The fall of a regime doesn’t always come with ballots or tanks. Sometimes, it begins when power loses control over money, fear, and the narrative, realizing that managing defeat is the only way to survive.
In international politics, regimes don’t always collapse; they can be dismantled. Not through the sudden rise of a democratic revolution, but by the gradual replacement of their material support systems—finances, coercion, legitimacy—with external scaffolding that turns the old power into an administrator of its own defeat. Since January 2026, Venezuela seems to have entered this gray zone: the first contemporary experiment of supervised dismantling of an authoritarian regime “from within,” where energy is the main lever.
This episode appears to be Venezuelan at first glance but suggests a bigger picture: a pilot test of the new order that Washington is trying to impose on a less liberal, more transactional, and overtly competitive world. If the 21st century began with the promise of global integration and ended with the hangover of interdependence, Venezuela could be the laboratory where the formula is tested: stability first, legitimacy later; assured oil flow, redefined sovereignty; restored institutions only when the ground no longer burns.
The return of history and the engineering of order
In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, ending the idea that sustained coercion could govern indefinitely against economic reality. In 2003, the occupation of Iraq aimed to prove the opposite: that military power could rewrite states from the top down. Both episodes—the Soviet implosion and the failed reconstruction in the Middle East—have become symmetrical warnings: collapse does not guarantee democracy; intervention does not guarantee statehood.
Venezuela in 2026 seems to be the uncomfortable synthesis of these lessons. There is no talk of annexation or formal occupation but rather of operational oversight: a regime that preserves the shell of internal power while, de facto, ceding part of its functional sovereignty in critical areas. The narrative is surgical: not to replace the old apparatus immediately—risk of chaos—but to capture its levers: money, oil, coercion, and access to the outside world.
This is the logic of tutelage: to avoid a vacuum and, above all, to prevent that vacuum from being filled by the forces incubated by the regime itself—military fractures, insurgencies, illicit economies. In other words, the priority is not the vote but the order; not alternation, but containment of collapse.
A tutelary state, not an occupied state
The concept of “tutelary state” often invokes colonial imagery. Yet its contemporary version is more subtle. A country can maintain formal sovereignty in the international community while ceding essential elements of its practical sovereignty: control over financial flows, security coordination, conditioning of foreign policy, sectoral oversight.
In the Venezuelan case, the anchoring point is oil. Energy operates as a stabilization mechanism and as an instrument of tutelage. If the oil flow is guaranteed under external rules, the state can finance minimum services and reduce social tension; if that flow is channeled outside the reach of predatory internal networks, the old regime loses its ability to buy loyalties, sustain repressive apparatuses, and maintain structural corruption as a governance system.
Here lies the paradox: the formal power remains “Chavista”—the visible elite, the everyday administration—but the gravitational center of power shifts. The result is not a classic democratic transition but a functional interim: a provisional government whose implicit mission is not representation but to keep the country standing while reconfiguring the conditions of state possibility.
The administrators of the intervened system
In any real transition—not the idealized ones—continuity matters. The question is what continues. In tutelary Venezuela, continuity seems to be administrative rather than sovereign. The Rodríguez brothers, in this reading, would no longer be the architects of their own hegemonic project but rather administrators of an intervened system. Figures like Diosdado Cabello—symbol of coercion—would be constrained by a new framework of rules that reduces their maneuvering room.
The public letter attributed to Delcy Rodríguez, read as a “declaration of survival,” offers a psychological and strategic key: the regime does not proclaim victory; it rationalizes its surrender. It speaks of fear, of “forced pause,” of truces bought with barrels. This is the rhetoric of a power that no longer commands but attempts to negotiate its exit without dying in the process.
In a political organization that functioned for years with clan logic, betrayal has a price. Thus, personal survival and minimal continuity of the apparatus become priorities. Tutelage offers an exit: cooperation in exchange for future political life, or at least not being erased from the map. The socialism of the 21st century does not die heroically; it retreats through calculation.
