After months of elaborate American military preparations, at 10:46 p.m. (EST) Friday, January 2, President Donald Trump issued an order from his Mar-a-Lago home in South Florida for the U.S. military to begin a lightning attack on Venezuela’s most heavily defended military base. The goal of the mission was to arrest Venezuela’s illegitimate president, Nicolas Maduro, and his politically influential wife, Cilia Flores, and bring them to the United States to face criminal charges of narco-terrorism in a federal court in New York City.
By 1:01 a.m., U.S. Special Forces troops were dropped by helicopter into the fortified Venezuela military base, where Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flires, had thought that they were safe. By 3:29 a.m., after a brief but intense series of gun battles, in which at least 40 Venezuelan soldiers and civilians were killed, Maduro and his wife had been taken prisoner and put aboard a U.S. Special Forces helicopter crossing the Venezuelan coast headed towards a U.S. amphibious assault ship, the Iwo Jima, cruising in international Caribbean waters. From there, Maduro and his wife were flown to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where they were transferred to a passenger jet that flew them to a military airbase north of New York City. They were then driven to a federal prison in Brooklyn, New York, where they awaited their first hearing in a Manhattan federal criminal court for the Southern District of New York, which took place on Monday.
Standing next to his wife and defense attorneys, Maduro pleaded not guilty to narco-trafficking and other criminal charges during his arraignment. He also defiantly told the federal judge that as the head of the nation of Venezuela, he was not under the American court’s legal jurisdiction.
“I am innocent. I’m not guilty. I’m a decent man. I’m still the president of my country,” Maduro said through a Spanish interpreter, adding that he was entitled to the international legal protections for a prisoner of war because he had been kidnapped by armed American troops from his home in Caracas.
When Maduro continued to argue that he was wrongfully apprehended, the presiding judge gently told him that there would be a more appropriate time and place to make those arguments in court at some later date.
The Faulty Legal Arguments In Maduro’s Defense
Maduro’s defense lawyer, Barry Pollack, told the judge that before Maduro’s trial begins, he plans to make arguments challenging the legality of Maduro’s abduction and asserting his legal immunity from criminal prosecution as a head of state.
However, former federal prosecutor Artie McConnell told the Wall Street Journal that those defense arguments are ultimately likely to fail for two reasons.
First, there is a legal precedent from prior court rulings that criminal conduct by a government leader, like drug trafficking, doesn’t qualify as an official government act that is immune from prosecution.
Second, federal prosecutors are likely to use the same argument against Maduro that was used successfully more than 30 years ago in the drug trafficking trial of former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. In that trial, the federal judge agreed that the U.S. had never formally recognized Noriega as the legitimate head of state for Panama because he never won a free election to serve as president.
Similarly, several internationally recognized fair election monitoring groups concluded that Maduro stole Venezuela’s last presidential election in 2024. Therefore, federal prosecutors are expected to argue that the U.S. does not recognize Maduro as Venezuela’s legitimate president and the legal protections that go with that status.
On Saturday morning, President Trump told the American people about the successful raid on the main Venezuelan military base at a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in South Florida. He said that Venezuelan military forces had been “rendered powerless” by the U.S. attack, and that “the lights of Caracas were largely turned off” during the American assault due to the damage done to Venezuela’s electrical grid.
Trump Watched The Attack By U.S. Troops In Real-Time Video
The president said he had watched the military mission in Venezuela in real time, surrounded by generals, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a makeshift situation room that was set up in his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump compared the live video feed he watched of the attacks on the Venezuelan military bases to an action-packed “television show.”
Trump said during his call into a Fox News morning show that he was impressed by “the speed [and] the violence” employed by the American Special Forces personnel in carrying out their assigned mission in Venezuela.
However, while those attacks were going on, normal life in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, continued largely undisturbed. Residents reported that they were still able to move about freely. But in some places, lines reportedly formed at gas stations by car owners seeking to top off their tanks against the possibility that more disruptive American attacks might follow.
Trump Plans To Take Over Venezuela And Exploit Its Oil Reserves
Meanwhile, Trump declared, “We don’t mind saying it, but we’re going to make sure that that country [Venezuela] is run properly. We’re not doing this in vain. . . We’ll run it professionally.”
Trump also said, “We’ll have the greatest oil companies in the world go in and invest billions” to rehabilitate Venezuela’s long-neglected oilfields, Trump said. The goal will be to take full advantage of Venezuela’s huge crude oil reserves by restoring its much higher levels of oil production from more than 20 years ago. That heavy Venezuelan crude oil is ideal for American refineries, which can use it to end the current worldwide shortage of diesel fuel and home heating oil that has been keeping those energy prices high.
