Iran is not Venezuela as much as Trump wants it to be

President Donald Trump had a likely successor in mind when his administration took out former Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in January. He doesn’t have that in Iran.

In the runup to the joint U.S.-Israel operation that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and dozens of top Iranian officials, CIA officials worked to make inroads with some members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to two people familiar with the matter who like others in this article were granted anonymity to describe sensitive operations.

But while the intelligence gleaned helped the U.S. and Israel successfully target Iran’s supreme leader and several other top Iranian officials, the administration had little certainty about who could realistically take power in Iran and would be able to work with Washington.

As the war in Iran expands, it is increasingly clear that defining and achieving success in this conflict is far more complex, lengthy and costly to American lives than the Venezuela operation.

“There’s no coordinated or breakaway group inside the regime that the Americans view as a new government they would welcome, or any real organized opposition,” one of the people familiar said. Trump, in one of numerous phone interviews since the Iran operation began, suggested to ABC News that several of the individuals he’d thought could take over the country’s government had been killed in the missile strikes. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead,” the president said. “Second or third place is dead.”

A third person close to the president’s national security team described the internal thinking about the current state of play in Iran as “all over the map.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a post-publication statement: “As President Trump said today, this was our last, best chance to strike and eliminate the intolerable threats posed by this sick and sinister regime run by terrorists. Iran was increasing their missile production every month, and if the United States allowed them to continue, Iran would have been shielded by deadly ballistic missiles while creating a nuclear weapon, arming terrorist proxies, and posing a dire threat to our homeland. The United States needed to act now while the regime was weaker than it had ever been rather than allow Iran to build up its capabilities and attack us first.”

Trump is attracted to the possibility of replicating in Iran what he did in Venezuela, a quick operation that led to a good working relationship with Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez.“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” Trump told the New York Times.

But the countries’ structures are vastly different. Venezuela’s government slid into authoritarianism over the past quarter century. The country’s president led a handful of people who had their own ministries and power bases. The U.S. government had made inroads into that leadership crew — which critics describe as a mafia-like gang — making a quick decapitation and a follow-on political arrangement easier. Iran, by contrast, is a theocracy entrenched over nearly five decades. The supreme leader ruled over a complicated system that intertwines clerical, elected and military leadership — and which is designed to fill positions that are vacated.

Trump on Monday publicly offered a justification for the Iran strikes aides had only suggested anonymously: the unproven and highly disputed claim that Iran’s missiles were close to threatening the U.S. homeland. That came only after a weekend of somewhat contradictory visions of what a post-Khamenei Iran could look like. At the same time, Trump sought to reiterate a clear set of military goals, including destroying Iran’s missile capabilities, annihilating Iran’s Navy and making sure Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon.

Devoid of more cooperative or friendly leadership that the U.S. can immediately identify,

Trump’s hopes that the Iranian people will overthrow the Iranian regime are also unlikely to come to fruition anytime soon.

Iran’s security and paramilitary capabilities, for now, remain mostly intact, the first person familiar said, “so there’s little reason to believe the regime won’t be able to quash any public protests or demonstrations with force.”

“We still don’t know if this war ends with some semblance of this regime intact or not, and regime collapse and regime change are two different things,” said Amos Hochstein, former senior adviser to President Joe Biden. “Regime collapse could lead to chaos and to multiple centers of power competing with each other. I personally don’t know where this is going. The problem is, I don’t think anybody does. And without troops on the ground, it’s very difficult to create regime change from the air.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a hearing in late January said that “no one knows who would take over” in Iran if the supreme leader were removed, acknowledging that while the administration would work toward a “similar transition” to what occurred in Venezuela, Iran’s situation “would be more complex.”

A new CNN poll released Monday showed that 59 percent of Americans oppose the Iran operation and that 60 percent do not believe Trump has a clear plan for handling the situation there. And it isn’t just Democrats publicly poking holes in the administration’s rationale for the operation and asking questions about the endgame.

In a post on X, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated the military objectives outlined by the president — in response to a post by conservative blogger Matt Walsh, who’d written that the administration’s “messaging on this thing is, to put it mildly, confused.”

Overseas, America’s partners and allies are also waiting for the administration to clearly spell out the goals of their operation, said one Western diplomat granted anonymity to describe private conversations , adding that Washington has so far failed to spell out a long term plan for Iran and the region.

For now, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have publicly identified a set of military objectives they want to achieve in an undefined time frame.

“Whatever the time is, it’s okay. Whatever it takes,” Trump said Monday at an unrelated Medal of Honor ceremony. During that appearance he outlined four U.S. objectives: destroying Iran’s missile capabilities, annihilating Iran’s Navy, making sure Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon or continue to arm, fund and direct terrorist armies outside of its borders.

The greater effort to define U.S. goals comes after a series of interviews he gave this weekend in which he put forward different timelines and goals for the war, ranging from “two to three days” to “four to five weeks” and from achieving “freedom for the people of Iran” to defending “the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.”

“If you listened to Secretary Hegseth this morning and then to the president, it’s clear they have not decided on their objectives and I think they’re going to have to do that very soon,” said Christopher Hill, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and four other countries under both Republican and Democratic presidents.

“We’ll know in a few days if there’s any anti-government movement in Iran, but it’s not looking like that’s a likely outcome. So they may want to ease up on the talk about regime change.”

Trump and his Cabinet’s comments on Monday suggest the administration may be downshifting its ambitions away from regime change to just reducing their military capabilities.

“The purpose of this is to destroy that missile capability,” Rubio told reporters on Capitol Hill Monday afternoon, adding that “what they are trying to do and have been trying to do for a very long time is build a conventional weapons capability as a shield…there will come a point where they have so many conventional missiles, so many drones and can inflict so much damage that no one can do anything about their nuclear program.

He said Iran is building, by some estimates, “over 100 of these missiles a month” and possess thousands of one way attack drones. “Imagine a year from now or year and a half from now, the capabilities they would have to inflict damage on us. It’s an unacceptable risk,” he said.

Cheyenne Haslett, Felicia Schwartz, Nahal Toosi and Eric Bazail-Eimil contributed to this report.