There Was No Delcy Rodríguez in Iran

The operation to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January was as successful as it could have been. U.S. operatives seized Maduro from his palace without losing a single man, and Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez has been completely compliant with U.S. demands since then. Earlier this week, she handed over former Industry Minister Alex Saab to face trial in the U.S. for financial crimes.

U.S. President Donald Trump said publicly that he was expecting the same thing to happen when he attacked Iran alongside Israel, which assassinated Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, in February. “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” Trump told the New York Times a few days into the war. A couple of days after that, he said that he would be involved in picking Iran’s new leader, “like with Delcy in Venezuela.” An administration official told The Wall Street Journal that the new model for U.S. intervention would be called “decapitate and delegate.”

Trump did not, in fact, get to choose Iran’s new leader. The Iranian government crowned Khamenei’s son Mojtaba the new supreme leader, which Trump said he was “not happy” with. The administration had originally hoped that Iran’s National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani could be a “transitional candidate,” a source told CNN, but decided to kill him after he led Iran’s retaliation in the war. Later, administration officials told Politico that they were “testing” whether Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf could be the Delcy of Iran.

However U.S. officials try to spin it, the Trump administration simply does not control Iran like it controls Venezuela. For nearly three months, the Trump administration has tried using a combination of carrots and sticks to get Iran to accept U.S. demands. On Sunday, the United Arab Emirates blamed Iran for a drone attack near an Emirati nuclear power plant. The next day, Trump said that he was delaying a planned attack on Iran at the request of Arab states, including the Emirates.

Why hasn’t the Trump administration been able to repeat the Venezuelan model in Iran? In short, it’s because Trump didn’t actually try to “decapitate and delegate” in Iran. Unlike the U.S. operation in Venezuela, which was aimed at the man in charge and left the political regime intact, the U.S. campaign in Iran was a war against the entire Islamic Republic. While Trump’s specific demands of Iran have shifted around quite a bit, he has consistently asked for a public, humiliating surrender.

Some observers—from Mehdi Parpanchi, editor of the opposition outlet Iran International, to Danny Citrinowicz, former head of Iranian affairs for Israeli military intelligence—have tried to claim that a Venezuelan scenario was always impossible in Iran, because the Islamic Republic is too ideologically entrenched. But that ignores important overlaps between the two countries. Maduro also had an army of ideological enforcers, which Rodríguez now has to wrangle. And plenty of Iranian insiders were disillusioned enough with Islamist ideology to look for an exit or even spy for foreign powers.

The core issue is that Trump attacked the interests of the Iranian state in ways that go beyond ideology. His opening message of the war told every Iranian in uniform, from high commanders to cops on the street, that they were a target for “certain death.” That message also hinted that the U.S. was going to foment revolution in Iran. A few days into the war, the administration began telling the media about a plan to use Kurdish rebels to get the uprising rolling. 

The U.S.-Israeli attacks killed hundreds of Iranians, both military and civilians, in the first two days alone. Trump himself admitted that some of them were “the people we had in mind” to lead Iran. An Israeli military operation to free former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from captivity nearly killed him, too.

Although U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio blamed Iran’s intransigence on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite branch of the military, Trump’s proudest attacks were on the Iranian air force and navy, part of the regular conscript military that dates back to before the Islamic Revolution.

In other words, the entire Iranian elite (and a good chunk of the rank-and-file) had their backs to the wall. The Delcy of Iran was dead before she could even cut a deal. And if they weren’t killed by foreign bombs, these leaders might face a firing squad for their role in suppressing the January 2026 uprising, which Trump was promising to avenge.

As the war dragged on, the U.S.-Israeli military campaign began to target infrastructure that any Iranian government—whether Islamist or secular, dictatorial or democratic—would need to run the country. Bombs destroyed Iranian steel mills, railroads, bridges, and even college campuses as Trump threatened to do the same to the country’s electrical infrastructure. It doesn’t take a true believer in political Islam to want to deter these attacks from happening again.

The Trump administration was right to see Larijani and Ghalibaf as “pragmatists.” Larijani reportedly presented Khamenei with a plan for Chinese-style reforms after violently putting down protests, and Ghalibaf is a ruthless, transactional operator who has constantly shifted his public image depending on the ideology of the moment. But “pragmatic” doesn’t mean “pushover.” Precisely because these men wanted to save their own skins and preserve their power, they had to play hardball with the United States. The same cost-benefit calculation that led Rodríguez to submit would lead Iran’s leaders to resist.

Rather than asking why Iran wasn’t like Venezuela, the question should be why Trump thought that the scenario would turn out that way. For all the contradictory reporting on what Trump’s advisers did or didn’t tell him, it’s important to bear in mind that the Biden administration was also considering an attack on Iran at the end of its term. Iran had been shockingly passive while suffering setback after setback in its post–October 2023 conflicts with Israel. Expert warnings about a regional war were proven wrong.

And the high of Maduro’s overthrow was intoxicating. The success of that operation seemed to show that anything was possible, and the January 2026 uprising in Iran presented an opportunity to rack up a streak of wins, caution be damned. Despite setbacks in Iran, the inner circle of foreign policy elites may still be chasing opportunities to repeat the Venezuelan model. Trump administration sources told Politico that it is seriously considering a military attack on Cuba, which would present a much weaker target than Iran.

“The initial idea on Cuba was that the leadership was weak and that the combination of stepped-up sanctions enforcement, really an oil blockade, and clear U.S. military wins in Venezuela and Iran would scare the Cubans into making a deal,” one of the sources said. “Now Iran has gone sideways, and the Cubans are proving much tougher than originally thought. So now military action is on the table in a way that it wasn’t before.”