“As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust, for a long period of time,” Trump said. “They were pumping almost nothing, by comparison to what they could have been pumping, and what could have taken place.”
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country, and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so,” Trump said.
Trump also told reporters, “We have tremendous energy in that country [Venezuela]. We need that for ourselves. . .”
Trump Asserts America’s Right To Lead The Western Hemisphere
“America will never allow foreign powers to rob our people or drive us…out of our own hemisphere,” he continued. “The future will be determined by the ability to protect commerce and territory and resources that are core to [American] national security.”
Trump also said that Venezuela’s socialist government, first under Hugo Chávez, and then under Nicolas Maduro, stole the massive investments that U.S. oil companies had made over decades that turned Venezuela into one of the world’s most prosperous oil-exporting nations. Now, Trump said, the U.S. will make sure that American oil companies will be able to recover the investments they lost decades ago to the socialist rulers of Venezuela.
While the U.S. military forces involved in the attack were withdrawn from Venezuela as soon as Maduro and his wife were captured, Trump left open the possibility of a future U.S. military deployment on the ground in Venezuela, if necessary, by declaring, “We’re not afraid of [putting] boots on the ground.” He also said that the U.S. military had been prepared to mount a second-wave attack on targets in Venezuela, but given the success of the initial assault, he doubted it would be needed.
When asked a second time at the news conference about a potential future U.S. military role, Trump conceded that the United States will have a “presence in Venezuela as it pertains to oil,” but that it would be “not very [large]” in size.
Trump Denies Repeating The U.S Mistakes Following The 9/11 Attack
Trump also dismissed the dire predictions by the critics of his military adventure in Venezuela. They note that Trump, as a private citizen, had criticized U.S. nation-building efforts that failed after the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, which followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C. Instead, Trump compared the successful operation in Venezuela that resulted in the arrest of Maduro to the air strike Trump ordered that killed Iran’s terrorist mastermind, General Qasem Soleimani of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) outside the Baghdad airport, and the raid that resulted in the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi during Trump’s first term as president.
“We’ve had a perfect track record of winning,” Trump said. “We win a lot,” he added confidently.
A Wall Street Journal editorial called Trump’s capture of Maduro, “an act of hemispheric hygiene against a dictator who spread mayhem far and wide.” The editorial also observed that, “Whether he admits it or not, Mr. Trump is now in the business of regime change that he’ll have to make a success.”
Why Trump Had To Make Good On His Military Threat
The editorial also said that after Maduro turned down Trump’s offers of amnesty and permission to leave Venezuela comfortably for a comfortable life in exile in any country that would have him, Trump was forced to “[follow] through on his threat and oust the despot. The U.S. President had to act or lose credibility with the world after choosing the face-off.”
The editorial added that pulling off the arrest of Maduro “without [suffering any fatal] American casualties is remarkable.”
The editorial also reminds us that the Venezuelan “dictator was also part of the axis of U.S. adversaries that includes Russia, China, Cuba, and Iran. All were helping to keep Mr. Maduro in power. His capture is a demonstration of Mr. Trump’s declaration to keep America’s enemies from spreading chaos in the Western Hemisphere. It’s the ‘Trump corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine.”
Trump stated clearly that the raid on Venezuela was intended to “restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial also argues that “all of this makes the military action justified, despite cries from [Trump’s political enemies on the left] that it is illegal under international law.”
Trump Has Been Further Emboldened by the Easy Victory
According to media reports from unidentified sources in the White House, Trump is thrilled with the immediate results of the military operation in Venezuela.
Trump has been more willing to order more aggressive American military interventions during the first year of his second term as president, by declaring a desire for a military takeover of Gaza if Hamas continues to refuse to be disarmed, and threatening another American air strike in conjunction with Israel against Iran’s resurgent ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs last week during his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Binyomin Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago. Trump also said in a social media post this past Friday morning that the U.S. military is “locked and loaded” and ready to take action if the Iranian security forces harm more civilian protesters against the Islamic regime that is responsible for the deteriorating economic and basic living conditions for ordinary Iranian citizens.
The success of the operation in Venezuela prompted Trump on Sunday to renew his threats against the president of the neighboring South American nation of Colombia, Gustavo Petro. Trump accused him of letting criminals in his country sell cocaine to the U.S. Trump then added, ominously, that, “He’s not going to be doing it very long.”
Trump told reporters traveling with him aboard Air Force One on Sunday that drug cartels are running Mexico and “we’re going to have to do something” about it.
Trump also predicted the fall of Cuba’s communist government in the wake of Maduro’s arrest. In addition, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Saturday that, “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned, at least a little bit.”
“He’s more resolved, not less, after this success [in Venezuela],” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said of Trump, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal after Graham traveled with Trump aboard Air Force One on Sunday night. Graham said Trump now feels stronger than ever that “We need to clear up our backyard. The theme here is: securing the border is really important. We need to get to the source of the problem.”
