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A number of thoughtful observers argued President Donald Trump would not pursue regime change in Venezuela. I was never convinced. On our podcast and in private conversations with experts and political leaders alike, I have been predicting that he would go for it. I also thought it was a bad idea, and I still think so.

After a U.S. snatch-and-grab operation of Nicolás Maduro, who ruled Venezuela as a dictator, under the cover of a night of airstrikes, the question has been answered. In remarks to the world today, Trump stated that the United States would “run” Venezuela and oversee a political transition. In response to a question from a member of the press, he stated “we are not afraid of boots on the ground.” Still, me being right is not what’s interesting or important here. I have gotten Trump wrong on some other big calls. I bet I will again in the future. Prediction in foreign policy is a humbling business.

The really interesting question is this: Why do so many national security minds keep misreading Trump? This is not about partisan wish-casting or bad commentary. Many of the people who were confident that Trump would not pursue regime change in Venezuela are smart, seasoned analysts who understand military power, electoral and bureaucratic politics, and American foreign policy history. And yet they were wrong.

I can come up with five reasons they got it wrong. And taking these reasons on board are important for understanding what happens next.

Reason 1: Assuming Trump Has a Doctrine We Can Recognize

There is a powerful impulse among the political and expert classes to map presidents onto familiar strategic categories. People in Washington like doctrines because they make the world legible. They give them models to make predictions: Realists avoid regime change. Jacksonians retaliate but disengage. Isolationists do not take on new commitments. The problem is that Trump does not actually fit any of these boxes, yet we’ve seen people call him a realist, Jacksonian, and isolationist, even fairly recently.

Trump may be surrounded by people who have doctrines and ideologies, but since 2016 I have maintained that Trump himself does not have one when it comes to foreign policy. His views are not organized into a coherent theory of international politics, nor are they disciplined by consistent assumptions about power, interests, or restraint.

This makes him unusually hard to read, especially if you have your own strong priors or believe Trump’s priors reliably predict future behavior. The absence of a doctrine does not produce restraint by default. In fact, it can create openings for abrupt, high-impact actions precisely because there is no internally consistent framework telling him, “people like us do not do things like this.”

Reason 2: Bluff or Commitment? It Could Be Both!

People treat the president’s often sensationalist public statements as either a bluff or a commitment when they can be both. It is difficult to tell when Trump is being instrumental rather than just winging it or not paying attention. Yet when he is being instrumental, he often uses public statements as devices rather than signals. They can be performative, coercive, exploratory, and self-justifying all at once. A threat can be issued without a fully formed plan behind it, but that does not mean the threat will never be acted upon. It may sit in the background until conditions align, until a bureaucratic faction presents a viable option, or until Trump himself decides that following through would serve his political or psychological needs.

In the Venezuelan case, too many assumed that Trump was all talk and that the suspected drug boat strikes were simply performative. But this president has often allowed ideas to marinate publicly before acting on them suddenly. Seeing Trump’s words as either meaningless or binding misses how they function as part of a longer, nonlinear progression.

Reason 3: Coalition Machinations

Many observers of this administration underestimate the power struggle inside the administration and how it scrambles the output. Venezuela has been an interesting case of this. My hypothesis here is that Venezuela has been an outlet of sorts for the hawks, especially Secretary of State Marco Rubio but also others. There has been no sustained appetite for confrontation with Russia or China, and only limited room to maneuver on those fronts without significant escalation risks. Iran and Venezuela, by contrast, offered arenas for hawkish foreign policy.

Analysts who looked at Trump’s supposed overall caution on major conflict assumed that caution would generalize across cases. But Trump can be restrained in one part of the world and aggressive in another, depending on who has this president’s ear the most on different parts of the world.

Reason 4: Overweighting Trump’s “Caution”

Speaking of Trump’s caution, people put too much stock in the president’s statements and behavior from his first term that showed risk aversion to military commitment. People have pointed to his reluctance to start new wars, his frustration with prolonged deployments, and his instinctive skepticism of large-scale interventions. From this perspective, regime change in Venezuela seemed inconsistent with what we “knew” about Trump.

