Iran is not Venezuela, despite Trump’s hopes of repeating ‘regime capture’ strategy

Experts say US influence over South American neighbour will be hard to replicate in country with deep and long-standing antipathy to the west

First, the CIA tracks the head of an oil-rich, US-baiting nation to a heavily guarded compound at the heart of his country’s mountain-flanked capital.

Then, that leader is removed from power with a deadly and irresistible show of US military force.

Finally, a more pliant successor is installed to do Washington’s bidding.

That was the recipe for Donald Trump’s recent capture of Venezuela’s regime. The country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, was abducted in Caracas before dawn on 3 January.

After special forces seized Maduro, his vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, stepped up with Trump’s blessing, launching a once-unlikely, pro-US era for a South American country whose leaders had long railed against “Yankee” imperialism.

“I thank President Donald Trump for the kind willingness of his government to work together,” Rodríguez posted on X on Thursday, in perhaps her most unabashed act of genuflection since her ally’s downfall.

Three months after Maduro’s demise, Trump appears keen to replicate “regime capture” model in Iran after its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in Tehran during a devastating Israeli-US operation targeting his base.

“I have to be involved in the appointment [of his successor], like with Delcy in Venezuela,” Trump told the US news website Axios this week.

Speaking to the New York Times, he said: “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is … the perfect scenario.”

A state department official told the Wall Street Journal that Trump’s strategy – “managing” a regime’s behaviour from afar without putting US boots on the ground – might be called “decapitate and delegate”.

Yet South America and Middle East experts have serious doubts about whether what has so far worked in Caracas would work 7,000 miles away in Tehran.

“Turning Iran into a pliable kind of puppet regime is much less practical than in Venezuela where [even under Maduro] … the government was already inclined to work with the US, its historic partner for energy and the key player in the region,” said Benjamin Gedan, a former South America director on the national security council staff at the White House and now the director of the Stimson Center Latin America Program

He added: “This idea that after Venezuela the US could go around the world intervening and installing a Delcy Rodríguez figure wherever our aircraft carrier weighs anchor, it’s a sort of silly idea.”

Iran experts believe Trump’s demand to be involved in choosing the country’s next leader is likely to be rejected out of hand by the country’s surviving officials as brazen interference in their domestic politics. The country has bitter memories of meddling by outside powers, including Britain, Russia and the US.

To a large degree, the 1979 revolution that brought the Islamic regime to power was fuelled by nationalist resentment over perceived foreign intervention. The then reigning pro-western monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was widely considered an American puppet.

Anti-Americanism, exemplified by the revolutionary chant “Marg bar Amrika” (Death to America), has been at the heart of the regime’s ideology since the revolution’s spiritual founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, branded the US “the great Satan”. Slogans and murals expressing antipathy to the US are prominent throughout Tehran and other Iranian cities.

Trump’s insistence on being consulted seems even more far-fetched given that the countries have had no diplomatic relations for 46 years – a contrast with Venezuela, where the US had ties until as recently as 2019. US links with Iran were severed by the Carter administration in 1980 after revolutionaries stormed the US embassy in Tehran and held 52 American diplomats hostage.

Alex Vatanka, the head of the Iran programme at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, called Trump’s attempt to insert himself into Iran’s choice of leader “beyond delusional” and questioned whether he had a workable plan to impose a Venezuela-type scenario.

“Regime change would have been much easier than converting existing Shia militant Islamists to the Maga movement, which is basically what he is asking for,” Vatanka said.

He added that outside influence was possible, due to individuals in “what’s left of the inner circle of Khamenei” working with foreign intelligence services.

“But you still need to have a game plan,” he said.

“You need to decide who inside the regime you can work with. Then – together with that group – you either convince the others who are fighting right now to co-opt them, or you help the Americans kill them.

“That way someone can emerge as the top man and do what Rodríguez is doing in Venezuela … But I have seen nothing to suggest to me that that level thinking has gone into what the US is doing right now. They might decide to pull out, saying: ‘We killed Khamenei, there are no nukes left, the missile launchers are destroyed.’

“It’s open warfare, and in such a situation, it becomes even harder for anyone who is left in the regime to want to suggest that they’re willing to work with the US … They’ll be killed before they get out of bed the following day.”

Naysan Rafati, senior Iran analyst at the thinktank International Crisis Group, said the US and surviving regime insiders may have a shared interest in continuity, but warned this could risk alienating the bulk of Iran’s population, which is still angry over the bloody suppression of recent protests at a cost of thousands of lives.

“Even if the system has a shrinking base of ideological adherents, those adherents probably feel that this is the endgame if they don’t band together. So you may have a rallying of the wagons,” he said.

“The neatest outcome for Washington is securing change within continuity – finding a partner that can quickly forge a critical mass of the Iranian system on terms the US can live with,” Rafati added.

“But that ambition faces two challenges: finding enough voices within the regime to accept change, and leaving many Iranians disaffected from continuity.”

Experts believe the real choice over Iran’s next leader lies with the powerful Revolutionary Guards, which controls Iran’s military policy as well as large swathes of the economy.

South America specialists believe Trump’s apparent desire to repeat “the Delcy model” reflects his emboldenment at Washington’s seemingly successful appropriation of the remnants of Maduro’s authoritarian regime.

“You had no loss of aircraft, no loss of US service members, you got a government that had been portrayed to him at least as being implacably hostile, that’s now very accommodating. You have a country with immense natural resources [that as Trump sees it] are newly available to the United States,” said Gedan.

But, the former White House adviser added, beyond the fact that Iran is much further away and better armed than Venezuela, it is far too early to tell whether Trump’s gambit has even worked in South America.

“A year from now, if the US navy is not still sitting in the Caribbean, the Venezuelans, little by little, might feel like they have some breathing room all of a sudden and some autonomy again,” Gedan predicted.

The distraction of conflict in the Middle East might even benefit Maduro’s successors as they seek to outlive Trump and extend their 27-year rule. “Their plan is not to be a puppet regime forever,” Gedan said. “Their plan is to hope the US moves on.”