Colombia And Cuba Are The Next Trump Target States
Graham listed Colombia and Cuba as “narco-states” that broadly fit the same profile as Venezuela. He warned that the leaders of those countries should be on notice after seeing what has happened to Maduro. Asked whether the White House is drawing up plans for similar military operations against the leaders of those countries, Senator Graham would only say enigmatically: “Stay tuned.”
Trump also reiterated his previously expressed desire for the U.S. to annex Greenland, which is a territory long-owned by Denmark, one of America’s oldest NATO allies. Control of Greenland is now more strategically valuable because a recent rise in the average temperature of far northern Arctic waters has made the sea routes around Greenland more ice-free and accessible to commercial shipping and surface naval vessels throughout most of the year than ever before. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and the European Union needs us to have it, and they know that,” Trump told the reporters on Air Force One. However, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen pushed back at Trump’s claim and declared that under international law, the U.S. “has no right” to annex Greenland.
Trump’s Venezuela Success Sends a Warning to China
Trump has also expressed growing concern over China’s growing influence over the socialist-governed Latin American countries of Cuba and Venezuela. He is especially worried about the situation in Panama, where China has gained growing influence over the operations of the Panama Canal, whose neutrality remains vital to American strategic and commercial shipping interests.
China’s foreign ministry issued an unusually strong condemnation of the U.S. military operation that resulted in Maduro’s capture, saying that it was “deeply shocked and strongly condemns the U.S.’s blatant use of force against a sovereign state and its attack on its president.” The statement also accused the United States of using force to upend Venezuela’s government.
“We call on the U.S. to abide by international law and the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter, and stop violating other countries’ sovereignty and security,” in the statement, which was released a few hours after Maduro’s capture.
A Wall Street Journal report suggests that the sudden U.S. removal of Maduro shifts the strategic playing field in the Western Hemisphere for Chinese leader Xi Jinping, after China has spent the past two decades trying to build closer ties with the leaders of Latin America, while U.S. leaders before Trump were mostly looking the other way.
The report speculates that Trump’s efficient removal of Maduro, a longtime nemesis of American interests in Latin America, poses a challenge to President Xi’s narrative that American power is waning, as “changes unseen in a century are accelerating” shifts in the global balance of power in China’s favor.
Maduro’s elimination also could weaken China’s commitment to other socialist regimes in the region, such as Cuba and Nicaragua, by exposing their vulnerability to a concerted American effort to neutralize their leadership.
In addition to demanding Maduro’s immediate release, China called for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Monday to discuss the U.S. attack on Venezuela. China also joined with Russia at the U.N. in calling the U.S. attack and the arrest of Maduro a rejection of multilateralism and a threat to regional peace.
China Pulls Back from Challenging Trump
In a new statement released Monday, China’s foreign ministry signaled that its policy of cooperation and engagement with Venezuela would continue “regardless of changes in Venezuela’s political situation.” But that second message also signaled a reluctance to openly challenge President Trump’s reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine and his willingness to deploy U.S. military power to keep Latin America firmly within America’s sphere of influence.
Trump’s determination “to deny non-Hemispheric competitors” to U.S. influence over Latin America was spelled out clearly in the new national-security strategy that was published by the White House in November. That Trump strategy statement also declared, “We want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets.”
China responded at that time by publishing its own policy paper. According to the Wall Street Journal report, it reaffirmed China’s commitment to remain a major strategic player in the region by standing up for national sovereignty across Latin America in opposition to the “hegemonism and power politics” employed by President Trump to rogue regimes led by despots like Maduro in America’s backyard.
China Might Choose to Drop Its Commitment to Venezuela
Until recent years, when China’s rate of economic growth slowed down, it offered an open checkbook for major “Belt and Road” investments in Latin American economies, such as building a bridge over the Panama Canal and a massive new port in Peru. But some of those countries now regret having accepted Chinese loans to finance those projects because it put them deep in debt to China, and made them a pawn in China’s economic rivalry with their powerful neighbor and still dominant trading partner, the United States.
The Wall Street Journal report also suggests that China may not be as eager to come to Maduro’s rescue and challenge the revived American interest in Venezuela as China’s initial reaction to Maduro’s arrest would indicate. That is because even though China is Venezuela’s biggest customer for its oil exports, it contributes less than 1% of China’s total imports.
China has had its own years of frustration with Maduro’s mismanagement of his country’s economy. The nearly bankrupt Venezuelan regime now owes China for $106 billion worth of project commitments. Furthermore, Maduro’s recklessness puts China’s investments in energy, mining, and manufacturing in Venezuela at risk, as Trump moves toward an American takeover and exploitation of the country’s oil reserves.
