For 10 weeks now, Venezuela has had two presidents playing a tense game of chicken. The United States and a host of other countries have arrayed themselves behind Juan Guaidó, the young challenger from the opposition, beginning a broad drive to force the disastrously incompetent and dictatorial Nicolás Maduro out of office.

But despite threats of intervention, calls on the military to rebel, economic sanctions, promises of aid for the long-suffering Venezuelans and long power failures, Mr. Maduro remains defiantly entrenched in the presidential palace, his corrupt generals at his side and his Russian and Cuban backers behind him.

The confrontation ratcheted up when Russia demonstratively flew two military planes with roughly 100 military “advisers” into Caracas on March 23. That prompted an echo of the Monroe Doctrine from President Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, to the effect that the United States regards any military forces arriving from outside the Western Hemisphere as a “direct threat” to the region.

Upping the ante, Mr. Maduro had his legislature (there are also two of those) strip Mr. Guaidó of his parliamentary immunity as head of the opposition-controlled National Assembly, opening the way to his potential arrest. Mr. Guaidó, who previously defied a ban against traveling abroad, responded by vowing to continue fighting the “cowardly, miserable and murderous” regime. “The regime believes that by attacking me, they will stop us,” Mr. Guaidó told supporters. “There’s no way back in this process.”

That may be so, and it certainly would be a great relief for Venezuela to be rid of the leader who inherited a broken country from his revolutionary mentor Hugo Chávez and has continued to push it to utter ruin, creating a humanitarian disaster atop the world’s largest oil reserves. But how long that “transition” might last, and what horrors it may yet visit on people hovering on the edge of starvation, are open questions.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly warned that any move to arrest or harm Mr. Guaidó will draw a “significant” response. But then Mr. Trump has frequently rattled his sabers — “all options are on the table” — and there are no suggestions that any military action is being seriously contemplated. And despite bellicose warnings from both Mr. Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Russia has shown no sign of pulling back its “advisers” or halting its support for Mr. Maduro, if only in hopes of recovering some of the large sums it has lent him.

In effect, what was intended as a swift operation to pry out a nasty despot has turned into a stalemate while Venezuela further disintegrates, lately with long, debilitating blackouts.

That is not to argue that Mr. Trump should become more aggressive. Mr. Maduro and his patron in the Kremlin may have called Washington’s bluff for now, leaving the American president with his own “red-line moment,” as David E. Sanger wrote in The Times, reminiscent of President Barack Obama’s failure to follow up on his threats against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. But a military intervention in a country bigger than Texas would be ugly, even if Russia did not get further involved, and nearly all the other nations backing Mr. Guaidó firmly opposed one.

The reality is that Mr. Trump has no real option but to wait. It is hard to conceive that Mr. Maduro will hang on indefinitely, or that his generals will not see the writing on the wall as the situation becomes ever more dire. Vladimir Putin, for all his longing to prop up a rare ally in Latin America and to stick it to the United States, cannot project serious power halfway around world, or risk the serious response this could provoke.

It is terrible to witness the suffering of a nation for no reason other than the criminal obduracy of a corrupt clique. But the last act in this tragedy can only be performed by the Venezuelans, knowing that the sooner they and their armed forces evict the thieves, the sooner the world will pitch in to help them recover their lives.

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