Trump has drawn parallels between Iran and Venezuela. But there's no Delcy Rodríguez in Tehran

US President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted the US operations in Venezuela as a “perfect” example of how regime change can play out, drawing direct parallels between Venezuela and Iran.

“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” Trump told The New York Times in a brief interview on Sunday.

But US operations in Caracas and Tehran have unfolded in vastly different ways.

In Venezuela, strikes were limited and intended to aid US special forces’ capture of authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro. His capture led to a swift about-face from his former deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, who welcomed US overtures almost immediately.

In Iran, air strikes by the US and Israel have been much broader in scope, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and hundreds of other people. These strikes were met with immediate and wide-ranging Iranian retaliation across the Middle East – one that Iran would have been planning for weeks.

Meanwhile, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has ruled out talking, sending a clear message that the remaining leadership in Iran is prepared to fight, rather than take instructions from Washington.

Analysts say that whatever comes next in the already-escalating war with Iran is highly unpredictable. And Iran’s theocratic, ideologically driven regime bears very little resemblance to the government built around former strongman Maduro.

Two very different governments in Iran and Venezuela

The Islamic Republic of Iran was designed to survive.

Although Khamenei was at the top, the regime’s authority is highly distributed – divided between military institutions, religious clerics and a variety of other political institutions, according to Johns Hopkins professor Vali Nasr.

“Since the Israeli attack in June, the supreme leader and the system have distributed even more power, in a sense that decapitation really does not work the way it does in other countries,” Nasr explained in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on Sunday.

“We can kill the top, but the system has been built to function,” said Nasr, who is also a former US State Department official.

Israel claimed it killed 40 senior Iranian military commanders in the opening wave of strikes. But Iran’s systems and its retaliation plans have clearly remained intact.

“I would say Iran is today functioning on the basis of a deep state, a set of bureaucrats, statesmen, clerics and Revolutionary Guard commanders and military commanders… They got their guidance from him, but the day to day running of the country was not done by the [supreme leader], it was done by this deep state,” Nasr added.

And unlike Venezuela, the regime in Iran is a theocracy-turned-autocracy. Many of its officials, diplomats and security forces are ideologically driven and have hardline views.

Previous crackdowns on dissent in Iran have not only aimed to squash anti-government sentiment, but also religious dissent, modern reforms and women’s rights.

Analysts have argued that one way for potential Iranian leaders to gain internal legitimacy to fill the power vacuum left in the wake of Khamenei’s killing is to double down on some of those views, as well as show greater strength against the country’s adversaries.

“It is possible that the future leaders will be more hardline than Khamenei. Now, in the transitional phase, that is very much a possibility, especially when it comes to the IRGC,” said Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, a senior analyst for on Iran and Iraq at Control Risks.

“We have seen that they have been quite indiscriminate in the attacks and the type of attacks compared, say, to the war in June,” she told CNN.

No clear successor to Khamenei

Trump’s administration has offered up contradictory war goals, but the US president keeps talking about new leadership in Tehran.

Even as top US officials insist the war is not about regime change, Trump called for the Iranian people to take control of their country. Then on Sunday, he told The New York Times that he has “three very good choices” for who should rule Iran now, but he declined to name them.

Unlike Venezuela – where the US operation was followed by swift visits with the acting president Rodríguez – there is no automatic vice-leadership in Iran willing to play ball with the US administration. Rather, Khamenei’s death has triggered an internal deliberation process that is out of the US and Israel’s hands.

There is also no local rival to the Iranian regime’s loyalist IRGC and Basij forces, according to David Petraeus, a retired US Army general and former CIA director.

“The challenge here is there is no Ahmed al-Sharaa figure, as in Syria, who had a military force, who was able to take down the hollow regime forces of the murderous Bashar al-Assad in Syria” in 2024, Petraeus told CNN.

Whoever is appointed next in Iran “would need the blessing of not just the Assembly of Experts but of the security establishment, including the IRGC,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East program at the think tank Chatham House.

“They are going to be looking for someone who would support their interests,” Vakil told CNN’s Brian Todd in an interview.

Airstrikes alone don’t lead to regime change

History shows that the use of airstrikes with no boots on the ground is highly unlikely to lead to regime change in a way that moves toward democracy or meaningful reform.

“It has never worked,” Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, told CNN.

Although modern bombs almost always hit their targets, that “tactical success doesn’t mean you get strategic success,” explained Pape, who writes a column on how escalation unfolds during war.

Air strikes do not embolden people to protest in the streets. They inject fear into the population and make it easier for leaders to make a nationalist argument for retaining power, he argued.

Instead, the experience of air attacks risks creating a dynamic of “the society and the government versus the foreign military attacker.”

Attempts at regime change by air typically lead to reconfigurations of essentially the same regime, or to even more nationalist or unpredictable governments, Pape said.

Bassiri Tabrizi, at Control Risks, predicted: “We are likely to see continued retaliation, continued escalation, and the conflict ending only as a consequence of the exhausted resources from one side or the other.”

*CNN’s Alejandra Jaramillo, Christian Edwards, Brian Todd and Dugald McConnell contributed to this report. *