U.S. drones are hitting boats off Venezuela, China is tightening its grip on Caracas, and millions have fled. This standoff comes down to four deeper reasons for regime change and four possible futures.

By Carlos Taylhardat | November 18, 2025

Right now, the American government is running a show of force in my family’s homeland, Venezuela.

Since September, the Trump administration’s Operation Southern Spear has launched a series of airstrikes on small boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific, destroying more than twenty vessels and killing dozens of people the United States calls suspected narco-traffickers. At the same time, the world’s largest aircraft carrier and its escorts are patrolling near Venezuela, while Nicolás Maduro deepens ties with China, Russia and Iran to shore up his regime.

I don’t look at this as a distant observer.

I grew up as the son of a Venezuelan diplomat and naval officer. My father served as a naval captain, fought against dictatorship, was shot in the head and survived, and later joined a coup attempt against the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, spending two years in prison. After that, he became a diplomat posted to Washington, Lisbon and Toronto, and later served as ambassador with a military designation in Lebanon and Iraq, where he negotiated trade with Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War. I myself worked in Venezuela during Hugo Chávez’s first election.

So yes, I have “beef” in this story. I’ve watched Venezuela from the inside and the outside. My father, who shared my name, Carlos Taylhardat, passed away on November 21, 2011, feeling a deep sorrow for Venezuela’s regression from a happy, wealthy nation to a place where around seven million people have been displaced.

Most of the world is arguing over the wrong question: whether the United States should invade, negotiate or pull back. In my view, that misses the point. What really matters are four deeper reasons why a change of regime in Venezuela matters for both Venezuelans and Americans. Additionally, some of the opinions from the left because of anger towards all things Trump neglect to include that Venezuela chose a government and it isn’t Maduro while the right seems to forget that America first starts with safety of all American citizens and not because Maduro is a Narco trafficker but worse, please read ahead to learn the why its worse than the Narco trafficking of any illict substances as my first item for a change and transfer of government in Venezuela:

• The Shadow of Missiles Over the Hemisphere
• The People’s Verdict, Silenced No More
• Black Gold’s Untapped Promise
• The Human Exodus and a Dream Deferred

Each narrative is a different way of looking at the same crisis, while each is a reason I believe Venezuela needs a change of regime, backed not by slogans, but by facts.

Context: Gunboat Diplomacy in 2025

First, a quick grounding in what is actually happening.

As of mid-November 2025, U.S. officials have acknowledged 21 airstrikes on 22 vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific under Operation Southern Spear, killing more than 80 people. The administration says the targets were drug-smuggling boats crewed by “narco-terrorists,” but it has released almost no public evidence about who was on board or how they were identified.

Alongside the strikes, the USS Gerald R. Ford, the U.S. Navy’s largest aircraft carrier, has entered the Caribbean with destroyers, cruisers and a nuclear-powered submarine. The Pentagon frames this as a deterrent posture toward Venezuela and its allies.

Caracas, meanwhile, leans heavily on external patrons. China has become Venezuela’s largest state lender and a central player in its oil and infrastructure sectors. Russia has flown nuclear-capable bombers to Venezuelan airfields for joint exercises. Over nearly two decades, Venezuela has also developed a drone program with Iranian-designed systems that now include strike capabilities.

Inside the country, the 2024 presidential election remains fiercely disputed. Election tallies and independent analyses have verified that former diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia won by a wide margin, while the official electoral authority declared Nicolás Maduro the victor without publishing a full, verifiable breakdown of results. The European Parliament and several governments now recognise González as president-elect; Maduro still controls the state.

And in the background, international agencies estimate that nearly 7.9 million Venezuelans have left their country of 28.5 million in the last decade, making this one of the largest displacement crises in the world.

With all this in mind, here are the four narratives as to why it’s in the best interest of both Americans and Venezuelan’s to change the current regime;

Narrative 1: The Shadow of Missiles Over the Hemisphere

In this first worldview, security is everything.