The Possible Impact On China’s Threat To Invade Taiwan
Finally, the demonstration of Trump’s willingness to employ America’s military might so effectively to protect American interests in Latin America must surely give Xi and China’s military leaders pause. Their attempts to intimidate Taiwan and nearby countries in the Asian- Pacific region, such as Japan and South Korea, are no longer working. That is because those countries no longer view China as a peaceful neighbor, but do regard an independent Taiwan, with its unmatched computer chip manufacturing industry, as a vital high-tech supplier and regional trading partner.
Furthermore, the combination of President Trump’s crash effort to rebuild the American economy’s manufacturing sector, and the record contracts for the purchase of a new generation of American ships, planes and other weapons from the Pentagon and European countries buying them to help Ukraine fight the Russian invasion, means that a successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan while under American protection might not be as easy a military task as Xi and his Chinese military advisors previously had thought.
In reaction to growing concerns expressed about President Trump’s recent foreign interventions, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said they have a common theme. “All of the President’s foreign policy actions are putting America First while making the entire world safer and more stable,” she said.
Parallels To The 1989 U.S. Arrest of Panama’s Leader
However, a closer parallel to the arrest of Maduro by U.S. military forces was the action by President George H.W. Bush, who ordered the U.S. military to arrest Noriega, the unelected military dictator of Panama, on December 20, 1989. Noriega evaded U.S. capture for 10 days by holing up in the Vatican’s diplomatic mission in Panama before finally surrendering.
Noriega was then flown to the U.S., where, in 1992, he was tried and convicted in a Miami federal court on charges of drug trafficking, racketeering, and money laundering. He was then sentenced to 40 years in a federal prison. After serving 17 years of that sentence, Noriega was extradited first to France and then back to Panama to stand trial again, where he died in 2017.
Much like Trump, President Bush ordered the U.S. military to invade Panama in order to arrest Noriega without Congressional approval, based upon the broad leeway that the U.S. Constitution gives to the president to take executive action to protect national security on his own authority.
A few hours after the start of the invasion of Panama, President Bush addressed the American people and identified four reasons justifying the action. They included safeguarding the lives of the 35,000 American citizens then living in Panama, defending democracy and human rights in Panama, combating the drug trafficking and money laundering for which Panama had become an international center during Noriega’s rule, and protecting the neutrality of the Panama Canal under the provisions included in the treaties which ceded the ownership of the canal to Panama in 1999, which were signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 and then ratified by the U.S. Senate.
The Bush administration claimed a right to self-defense, citing Noriega’s declaration of a state of war against the United States, the killing of a Marine officer, and physical assaults on other Americans in Panama. In the military operation Bush ordered against Panama, 23 U.S. troops were killed.
How President Bush Won Approval for the Panama Attack
Again, like Trump, because of the need for secrecy before the invasion to assure its success, President Bush did not give Congressional Democrats advance notice or an opportunity to object to his decision to use military force. However, Bush’s four reasons for the invasion obtained the approval of 80% of the U.S. public. That provided sufficient justification for broad Congressional approval and support for the invasion, including from opposition Democrats, after the fact.
The legal justification for President Trump to take U.S. military action to arrest Maduro was equally strong. Maduro has been under federal court indictment for engaging in narco-terrorism since 2020. In the years since then, the federal government’s bounty for information leading to Maduro’s arrest has been raised several times, under both the Trump and Biden presidencies, to a current total of $50 million.
Since the operation, Trump has offered shifting rationales for the arrest of Maduro. On the one hand, Trump said, he acted to prevent Venezuela from continuing to be “run by a dictatorship.” He asserted that the United States now has a legitimate role in shaping Venezuela’s political future, and framed his action as serving the best interests of Venezuelan citizens as well, adding that, “we want to do liberty for the people … of Venezuela.”
“But look,” Trump then added, at the “tremendous numbers of [American] people were being killed [by the illegal] drugs [coming through Venezuela]. And they [Venezuela sent] prisoners and … people from mental institutions and drug lords … They sent them by the hundreds of thousands of people into our country, and that is just unforgivable.”
Venezuela’s President Maduro Had His Own Drug Cartel
In a new federal indictment, which was unsealed by federal prosecutors the same day that U.S. forces arrested him, Maduro is accused of heading the Cartel of the Suns, a loose-knit organization of senior Venezuelan generals and government officials who are accused of receiving millions of dollars in bribes from leaders of a Colombian guerrilla group over more than two decades.
Federal prosecutors say that in return for the bribes, Maduro and his predecessor, the late Hugo Chávez, and other senior Venezuelan government officials worked in tandem with and supplied weapons to the terrorist group known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which was active from 1997 to 2021.
