The world changed for the better in the last week with the ouster of Venezuela’s narco-terrorist leader Nicolás Maduro. It was a perfectly executed military operation that incurred no American fatalities but delivered de facto control of the world’s largest oil reserves to the United States—reserves worth $17.3 trillion even at current low crude prices.

This was accomplished without a prolonged battle, without an occupation, and without any real or prospective local resistance to the new reality on the ground. There was no real international opposition, apart from the usual impotent whining from our weak adversaries, their even more powerless allies of necessity on the international left, and tiresome Democratic scolds.

In Caracas, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez is now in charge. She has been a hardline socialist who joined the Venezuelan revolutionary movement to avenge her father, a Marxist guerrilla who died in prison. The remaining Bolivarian leadership and state apparatus are similarly packed with hard-edged ideologues who allegedly moonlight on a mass scale as profiteers from the country’s lucrative drug trade. If they fail to cooperate with Washington, President Trump has issued direct statements that they could face fates worse than that of their deposed and incarcerated boss.

Having quickly agreed to surrender 30 million to 50 million barrels of oil to the United States—enough to keep 4 million cars on the road for a year—they may be privately hanging up their ideology while muttering silent prayers of thanks for their deliverance. To stay on the right side of Trump, they will almost certainly institute any change Washington demands, likely including the restoration of the American energy assets nationalized over the last half-century by Venezuela’s previous presidents, Carlos Andrés Pérez and Hugo Chávez.

Will elections be held? Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have said that they will be, and Venezuela’s constitution requires elections within 30 days if the president leaves office. But no date has been set, and democracy is clearly not the main issue for the Trump administration. Nor should it be.

Imposing “regime change,” installing pro-American leaders, and engaging in democratic “nation building” in any country are, as history has cruelly taught us, fraught and uncertain processes with outcomes that usually incur significant expense in blood and treasure. At worst, such interventions fail altogether. Any economic resources at stake eventually fall into adversarial hands and embattled radicals emerge as renewed international threats. Note the U.S.’s humiliating exclusion from both Iraq’s oil fields and Afghanistan’s mineral deposits, despite having liberated both of those countries from oppressive dictatorships and then fought long, hard, and futilely to prop up their corrupt and feckless successors while also trying to defeat the likes of ISIS.

As cooperative as Venezuela’s new leaders appear to be, they do not seem to relish the prospect of being replaced, democratically or otherwise. Likely, either Rodríguez or some other regime candidate would lose to the exiled opposition leader María Corina Machado or any stand-in candidate Machado endorses. This would repeat the near-certain actual results of Venezuela’s 2024 election, in which Maduro fraudulently claimed victory.

If the workings of Venezuelan domestic politics remain a Venezuelan matter, however, they will naturally be much less tainted by allegations of Yankee imperialism. All we have to do is hold our noses at the noxious Marxist leftovers in Caracas while the oil flows.