U.S. President Donald Trump speaks, while wearing a "Make America Great Again" cap, after disembarking Air Force One, as he returns from his Asia trip, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., October 30, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
The Trump administration’s moves to push for regime change in Venezuela have been far from discreet, and one former CIA official warns that this approach and the overall operation are liable to blow up in the president's face.
Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump and his administration have pushed heavily for regime change in Venezuela, pressuring President Nicolás Maduro to resign from office. This push has involved a heavy increase in military and defense posturing, including the authorization of covert operations in the South American nation, the buildup of aircraft carriers off of its northern shore and the prospect of ground deployments in the near future.
Speaking with CNN on Monday afternoon, Kevin Carroll, a former CIA case officer and official with the Department of Homeland Security, said that the administration should “be quiet” with its handling of Venezuela and warned that any sort of military operation in the country could go poorly in a number of ways.
“The very first thing the administration should do is be quiet in public,” Carroll said. “You know, they've been discussing covert action, it’s more like overt action at this point."
"I think they shouldn't undermine whoever comes next there [after Maduro] by making them look like an American puppet by so publicly discussing the CIA’s involvement," Carroll added.
Carroll also warned that despite the history of successful U.S.-backed regime changes, there’s no guarantee that things won’t go sideways in Venezuela and noted such a move could have negative reverberations.
“The U.S. has demonstrated repeatedly that we're capable of forcing regime change from the air, as in Libya in 2011 or in Afghanistan in 2001, with air power and just some special operations forces," Carroll said. "But that doesn't mean that you can control what happens next. We obviously weren't able to get a government to our liking in power in [Libya], and it took a massive investment of U.S. forces to try, ultimately unsuccessfully, to keep a government that we favored in power in [Afghanistan]. So I think the reverberations could be could be really poor."
“You could have some sort of civil war situation develop with competing factions and within Venezuela. Another thing is that for historical reasons, Latin Americans are sensitive about gunboat diplomacy and so forth by the United States. And so going down there and so obviously forcing regime change is going to raise the hackles of nationalists throughout Latin America.”