The doctrine of the new order: high sovereignty, low globalism
This Venezuelan scheme cannot be separated from the doctrinal framework that Washington projects towards Europe and the world: the return of sovereignty as a condition, not an obstacle, for cooperation. In this vision, the post-Cold War era was an illusion: liberalism did not conquer the planet by moral gravity; authoritarianism returned with technology, money, and strategic patience.
The language of this new era is transactional. The Western civilization must act as a bloc—it is claimed—and its alliances only endure if both sides are strong internally. Multilateral cooperation ceases to be an altar and returns to being a tool: it is useful if it produces security and prosperity; it hinders if it paralyzes.
In this map, the dominant quadrant is full national sovereignty: hard borders, industrial relocation, bilateral agreements, increased trade friction, and a West that operates more as a network of contracts than as a community of values. The motto is not “integration” but “resilience.” And the price is a global coordination deficit that is accepted as a strategic cost.
Venezuela, then, would not be an exceptional case but a hemispheric trial: converting energy into a geopolitical control device, blocking access to strategic enemies (China, Russia, Iran), and reintroducing the country into a Western architecture regulated by licenses, compliance, and contracts with secure jurisdiction.
Three phases: foundations, structure, facade
Tutelage is not sold as tutelage. It’s marketed as a technical sequence.
Phase 1 (2026–2027): the foundations. Citizen security, territorial control, halting the humanitarian collapse. Partial amnesty as a pressure valve—pacifying without reconciling—and initial guarantees of minimal civil rights (opening spaces, decompressing fear). The logic is simple: without order, there is no reconstruction; without decompression, there’s no economy.
Phase 2 (2027–2029): the structure. Oil reactivation with strict rules; return of capital under contractual frameworks that reduce the risk of capture. A productive threshold is sought to finance basic recovery, rehabilitation of services, and social stabilization. Here, energy once again becomes the heart: without flow, there’s no state; without rules, the flow feeds the old monster.
Phase 3 (2029–2030): the institutional facade. Elections, restoration of autonomous powers, international observation, and a new social pact. Note the order: legitimacy comes at the end, as the crowning of an already stabilized system, not as a starting point.
The fatal dilemma: control without legitimacy
The issue with this design is as old as politics itself: control can be bought; legitimacy cannot.
A tutelary government can gain stability through external imposition, residual fear, and material improvement. It can buy silence. But if society perceives that stability was imposed—rather than negotiated—bitterness accumulates as historical debt. The transition becomes an “authoritarian equilibrium stabilized” with a technocratic face. And the country remains trapped: neither full democracy nor classic dictatorship; a managed limbo.
Here arises the greatest strategic risk: a tutelage without real participation from civil society may sow future explosions. And the resistance of residual elites—sabotage, illicit economies, subcontracted violence—could try to break the scheme from within.
Even the debate over figures like María Corina Machado fits into this logic: her return, to avoid igniting the board, would need to be coordinated with the tutelary framework. In stabilization, the street has limits; politics has timelines; and the opposition has a thankless task: to push for legitimacy without creating chaos.
The question that will determine the Venezuelan century
History teaches that transitions fail due to two opposing excesses: institutional romanticism (believing that the vote alone can rebuild the state) and stabilizing cynicism (believing that order alone can create legitimacy). Venezuela is walking a tightrope.
If the supervised dismantling succeeds in turning oil into visible welfare—electricity, water, salaries, services—and simultaneously opens verifiable space for civil liberties, the country may reach the threshold where elections are not a detonation but a closure. But if the tutelage drags on, if the economy improves without civic openness, or if the timeline dilutes, stabilization will become a new regime: more presentable, more efficient, equally illegitimate.
In the end, the issue is not whether Venezuela will be stable. It’s what kind of stability it will purchase. A nation cannot live on truces alone; it lives on consent. And consent cannot be imposed. It must be earned. In that phrase—more than in any document, license, or contract—lies the key to the experiment: the day the gravitational center of power aligns again with civil will, tutelage will have fulfilled its mission. If not, it will have simply created another form—more modern, more contractual—of the same old domination.
@antdelacruz_
Executive Director of Inter America Trends