You look north across the Caribbean and see not a tourist playground but a narrow lake between U.S. bases and Chinese-linked infrastructure in places like Cuba and Venezuela. From Washington’s vantage point, this starts to resemble a slow-motion Cuban Missile Crisis updated for the 21st century.

Venezuela has become China’s largest borrower in Latin America, with tens of billions of dollars in state-backed loans tied to oil and infrastructure. Chinese companies are embedded in ports, oilfields and telecom networks. Geological studies show uranium-bearing formations and potential rare-earth deposits in parts of the country, while more recent reporting describes a chaotic rush for those minerals in lawless mining regions. Russia has flown nuclear-capable bombers to Venezuelan airfields for joint exercises. Iran has helped Caracas develop reconnaissance and now armed drones that could harass U.S. forces and neighbours in a crisis.

No one is saying Chinese nuclear warheads are quietly stationed in Venezuela today. But in this narrative, the risk curve is obvious: if a regime aligned with Beijing, Moscow and Tehran holds onto a resource-rich coastline a short flight from U.S. cities, warning times shrink and the chances of great-power miscalculation grow.

Seen this way, helping Venezuelans complete a democratic transition under González is not nostalgia for democracy. It is preemptive defence, a way to reduce the odds that the Caribbean becomes a permanent chessboard for rival nuclear powers with weapons seconds away from any American city.

Narrative 2: The People’s Verdict, Silenced No More

The second worldview starts, not with missiles, but with people in line to vote.

On 28 July 2024, Venezuelans queued for hours to cast ballots. Officially, the National Electoral Council declared Nicolás Maduro the winner with just over half the vote. Opposition parties, however, collected tally sheets from the majority of polling stations and compiled a parallel count showing Edmundo González winning comfortably. Independent statistical work on the opposition’s data found no evidence of large-scale fraud in their tallies, while the government has still not released a full, verifiable accounting.

In this narrative, Maduro broke the spirit of the 2023 Barbados Agreement, which promised free and fair elections in exchange for partial sanctions relief. The European Parliament and several governments now recognise González as president-elect. Opposition leader María Corina Machado, barred from running herself, campaigned for González and now faces harassment and threats at home.

This is not Libya in 2011, with no consensus figure and no constitutional path. Here, there is a constitution and there is a candidate who won the people’s trust and vote. The question is whether anyone will help enforce that basic fact.

I remember Chávez’s first election in 1998. I was working in Venezuela then. The mood was hopeful and electric. People believed corruption and inequality might finally be addressed. Over time, that hope hardened into something very different: stealth authoritarianism, where democratic institutions were gradually bent to keep one project in power.

So Narrative 2 sounds like this: the people have already chosen. The world should help them make that choice real, not lecture them about “stability” while a minority clings to power. Supporting a transition in this frame is not regime change; it is belated respect for the electorate, backed by transparency reforms and serious protections against cycles of revenge.

Narrative 3: Black Gold’s Untapped Promise

The third worldview is economic. It looks at the Orinoco Belt and sees not ideology, but wasted opportunity.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, buoyed by oil, Venezuela became one of Latin America’s most prosperous countries, with per-capita income among the highest in the region. Oil revenues funded education, infrastructure and social programs, and the country attracted immigrants from Europe and across Latin America.

Today, Venezuela still holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves, much of it in heavy oil deposits in the Orinoco Belt. Those reservoirs need technology, capital and stable rules to exploit, but they are not an automatic curse. They are a tool that can be used well or badly.

Over the last two decades, mismanagement, corruption and, later, sanctions hollowed out production. U.S. and European companies were driven out or squeezed, sometimes through nationalisation by decree. Limited licences in recent years allowed firms like Chevron to return and briefly stabilise output, only for renewed sanctions to push production back down and hand more leverage to buyers like China.

In this narrative, the tragedy is not that Venezuela has oil, but that it wasted it.

A transition under González could reopen the door for transparent public–private partnerships, where Venezuelan state companies retain ownership but foreign firms bid openly for time-limited contracts, and the rules are clear enough that investors believe them. A portion of the revenues could rebuild infrastructure, tourism and public services instead of disappearing into opaque intermediaries or sanctions-busting schemes.

