The Exiles Who Sold Trump’s Wars

When the United States bombed Iran in February and abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from his Caracas residence in January, celebrations erupted across Iranian and Venezuelan exile communities in America, videos of which President Donald Trump eagerly reposted on Truth Social. For the better part of the past two decades, Iranian and Venezuelan émigré networks have been an indispensable supporting cast for Washington’s pressure campaigns against their home governments. They were not the architects of U.S. policy. But they were its most convincing salespeople, helping transform what might otherwise have looked like naked aggression into something resembling a liberation project.  

Now, the diaspora figureheads from Iran and Venezuela, each with decades invested in cultivating American power, have been cast aside as nice people unfit to lead. The dismissals came quickly, and in nearly identical language. María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, offered Trump her prize—an accolade he had been openly campaigning for since the start of his second term—and said Venezuelans were “very grateful” for their “hour of freedom” after the capture of Maduro. Days earlier, the president had already taken her measure. “She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country,” he told reporters after the operation. “She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.”  

Then, Delcy Rodríguez, vice-president of Venezuela since 2018, was sworn in as acting president on January 5, decrying the “kidnapping” of her former boss. But shortly after Trump’s warning that she could “pay a very big price” if she didn’t comply with his demands, Rodríguez said her cabinet was willing to work with the United States. A rare oil deal between the two governments granted the United States access to Venezuela’s petroleum revenues in a murky, potentially corruption-riddled process. 

Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last shah, fared no better. The most visible face of Iran’s exiled opposition, he published an effusive op-ed in The Washington Post the day the bombing of Iran began, thanking Trump for a “humanitarian intervention”—the same day American airstrikes killed over 100 schoolgirls in the city of Minab. Asked whether the former royal might lead a post-clerical Iran, Trump was dismissive in the by-now-familiar register. “It would seem to me that somebody from within, maybe, would be more appropriate,” he said. 

In the case of Iran, what Washington wanted instead became clear in May, when The New York Times reported that the United States and Israel had been quietly working to install former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—a Holocaust denier and longtime hardliner of the Islamic Republic—as Iran’s next leader. The plan collapsed only when Ahmadinejad was wounded in an airstrike on his Tehran home.  

It echoed what had happened with Rodríguez in Venezuela, where a managed transition led not to real democratic change but to a regime insider acceptable to Washington. The goal was to swap one ruler for another, not to free anyone, but to find an amenable transaction partner.  

“As far as regime change, I never cared about regime change,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal on Sunday after announcing a deal with Iran. “This is the third group we’ve dealt with, and this is the most rational group yet.”  

Having supplied the justification for intervention through unrelenting activism, the exiles were shut out of the rest of the process. The policies they had demanded for years were carried out. But as immigrants, they are not those who bore the cost. Over time, the Iranian and Venezuelan exiles had lost sight of the fact that they were pushing to impose their will on countries they weren’t calling home anymore, and they were out of step with the people they claimed to champion. 

Nowhere is that distance more visible than in the politics of economic sanctions. Iran has for years ranked among the most heavily sanctioned states on earth; one 2024 study put the cost to its economy at $1.2 trillion between 2011 and 2022. Venezuela’s sanctions, concentrated on oil, were narrower in design but sweeping in effect—lost revenues between 2017 and 2024 reportedly equaled 213 percent of the country’s GDP over the period. A study in The Lancet has attributed more than 560,000 deaths a year to unilateral sanctions worldwide, through their corrosion of health systems and economic life. (The Lancet authors note that unilateral sanctions from the U.S. or E.U. may be more lethal than the multilateral sanctions imposed by the United Nations.) The scholarly consensus on whether such measures actually change government behavior is, at best, deeply skeptical. 

 The evidence didn’t matter to key actors within the two diaspora communities who’ve been leveraging their influence to espouse sanctions, portraying them as benign tools of statecraft that the target nations would happily embrace. Several Iranian-American influencers took to calling the measures “chemotherapy,” a poison administered to cure a terminal disease. The metaphor gave away more than its users intended: Someone has to absorb the toxicity, and it was never going to be them. 

The most zealous advocates of economic punishment were Iranian-born analysts affiliated with organizations such as United Against Nuclear Iran and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Nominally dedicated to blocking Iran’s path to a bomb, they operated in practice as trade vigilantes, mounting pressure campaigns against any company that signed a deal with Tehran—most of it far from anything military.  

In 2014, after a sustained publicity campaign, UANI helped push the British accounting firm Grant Thornton out of Iran; firms in travel, food, construction, and renewable energy were maneuvered into severing ties on the same logic. The target was commerce, and the cost was borne by Iranians, not ex-pats. 

Venezuelans in America have similarly championed sanctions against their native country. Former President of the National Assembly of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó, is perhaps the most notable example. In exile in Florida since 2023, Guaidó described sanctions as “necessary” for the restoration of democracy back home, a call echoed by Venezuelan-American journalists in Miami.  

During the first Trump administration, the significant support the sanctions policy garnered among the Venezuelan diaspora, especially in South Florida, where the largest population of Venezuelan-Americans is concentrated, mirrored the Cuban diaspora’s agitation to perpetuate sanctions against their birth country, a policy that’s now old enough, if it were a person, to receive full Social Security benefits. 

Now that both the Venezuelan and Iranian regimes have forged agreements with the Trump administration to keep their grip on power, it’s clear that many exiles mistook American coercion for democratic solidarity. They believed they were enlisting Washington in the cause of freedom. In the end, Washington recruited them to the cause of political micromanagement, not regime change. That is the lesson facing exile communities from Tehran to Caracas: the superpower that borrows your moral authority may not share your democratic ambitions. It may only need your story long enough to justify its own.  

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