Power First, Democracy Later: The Uncomfortable Lessons from Venezuela

“When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you” is a line from Nietzsche, who warned that “whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster.” I recall this Nietzschean fragment as apposite to today’s Venezuela, and how tempting it is for those who struggle against domination to justify using the dominator’s tools. Venezuela is not only a tragedy for Venezuelans; it is a test of whether democracies can resist becoming what they claim to oppose.

Maduro is not “controversial”; he is an authoritarian ruler whose claim to legitimacy has collapsed. Power without legitimacy is always unsustainable. Max Weber famously argued that political authority endures only when it is perceived as legitimate, rooted in legal-rational procedures, tradition, or charismatic belief. The Maduro government has steadily lost all three. What began as a contested mandate hardened into systematic illegitimacy: constitutional manipulation, the creation of a parallel constituent assembly to sideline the elected legislature, the banning and prosecution of opposition figures, the dismantling of free and competitive elections, and votes widely denounced as fraudulent. Illegitimacy was layered upon illegitimacy until institutions were hollowed out. 

For a region that has lived through military coups and open dictatorships, the recent deterioration of democracy has arrived not with boots, but with ballots. Increasingly, it is elected leaders who dismantle the very institutions that brought them to power. Whether from the right or the left, Chávez, Maduro, Bukele, Noboa and others, they follow a familiar script: erode checks and balances, rewrite the rules, and entrench themselves while claiming popular legitimacy. Democracies can be dismantled even with enormous popular support. That is the central warning of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in How Democracies Die: modern autocrats do not overthrow democracy; they subvert it from within, step by step. The uncomfortable question is what happens when the supposed defenders of democracy begin to mirror that logic in their foreign policy. It would be naïve to believe that United States policy toward Venezuela is driven purely by democratic principle. If this were only about defending democracy, Saudi Arabia would be a problem too, and it isn’t.

The reason is simple, and international relations theory helps make it visible. What is at stake is not democratic consistency but power: who controls resources, influence, and strategic space, the Mearsheimer logic underlying Trump’s National Security Strategy (Katz). In this light, U.S. policy toward Venezuela looks less like a moral crusade and more like classic great-power behaviour, closer to offensive realism than to democratic idealism, and increasingly framed through a revival of Monroe-style spheres of influence.

But the novelty today lies elsewhere. We are not simply watching the return of the Monroe Doctrine; that belongs to the vocabulary of the world of yesterday. What we are living now feels even less restrained. Previous administrations at least maintained the appearance of legality, alliances, and process. Now even the pretences are eroding. Venezuela thus becomes both a site of great-power competition and a stage on which the concentration of power at home is normalised. The fact that Delcy Rodríguez, and not María Corina Machado, appears as the central interlocutor does not look like democratic renewal; it looks like a new strategy: elite pacting, controlled transition, and negotiated continuity. This moment is not a simple binary. It is not authoritarianism versus democracy or imperialism versus sovereignty; not heroic liberation and not crude invasion, but something more ambiguous. It is a convergence of power, legitimacy, institutional erosion, strategic competition, and domestic political habits.

What we are seeing is not a return to yesterday’s imperialism, but a different repertoire of power: management rather than occupation, choreography rather than rupture, regime reconfiguration rather than regime change. Trump is, above all, transactional. Venezuela is not for him a moral struggle, but a trophy to himself as a deal maker, a negotiator.

This takes us into analytical territory for which our old vocabulary is insufficient. The binaries that organised the twentieth century, dictatorship versus democracy, intervention versus sovereignty, revolution versus reaction, explain less and less. What is emerging instead is a politics of administered transitions and negotiated authoritarianisms, where elites pact, institutions are selectively restored, and democratic language coexists with non-democratic practices. The aim is not to replace regimes, but to recalibrate them so they remain governable and internationally manageable.

Seen this way, Venezuela is not only a national crisis but a laboratory. It shows how democratic and authoritarian actors increasingly converge on similar tools: control of legality, selective repression, managed elections, and international bargaining over legitimacy. The question is no longer simply whether a dictator falls, but what kinds of hybrid orders take shape in the aftermath.

This is why Nietzsche’s warning matters, not as moral preaching but as analytical insight. The risk today is not just that democracies are overrun by their enemies; it is that, in the name of urgency and stability, they adopt the same logics of concentration, exception, and negotiated continuity. The abyss is not on the other side of the border. It is in the normalisation of these new repertoires of power, and in our lack of language to name them.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/SWinxy

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