In a public statement made shortly after winning the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, Venezuelan democratic activist María Corina Machado pledged that she would dedicate the award to U.S. President Donald Trump. It wasn’t just an effort to salve the U.S. president’s famously thin skin after he had sought the prize for himself. Machado’s gesture was also indicative of her personal stake in the U.S. administration’s military buildup in the Caribbean—and the tightrope that she will need to walk in support of Trump’s approach toward the autocratic regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Machado has supported Trump’s efforts in the region, including the killing of alleged narcotics traffickers without evidence or due process.
“This is about saving lives,” she told Fox News in early September after the United States began its bombing campaign.
But can a Nobel Peace Prize laureate continue to endorse a policy that many argue is in violation of international law? And what about if the United States escalated its campaign and Venezuela’s national sovereignty were violated, albeit in the name of democracy?
It was during the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden that Machado rode out of the ranks of a divided democratic opposition to become the face of a broad popular movement rejecting Maduro’s rule. At the time, the Biden administration—in a policy that infuriated many members of Venezuela’s opposition movement—engaged with the Maduro government and selectively lifted the “maximum pressure” sanctions imposed by Trump in 2019. The idea was to incentivize the Maduro regime into convening a competitive presidential election in 2024, as required by the Venezuelan Constitution.
While U.S. and international carrots and sticks pressured the Maduro government into permitting a privately organized national opposition primary that overwhelmingly elected Machado as its presidential candidate, the Maduro-controlled Supreme Court quickly barred Machado from running. Machado campaigned on behalf of her stand-in, Edmundo González. Then, when the election was held on July 28, 2024, it was brazenly stolen by Maduro. And in November 2024, a Democratic administration was not returned to the White House.
Once back in the Oval Office, Trump shifted tack on Maduro to a martial response, declaring him and his government “narco-terrorists.” Under that vague but provocative designation, the U.S. Defense Department mobilized a fleet of more than eight boats, a nuclear-powered submarine, and more than 10,000 personnel in the southern Caribbean..
Shortly after taking up position, the fleet blew up at least four boats and their crews, who the United States alleged were narcotics traffickers. More recently, Trump has signaled that he may direct the forces to attack land-based targets in Venezuela. These are actions designed to rattle Maduro’s inner circle enough that they oust him from the presidential palace in Caracas and spark a transition to democracy.
The Venezuelan opposition’s frustration, and its seeming willingness to go along with Trump’s potentially extraterritorial scheme, is understandable. After Maduro proclaimed himself reelected—without releasing any evidence to support his claim—the regime initiated a massive crackdown against peaceful demonstrators, during which more than 2,000 protesters were arrested and at least 24 killed. Despite widespread international opposition to the elections (minus, of course, countries such as China, Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, and Russia, which rushed to embrace the stolen election’s result) and the government-sanctioned bloodshed that followed, Maduro’s regime proved persistent.
International attention on Venezuela soon faded, and its regional neighbors—Brazil and Colombia—quietly slunk away from any responsibility.
After a long, tense campaign in which Machado and her advisors were harassed and some were arrested, the stolen election, and the inability (or in some cases, unwillingness) of the international community to exert meaningful pressure on the Maduro regime, many in the opposition concluded that even a semi-democratic path toward change was impossible.
Out of desperation, perhaps, Machado and others returned to their calls for the military to defect and thereby remove Maduro and his corrupt cronies from power. Such calls included embracing Trump’s policy killing of Venezuelan civilians whom he claims were drug traffickers, or as he calls them, “narco-terrorists.”
While speculation around the Nobel committee’s decision to award Machado has focused on whether this was a consolation prize for Trump—in that it indirectly gives a nod of support to his hard-line policies on Venezuela—there’s another interpretation, too.
The Norwegian award committee cited Machado’s “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela” and her commitment to a “just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” The announcement’s language can be interpreted as both an endorsement of her battle on the 2024 campaign trail—and also a warning over her support for less-than-peaceful and less-than-democratic means for regime change.
A Nobel Peace Prize rewards commitment to international law and peace over conflict. There is a strong probability that the Trump administration’s Venezuela policy, whether via a palace coup or a targeted bombing campaign, will stoke more violence, bloodshed, and chaos.
Venezuela’s military is deeply riddled with corruption; when you combine that with the presence of Colombian insurgent groups, illicit gold mining in the Orinoco region, and armed pro-government militias (the so-called “colectivos”), it’s easy to see how a spark of violence could open up a broader struggle across the country among and by these criminal networks.
The Trump administration has justified its military escalation off the Venezuelan coast by depicting the Maduro government as a corrupt, illegal regime run by a cartel of narco-terrorists, and some segments of the opposition have embraced this. Yet if that’s true, then neither a palace coup nor a U.S. military strike that takes out the leadership will be sufficient for democratic change.
A bloodless coup in the regime of a so-called narco-terrorist is an oxymoron. This is particularly true in a country such as Venezuela, in which—as the opposition and the Trump administration have correctly argued—the state has been deeply penetrated by illicit activities and transnational criminal networks, including Colombian insurgents, and the military has colluded in activities ranging from illegal gold mining to narcotics trafficking.
The Nobel Prize has shone a spotlight on the plight of Venezuelans in their decades-long struggle to use democratic means to unseat a criminal regime. But does the failure of those pathways justify military strikes? As a long-standing civic activist, first with the election-monitoring group Súmate and later as an opposition leader, Machado has become the hero of popular resistance to the regime. What kind of change this movement wants after the electoral option was shut down last year remains unclear.
One possibility is for Machado to offer a nonviolent, non-U.S. militarily led transition—one around which other countries could rally and which seeks to curb the risk of spiraling violence.
This is tricky terrain for Venezuela’s new Nobel Prize laureate as she seeks to both soothe Trump’s ego and address the urgent pleas of her popular movement and the citizens of Venezuela.