The name of Maduro’s own “Suns” cartel refers to the gold sun ornaments, which are worn as military decorations by Venezuelan generals on the epaulets of their uniforms. Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst for the International Crisis Group, told the Wall Street Journal that the Cartel of the Suns isn’t built like a traditional hierarchical drug-trafficking cartel, but rather a diffuse network mostly made up of Venezuelan military officers who facilitate drug shipments, getting payoffs along the way.
“It is a convenient label for a loose and sometimes fractious group of generals and senior government officials that thrives amidst Venezuela’s endemic corruption,” Gunson said.
How Venezuela Used Drugs to Wage War Against the U.S.
According to the new indictment, first under Chávez, and then with Maduro, who took office after Chávez died in 2013, the Venezuelan government “prioritized using cocaine as a weapon against America.” They permitted the guerrillas to finance their war against the Colombian government by illegally shipping thousands of tons of cocaine through Venezuela to the U.S. and Europe.
The new indictment says Maduro “sits atop a corrupt, illegitimate government that, for decades, has leveraged government power to protect and promote illegal activity, including drug trafficking.”
The indictment also accuses Maduro of advancing a criminal conspiracy by selling Venezuelan diplomatic passports to drug traffickers and ordering the kidnapping and murder of people he believed owed him drug money.
Maduro’s Long Career of Political Corruption
It also claims that Maduro “tarnished every public office he has held.” It accuses Maduro of moving loads of cocaine while he was a legislator of Venezuela’s national assembly, and, during his tenure as Venezuela’s foreign minister, the indictment says that Maduro gave diplomatic passports to drug traffickers and created a diplomatic cover story for the airplanes used by money launderers to repatriate the proceeds of their illegal drug sales from Mexico to Venezuela.
As mentioned earlier, Maduro’s legitimacy as Venezuela’s president was further undermined when international monitors from the Jimmy Carter Center, the United Nations and the Organization of American accused Maduro of stealing the July 2024 Venezuelan presidential election. Based upon their independent vote counts, it was clear that the presidential election was won by the opposition candidate, retired Venezuelan diploma, Edmundo González Urrutia, by a wide margin. He had been supported by opposition leader María Corina Machado, who had been barred by Maduro from running for president in the general election after she won her party’s primary.
Maduro’s Stolen Election Led to Protests and Violence
Maduro claimed victory in his third term as president amid widespread international declarations of non-recognition and escalating domestic repression. Protests against the blatant electoral fraud erupted nationwide. That prompted a sweeping crackdown by Maduro’s security forces that left at least 24 people dead, and more than 2,000 were arrested and thrown into Venezuelan prisons, which are notorious for the practice of torture. The legitimate winner of the election, González, was forced to flee to Spain, and opposition leader Machado was forced to go into hiding, but the rubber-stamp Venezuelan Supreme Court upheld Maduro’s stolen electoral victory.
In August 2024, a month after Maduro stole the presidential election, the Trump administration doubled the reward it was offering for Maduro’s capture to $50 million. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced at that time that, “Under President Trump’s leadership, Maduro will not escape justice and he will be held accountable for his despicable crimes.”
Over the past quarter-century, Venezuela has gone from being one of the richest countries in Latin America, before socialist Hugo Chávez became president in 1999, to one of the poorest today.
Drug Trafficking Was the Maduro Family Business
The newly unsealed four-count federal criminal indictment charges six defendants, including Maduro’s wife, his son, and other senior government officials, with drug and gun offenses. It accuses Maduro of running a cocaine trafficking ring that “enriched and entrenched Venezuela’s political and military elite,” and which concentrated power and illegal wealth in the hands of Maduro and his family.
The indictment identifies the drug traffickers that Maduro was working with as the Mexican-based Sinaloa Cartel, as well as the notorious Venezuelan gang known as Tren de Aragua. Both groups are officially listed by the U.S. State Department as foreign terrorist organizations. The members of Tren de Aragua have been a prime target of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol raids ordered by the Trump administration to deport violent criminal aliens living in this country illegally.
According to U.S. government law enforcement authorities, Venezuela has long played an important role in allowing narcotics from Colombia to move through its territory and then onto ships and planes headed to the U.S., various countries in the Caribbean, and Europe.
Venezuela’s Role in the Cycle of Drug Crime and Corruption
“This cycle of narcotics-based corruption lines the pockets of Venezuelan officials and their families while also benefiting violent narco-terrorists who operate with impunity on Venezuelan soil and who help produce, protect, and transport tons of cocaine to the United States,” the new federal indictment says.
Trump began to escalate tensions with Venezuela and Maduro last September, when he ordered the U.S. military to start attacking the Venezuelan speed boats bringing illegal drugs to the United States.
