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Confused about what, exactly, the United States has planned for Venezuela? You’re in very good, mighty large company.

Around Washington, even those who have gotten briefed by the Trump Administration’s most-senior hands overseeing the operation cannot convincingly describe it. The D.C. set lacks a vocabulary to detail what has happened, what is happening, and what they expect to happen next. The problem underlying all three is that none match the known definitions describing past bouts of U.S. ambition abroad. What do you call it when the U.S. seizes the leader of an oil-rich South American nation from his bed and hauls him to Manhattan to face drug charges, but leaves the rest of his leadership intact and warns them that they better do what he wants? In a first for Donald Trump, he is lacking a slogan.

Speaker Mike Johnson seemed ready to split hairs on Monday after a closed-door session with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other Trump officials. “The way this is being described, this is not a regime change,” Johnson said. “This is a demand for change of behavior by a regime.”

Got that? Yeah, neither does most of Washington.

For his part, appearing Monday in federal court in Manhattan, Venezuela’s autocratic leader Nicolás Maduro said he had been “kidnapped.” U.S. officials countered that he was arrested as part of a criminal case against him and his family. Venezuela’s allies said it felt all too familiar: “It reminds us of the worst interference in our area, in our zone of peace,” Columbia’s Ambassador to the U.N. said during a fiery emergency session this week. The French representative sitting through that Security Council meeting said Trump’s action “chips away at the very foundation of international order” while U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, said the moves violated the U.N. charter.

But here’s the problem no one can untangle: what, exactly, do we call it?

The challenge here is how all of the potentially appropriate language carries biases with it. Regime Change is synonymous to a lot of Washington with plenty of troubled records in removing one set of leaders for another. (And, to be clear, leaving Maduro’s Vice President in charge of the still-intact Maduro government falls far short of that.) Decapitation works only if the body below dies, and that does not seem to have happened; Trump says the new leader is complying with his demands. Regents or viceroys hearken back to royalty and empires, and that’s not the look Trump is going for here—at least for now. And anything bordering on colonial or Cold War language—protectorate, satellite state, occupied territory, vassal state, provisional government, client—are pretty much non-starters with the foreign policy establishment that knows these things seldom end well for the bigger power.

Scholars of U.S. ambitions are also searching for the right language. “It does not seem that Trump is imagining regime change. He would be doing different things if that were the goal,” says Daniel Immerwahr, a historian at Northwestern University whose 2019 book, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, seems prescient these days. “You could call it an informal empire if you wanted to, like, We will turn you into a protectorate. But that is different from We're going to micromanage your internal politics. That is different from We're going to try to make you part of us, or like us in some way, or make you over in our image.”

But as Dominic Tierney, a Swarthmore College political scientist whose research focuses on wars and their perceptions, put it to me: “If any other country made any effort to do that to the United States, it would be considered an act of war, unquestionably.” 

Read more: Maduro’s Nike Tracksuit and the New Visual Language of Power

In the most simple terms: there is not really a word that fits what just happened. It’s not like, to borrow an Immerwahr analogy, the munchkins are ready to greet Dorothy as a liberator for dropping a house on the Wicked Witch of the East. Predictions of Iraqis greeting U.S. forces as liberators to this day haunt the Bush team. The grey zone works in Trump’s favor. That’s why it has been so easy for Trump’s team to talk in circles around what they just accomplished.

“American warriors are second to none, the best in the world and the best of our country,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said hours after the operation. “What all of us witnessed last night was sheer guts and grit, gallantry, and glory of the American warrior. I'm simply humbled by such men.”

The next day, appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, Secretary of State and interim National Security Adviser Marco Rubio downplayed the military aspect of the operation. “There's not a war. I mean, we are at war against drug trafficking organizations, not a war against Venezuela. We are enforcing American laws with regards to oil sanctions,” he said.

And the following day, after meeting with both Secretaries, Johnson seemed ready to parrot the language. “We are not at war. We do not have U.S. armed forces in Venezuela, and we are not occupying that country,” the Speaker said.

But, as he is wont to do, Trump had other messaging. 

"We’re at war with people that sell drugs. We’re at war with people that empty their prisons into our country and empty their drug addicts and empty their mental institutions into our country,” Trump told NBC News that same day.

On Wednesday, when he sat down for almost two hours with reporters from The New York Times, Trump then suggested the U.S. could play a role in Venezuela for years.

“We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil. We’re getting oil prices down, and we’re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need,” Trump said Wednesday.

Hours later, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Fox News that a U.S. takeover of Venezuelan oil is not happening. “No, definitely not. This is Trump being Trump,” he said. “This is the threat of military force but not the use of military force to prevent the export of Venezuelan crude that’s been under sanctions.”

The ambiguity might be strategic but not without cost.

Even the Senate struggled with its vocabulary as it issued a rare rebuke of Trump’s actions in the Southern hemisphere. GOP Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Todd Young of Indiana, and Josh Hawley of Missouri joined with Democrats to advance largely symbolic legislation that would require Trump to seek Congress’ approval before taking any new military action in Venezuela. But notably absent: an actual definition of what was happening beyond calling future actions “hostilities.”

Then there’s the murky rationale behind all of this. Trump and his allies have said this is to head off a narco-terrorism operation that threatens Americans, but cannot seem to stop talking about Venezuela's oil riches. (“You didn't say that part out loud,” Immerwahr jokes about oil having been an unspoken pretense for past wars.) From the White House, it seems like Trump is already rationing barrels of energy to U.S. firms. Some, like Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, are hailing the move as a first step toward restoring democracy in Venezuela, yet Trump has signaled Maduro’s most credible political rival—the one who won last year’s Nobel Peace Prize—should not be waiting for a phone call installing her, even after she offered to give Trump her award for freeing her nation of Maduro.

So what might end up coming out of this is a term that is uniquely about Venezuela for the moment—but one that could be expanded if Trump replicates this nebulous tactic elsewhere. After all, Balkanization did not mean anything until the 20th Century. Language is fluid—and certainly so is Trump’s pursuit of power.

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