For the United States and the wider world, that means a closer, more reliable source of energy than some distant suppliers. For Venezuela, it means regaining something like the normalcy my parents’ generation knew: an economy that works, however imperfectly.

When my father negotiated trade with Saddam Hussein in the early 1990s, he dealt with a ruthless regime because oil, in the real world, is always tied to politics. What I took from those stories later was that there is a spectrum between plunder and partnership. Narrative 3 argues that Venezuela has lived too long at the plunder end and that a democratic transition is the only way to move back toward genuine partnership as it used to be before. Venezuela could change from being known as the largest oil reserves to the most profitable oil industry.

Narrative 4: The Human Exodus and a Dream Deferred

The fourth narrative is about people leaving.

Since 2014, roughly 7.7 to 7.9 million Venezuelans have fled their country, one of the largest displacement crises on earth. Around 6.7 million are in Latin America and the Caribbean alone. They live in Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, Canada and beyond, often working far below their qualifications and without legal status.

This narrative remembers a different Venezuela: the country that won Miss Universe pageants and baseball championships; the place people migrated to, not from; the Caracas of noisy markets, full restaurants and a sense that if you worked hard, you could make a life.

The numbers behind the feeling are stark. Colombia alone hosts millions of Venezuelans; shelters along the route describe an endless flow of families. Many cross dangerous routes like the Darién Gap, where migrants routinely disappear.

In this worldview, regime change is not about geopolitics or barrels per day. It is about whether those families ever get to decide between staying abroad by choice or going home to something livable.

My own childhood memories of Venezuela are full of colour: relatives proud of their country, beaches that felt like the edge of the world, a sense of humour that survived even our politics. When I think of a transition under González, I do not picture a perfect democracy. I picture a place my compatriots might actually want to return to, or at least visit, without explaining to their children why everything broke.

In the end, Narrative 4 reduces everything to a simple, unfair fact: the country with the world’s largest oil reserves could not keep its own people fed, safe and hopeful, and so they left. Changing that is bigger than one election. But without a legitimate government, the rest is almost impossible.

Venezuela: A Beacon of Hope

So while there is endless speculation about what Trump is planning to do, or what he should do, where one side attacks anything this administration does and another reacts with pure cynicism, I see something else: possibility. This moment is an opportunity for a nation to return to, or even surpass, its better past. I am relieved that the show of force has stayed outside Venezuelan territory so far, buying time for pressure, diplomacy and negotiation. Used wisely, that time can produce a plan that allows both America and Venezuela to prosper.

If we take the four narratives seriously; the missiles, the stolen verdict, the wasted oil and the human exodus. The case for a negotiated transition becomes stronger than the case for doing nothing. That is the hope I hold on to: that out of this standoff, Venezuela can again become a country people choose to live in, not flee from.

Key Takeaways

• The United States has launched more than twenty airstrikes on small boats under Operation Southern Spear, killing dozens of people in the name of fighting maritime drug trafficking.
• China, Russia and Iran now play central roles in Venezuela’s security and economy, deepening Washington’s fear of a hostile foothold near U.S. waters.
• The 2024 presidential election is widely viewed as stolen, with Edmundo González Urrutia recognised abroad as president-elect while Nicolás Maduro keeps de facto power.
• Venezuela still holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves, but decades of mismanagement and sanctions have crippled production; a democratic transition is the only path back to real partnership and investment.
• Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled their country, turning the debate over regime change into a daily question about whether people can safely stay, return or integrate elsewhere.

Questions This Article Answers

1. How many boats has the United States actually destroyed so far, and how many people have died?
2. Why do many Venezuelans say the world should support a change of government without supporting an invasion?
3. What role do China, Russia and Iran now play in Venezuela’s security and economy?
4. How could Venezuela’s oil industry become a mutual benefit instead of a curse?
5. Why is the Venezuelan refugee crisis central to any honest discussion of regime change?

Read more from 3 Narratives News on Venezuela in “Maduro or President-in-Exile González?” and our strategic overview “Venezuela Surrounded: Invasion or Deterrence?”