But Trump’s incentives, advisors, grievances, and political context evolve. What looked like risk aversion one week can morph into opportunism the next week. And it can look even more like he is “winging it” from the outside in his second term as president because there is not much of a traditional interagency process anymore. Leaks about sensitive national security operations are not nearly as pervasive as they were during his first presidency. As a result, the signals that analysts often use to gauge intent in Washington are missing.

When looking at the possibility of regime change, too many have equated this with prolonged military commitments. Yes, Trump has consistently shown discomfort with open-ended wars. But he is much less uneasy about sharp, theatrical action.

Reason 5: What Regime Change Looks Like

This last point is a natural segue into my final explanation for why people misinterpret this president on foreign policy. Many observers have overly narrow mental models of what a regime change operation in this and other cases could look like. They fall back on familiar cases like Iraq and Panama (which, many forget, was made possible by the large U.S. military presence already based there). They picture Marine units storming beaches. They envision long-term occupations that turn into “forever wars.”

However, there is a spectrum of ways and means to change a regime. As I have been saying for months, a regime change operation in Venezuela could take the form of airstrikes combined with a snatch-and-grab operation, likely conducted by Joint Special Operations Command. That kind of operation sits between a raid and traditional intervention. It can be framed as law enforcement, decapitation, or crisis response rather than invasion.

This narrower conception may lower the perceived threshold for action. That does not mean it will not spiral into a larger U.S. military campaign later, but for purposes of prediction, what matters is how the president sees the initial move. Indeed, most leaders who have chosen to use force have done so in the belief that they can avoid a long war. Some have been right, and others dead wrong.

Trump noted in his remarks that there was a second wave military operation that the Defense Department planned for that has not yet taken place and may not need to. But he also claims that the United States will now “run” Venezuela somehow, opening the door for another quagmire even if what is left of Maduro’s security state collapses in the wake of his capture. Commenting on his ability to run Venezuela, Trump optimistically said “it’s all being done right now.” He indicated the Venezuelan vice president is willing to cooperate somehow and that she “doesn’t have a choice” to do otherwise. While I do not share his sentiment, the American president was remarkably confident about the next phase in his remarks today.

What Does This Mean?

When it comes to predicting the president’s next move, too many politicians and analysts assume coherence where there is division, chaos when there is improvisation, and restraint where there is only selectivity. Trump’s foreign policy behavior emerges not from doctrine but from friction. Venezuela offered a target that felt weak, morally disreputable, geographically proximate, and manageable.

Under Trump, foreign policy outcomes are less the product of grand strategy than of episodic alignment. Observers should stop asking whether a given action is consistent with Trump’s supposed beliefs and start asking whether it is legible to him as fast, dominant, and containable. They should pay closer attention to intra-administration dynamics and to how ideas persist even when not immediately acted upon. Otherwise, the failure to predict Venezuela will not be an outlier.

Ultimately, the most reliable predictors of the strike on Maduro were the most basic: the array of U.S. military forces moved into the Caribbean and the steadily escalating strikes on Venezuelan assets that were being framed (in a clearly dishonest way) as focused on countering drug trafficking. This is the same analytical discipline that led specialists like Michael Kofman to correctly predict Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

While many debated President Vladimir Putin’s “true” intent, the amount and type of hardware moved to the border signaled what was about to happen (even if it was not enough for Russia’s invasion operation to succeed) and political rhetoric had changed from past saber-rattling. Even after observers were proven wrong, they wrote it off to Putin being insane or irrational. He may be unreasonable and a poor military strategist, but I don’t think Putin is irrational. Instead, the claim of irrationality functioned as an alibi for an expert class unwilling to update its own view of how the world now works, with the post-Cold War era dead and decomposing.

Let’s hope this analytical trend does not continue much longer. Venezuela is a warning shot about how this president and other world leaders may act elsewhere when similar conditions align. A more dangerous world is certainly here.

Ryan Evans is the founder of War on the Rocks.

**Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.

Image: The White House