Since then, the attacks have destroyed more than 30 drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing at least 107 people. More recently, the U.S. military has launched an effort to intercept and seize tanker ships carrying illegal cargoes of sanctioned Venezuelan oil exports designed to further strangle the country’s economy.
In October, tensions between the U.S. and Venezuela escalated further as the first media reports surfaced of a covert U.S. military operation being planned to seize Maduro and put him on trial. Trump also made the unusual public announcement at the time that he had authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela, because its leaders had “emptied their prisons into the United States of America” and “we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela.”
Trump Attacked Only After Maduro Rejected Amnesty and Exile
In mid-November, Trump and Maduro spoke on the phone. They discussed Trump providing a general amnesty for Maduro, as well as his senior aides and their families, many of whom face U.S. financial sanctions and criminal indictments because of their alleged personal involvement in the Cartel of the Suns’ drug smuggling activities. Trump also reportedly told Maduro during that conversation that if he didn’t agree to leave Venezuela willingly, Trump would consider the use of force to arrest him and bring him to trial in the United States.
Maduro’s response to that offer can be understood from what the Trump administration did next. On November 24, it moved to legally designate Maduro’s government as a foreign terrorist organization. That gave the administration the legal authorization to freeze Venezuelan financial assets held in the United States, intensify trade sanctions against Venezuela, and lay the legal foundation to justify future military action against Maduro and his regime.
International-law expert Geoffrey Corn, who heads the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University, told the Washington Post that even though there may be no “plausible legal basis” for Maduro’s seizure by the U.S. military, a prior Supreme Court ruling makes it clear that a defendant in Maduro’s situation can’t argue that his case should be dismissed because of an unlawful arrest.
According to Corn, who previously served as the Army’s senior law-of-war expert adviser, and recently co-wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post defending the legality of Trump’s military operations in Iran without notifying Congress first, “Maduro is not going to be able to avoid being brought to trial because he was abducted, so to speak, even if he can establish it violated international law.”
Corn also accurately predicted that Maduro’s defense lawyers would argue, despite the Supreme Court precedent, that his arrest was illegal, and would also seek to give him the added protections of prisoner-of-war status under international law.
Challenging Trump’s Assertion That Drug Crime Is Terrorism
But Corn also said that the Trump administration has been using flimsy legal arguments to justify the military strike against Venezuela. “Alleging that the drug threat is analogous to [terrorist] attacks by al-Qaeda has never been credible. Almost all international law experts have categorically rejected that interpretation of self-defense,” Corn concluded.
President Trump indicated at his morning-after-the-raid press conference that the United States will maintain control over Venezuela for the immediate future. “We’re going to run the country until we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” Trump said. But instead of demanding a thorough and immediate regime change, restoring democracy to Venezuela quickly by holding an honest presidential election, Trump said the U.S. will seek to establish a working relationship with the other members of Maduro’s regime who are still in charge of the government. They include socialist vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who has become Venezuela’s new acting president, as well as Delcy’s brother, Jorge Rodríguez, who is the president of Venezuela’s National Assembly.
Trump Will Not Try to Force Democracy on Venezuela Now
The next day, in a nationally televised CBS News interview, Secretary of State Rubio said that any expectations for a quick return to democracy in Venezuela were unrealistic. “They’ve had this system of Chavismo [rule by the political party that was founded by President Hugo Chávez] in place for 15 or 16 years, and everyone’s asking, why 24 hours after Nicolás Maduro was arrested, there isn’t an election scheduled for tomorrow? That’s absurd,” Rubio said, regarding hopes that the Chavismo political movement that has actually run Venezuela for the past 27 years could be so easily replaced, virtually overnight.
Rubio outlined how the U.S. planned to achieve its more immediate goals for dealing with the Venezuelan regime under its new interim president, Rodríguez. He said, “What you’re seeing right now is an oil quarantine that allows us to exert tremendous leverage over what happens next,” in Venezuela.
“We want drug trafficking to stop. We want no more gang members to come our way. We don’t want to see the Iranian and, by the way, Cuban presence, [as] in the past. We want the oil industry in that country not to go to the benefit of pirates and adversaries of the United States, but for the benefit of the [Venezuelan] people. We want to see all of that happen,” Rubio declared.
Exerting Leverage on Venezuela Using Oil and Military Force
During his CBS interview, Rubio also said that the U.S. will continue to exert leverage, including continued sanctions on Venezuela’s oil exports, so that Venezuela can “no longer cozy up to Hezbollah and Iran in our own hemisphere.”
In a separate Sunday interview with NBC News, Rubio said that the U.S. goals in Venezuela are, “No more drug trafficking, no more Iran/Hezbollah presence there, and no more using the oil industry to enrich all our adversaries around the world.”
