuela will continue plowing the sea.