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Fresh off a successful operation in Venezuela, the U.S. is weighing its options as Iran’s leadership launches a violent crackdown on anti-government protesters — raising questions about whether similar military pressure could be applied to Tehran, Iran.
In Caracas, Venezuela, U.S. special operators moved quickly to capture Nicolás Maduro. In Tehran, Iran, any comparable effort would unfold against a state with greater military depth and the ability to strike back well beyond its borders.
“Thinking of this as an operation, as in the case of Venezuela or the nuclear program, is the wrong framing,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Fox News Digital. “This has to be seen as a campaign.”
Iran is a larger, more capable military power than Venezuela, with security forces designed to protect the regime from both foreign attack and internal unrest. Power is distributed across clerical institutions, security services and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — a structure built to survive the loss of individual leaders rather than collapse with them.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei faces mass protests in Iran. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)
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“Musical chairs at the top is highly unlikely to work in Iran,” Taleblu said.
He pointed to the central role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which he described as “the tip of the spear of the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism,” warning that removing a single figure would leave a hardened security apparatus intact — and potentially more dangerous.
That structure is backed by a military capability Venezuela never possessed: a resilient missile force that gives Iran credible options for retaliation if it believes the regime itself is under threat.
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“The retaliatory capability of the Islamic Republic is still fairly intact, which is their missile program,” Taleblu said.
During heavy Israeli strikes in the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, Iran’s missile force was degraded but not eliminated. While air defenses and launch infrastructure were damaged, Tehran, Iran, retains a significant inventory of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles and the ability to disperse and fire them from mobile launchers.
Analysts say the conflict reinforced Iran’s reliance on missiles as its primary deterrent, even as it accepted that air defenses could be penetrated. During the war, Israel degraded Iran’s air defenses while the U.S. moved in to strike its nuclear facilities.
Iran’s armed forces also are far larger than Venezuela’s, with nearly 1 million active and reserve personnel compared with roughly 120,000 troops in Venezuela — a disparity that underscores the very different military environments U.S. planners would face.
Iran’s antagonism toward the United States is rooted in the ideology of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which cast opposition to Western influence — particularly the U.S. and Israel — as a core principle of the state. Venezuela’s clashes with Washington, by contrast, largely have been driven by political power, sanctions and control over oil revenues, rather than a revolutionary ideology aimed at opposing Western society itself.
Iranians have taken to the streets to demonstrate against the regime across the country. (UGC via AP)
In Venezuela, Trump administration officials framed the operation not as regime change, but as a limited action to advance U.S. interests — prosecuting Maduro on drug trafficking charges and securing leverage over the country’s oil sector. After Maduro’s capture, Trump allowed Vice President Delcy Rodríguez to assume power on an interim basis and expressed doubt that opposition leader María Machado had sufficient internal support to govern.
In Iran, by contrast, any military action would be interpreted as a direct challenge to the regime itself.
Unlike Venezuela, where the state apparatus remained intact after Maduro’s removal, targeting Iran’s leadership risks expanding the mission from a narrow strike into a broader campaign against the regime’s security forces.
“You could conduct an attack against the leadership, including the supreme leader, but that raises lots of questions about who comes next,” Seth Jones, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former Pentagon official, told Fox News Digital.
“Is it Khamenei’s son? Is it Sadegh Larijani? Is it Hassan Khameini?” Jones said, referring to figures often discussed as potential successors. “Or do you start to look at other options?”
Nicolás Maduro is seen in handcuffs after landing at a Manhattan helipad, escorted by heavily armed federal agents. (XNY/Star Max/GC Images via Getty Images)
That uncertainty, Jones said, is what turns a leadership-targeting strike into a far broader and riskier proposition.
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“The more this starts to be not just the removal of a leader, but regime change, the more it becomes an expansive targeting problem,” Jones said.
Jones added that the core challenge for U.S. planners is not whether military force could be used, but what political objective it would serve.
“The big question then becomes what’s the objective — not just militarily, but what’s the political objective in Iran and how does that translate into what types of military resources you need?” he said.
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Such an expansion, Jones warned, would raise the risk of a prolonged and destabilizing conflict in a country of Iran’s size and complexity.
“The more you start looking at regime change and using military force for that, the more messy the situation in Iran could get,” Jones said. “It’s really hard to social engineer from the outside.”