Iran’s Strong Connections to Venezuela
Rubio’s comments underscore a broader U.S. security concern about Iran’s relationships in Latin America, especially its ties to Venezuela, with which Iran built close diplomatic and economic ties during the presidencies of both Chávez and Maduro.
That relationship deepened during the mid-2000s, when Chávez declared Venezuela to be a member of what he called an “axis of unity” with Iran and other enemies of the United States. In June 2022, Iran and Venezuela, under Maduro’s rule, signed a 20-year cooperation pact meant to shore up their alliance and blunt U.S. economic sanctions on both countries, while expanding their collaboration on energy, technology, and security. The deal included Iranian assistance for Venezuela’s struggling oil sector in exchange for mutual economic access and stepped-up military cooperation on the use of drones.
U.S. officials believe that those ties have enabled Hezbollah to raise money for its recovery from its war with Israel in 2024, and to build logistical networks with Venezuela and neighboring countries. Over the years, the U.S. has placed sanctions on Venezuelan officials and businessmen for helping Hezbollah operatives to obtain passports, move cash, and participate in smuggling schemes, allegations which the Maduro government has denied.
Israel Is Paying Close Attention to Trump’s Attack on Venezuela
In Israel, Knesset opposition leader Yair Lapid wrote on X that “the regime in Iran should pay close attention to what is happening in Venezuela,” suggesting that U.S. military action there was sending a broader message to another rogue government facing intensifying protests and riots at home.
The Jerusalem Post reported that Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli said the capture of Maduro struck a blow to the “global axis of evil” and sent a “clear message” to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei about the consequences of supporting narco-terrorism and terrorist proxies such as Hezbollah.
“Maduro did not run a country; he ran a crime and drug empire that directly fueled Hezbollah and Iran,” Chikli said. “[President Trump’s] decisive steps have proven once again that strong leaders are the only way to defeat dictators.”
Hezbollah has been active in South America in the past. It is believed to have orchestrated two major terrorist attacks on Jewish targets in Buenos Aires in the 1980s that together killed hundreds of people. The current president of Argentina, Javier Milei, supports Israel and has taken steps to hold Hezbollah accountable for those attacks.
Trump’s Logic in Giving Priority to Stability Over Democracy
Larry Gumbiner, a former U.S. diplomat who served in half a dozen Latin American countries during a 31-year State Department career, said the Trump administration is clearly giving priority to stability over democracy in its immediate plans for running Venezuela.
Trump’s plan, Gumbiner said, appears to be to keep the rest of the Maduro government in power minus Maduro, on the condition that interim president Rodríguez can be persuaded to carry out Trump’s plan to allow U.S. oil companies to rebuild the country’s oil sector, and stop the drug trafficking and support for Colombian guerrillas operating in Venezuelan territory. If not, the continued presence of a U.S. naval fleet off the shores of Venezuela keeps alive Trump’s threat of a second round of military attacks targeting other senior members of the Maduro regime.
Gumbiner also suggests that there may be good reasons why the Trump administration is not trying to impose a fast transition to democracy. Venezuela’s army and other security forces remain loyal to the Maduro regime because their members have also benefited greatly from the corruption under Maduro and his predecessor, Chávez. That is why these forces might be unwilling to cooperate with Trump’s agenda without a much larger American military presence on the ground in Venezuela than Trump has been willing to commit so far.
Can Trump Work with Maduro’s Allies Now Running Venezuela?
To remain in power, the interim president, Rodríguez, will have to maintain the support of both Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who are also facing serious U.S. criminal charges and might also resist an accommodation with Trump for the same reasons that Maduro did.
Freddy Guevara is a former Venezuelan lawmaker who spent more than three years as a political prisoner there, and who now teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School. “Maduro felt invincible [when Trump threatened him]. And look where that got him. If these guys [Rodríguez, Padrino, and Cabello also] feel invincible, it will end badly for them, too,” Guevara told the Wall Street Journal.
Venezuela’s constitution says that Rodríguez, who was sworn in as acting president the same day that Maduro was arrested, must call for a new presidential election within 30 days if Maduro’s absence becomes permanent. But Venezuela’s Supreme Court, whose judicial bench is stacked with Maduro supporters, could rule that the current extraordinary circumstances justify suspending the constitutional time limit on Rodríguez’s interim presidential authority.
Maduro’s Allies Are Also Wanted Narco‑Terrorists
The U.S. government also has outstanding criminal arrest warrants against two other senior Venezuelan government leaders who are also alleged to be senior members of the Maduro-led Cartel of Suns. It has placed a $25 million bounty on the head of Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello. He served as Maduro’s enforcer as the chief of the state’s security forces and a militia known as the Colectivos, which used violence to stamp out any protests against the Maduro regime. There is also a $15 million reward from the U.S. government on the head of General Vladimir Padrino, Venezuela’s defense minister.
Meanwhile, in a defiant televised address to the Venezuelan people the day after the U.S. military operation, Vice President Rodríguez struck a defiant tone and demanded the immediate release and return of Maduro. “There is only one president in this country, and his name is Nicolás Maduro,” Rodríguez declared.
She also announced that she had convened a national council for the defense that included Venezuela’s top government and military officials under Maduro.
Her hostile actions and attitude in reaction to Maduro’s arrest appeared to contradict earlier comments that day by Trump at his news conference in which he said that Rodríguez had been sworn in as the new head of the country because “she’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.”
Maduro’s Successor Talks Tough but Then Pulls Back
At his news conference, Trump said that after Rodríguez had a long conversation with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, she had agreed to do whatever the U.S. needed done.
That is why, Trump initially said, “She, I think, was quite gracious, but she really doesn’t have a choice” other than to follow American orders, “very simple.”
In reaction to her initial demand for the U.S. to release Maduro, President Trump warned that Rodríguez could “face a situation probably worse than Maduro,” if she doesn’t become more willing to cooperate with American needs.
By then, Rodríguez had toned down the hostility of her initial remarks and said, much more diplomatically, “We invite the U.S. government to collaborate with us on an agenda of cooperation oriented toward shared development within the framework of international law to strengthen lasting community coexistence.”
Rodríguez, a 56-year-old lawyer by training, has been described by former colleagues as a ruthlessly ambitious political operative. For the last decade, she has held a number of key government positions as she climbed to the top of Maduro’s regime. She also held senior positions in the government of Hugo Chávez. He was a charismatic former army tank commander who once staged a failed military coup and was elected president of Venezuela due to a voter backlash against the members of the country’s entrenched but corrupt elite who enriched themselves by taking a portion of the country’s oil wealth.
New Venezuela President Willing to Do Anything to Stay in Power
Delcy and her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, who presides over Venezuela’s Congress and helped Maduro to steal the 2024 presidential election, are considered to be among Maduro’s most loyal followers.
Andrés Izarra, a former minister who now lives in exile after breaking with the Maduro regime, told the Wall Street Journal that Delcy and Jorge Rodríguez “are very, very manipulative, [and] I think they will maneuver to stay in power as long as they can.”
Their father, Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, was a Marxist guerrilla and co-founder of Venezuela’s leftist Socialist League who was active during the 1960s and 1970s.
Delcy Rodríguez follows in her father’s footsteps by maintaining a close relationship with the Cuban intelligence agents upon whom Maduro has long relied to root out traitors among his followers. Cuba’s communist government also reportedly views her as a reliable ideological ally and as a guardian and advocate for Cuba’s vital national interests within Venezuela.
Trump Declares That the U.S. Is Now in Charge of Venezuela
By Sunday night, it was clear that President Trump was fed up with reporters’ questions aboard Air Force One about the situation in Venezuela. “Don’t ask me who’s in charge, because I’ll give you an answer, and it’ll be very controversial,” Trump said. “We’re in charge.”
However, a Wall Street Journal editorial was more skeptical of the Trump administration’s confidence that it could allow Maduro’s governing partners in crime to remain in power and intimidate them into compliance with the threat of applying another dose of overpowering American military force, and without saying “anything about holding new elections as a U.S. goal.” The editorial also notes that “Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday that elections will need to be held eventually, though he didn’t seem to think it’s all that urgent.”
The editorial is rightfully concerned that because Maduro’s “cronies are still running Venezuela, and they don’t seem ready to give it up.” Does that mean that “President Trump [is] willing to settle for Maduro 2.0?” Let’s hope not.
As the editorial points out, “despite Mr. Trump’s vow that the U.S. will ‘run the country,’ there is no one on the ground [in Venezuela right now who seems capable] to do so. While the editorial suggests that there is no need for the U.S. to back any particular candidate in a new election to select Venezuela’s president, “a democratic government of the kind that won the 2024 election, only to have it stolen by Mr. Maduro, would be a more durable ally” than the current “Maduro Administration version 2.0.”
Venezuela’s Opposition Nobel Prize Hero Still Sidelined
With regard to the possibility of the U.S. turning the Venezuelan government over to María Corina Machado, who was selected to receive the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for leading the domestic Venezuelan opposition to Maduro, Trump told reporters that the U.S. had not been in contact with her in advance of the military operation. He explained that even though he regarded her as “a very nice woman. . . I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the [necessary level of] support or the respect within the country.”
Because the Venezuelan government refused to give her permission to attend the Nobel Prize award ceremony, scheduled for December 10 in Oslo Norway, Machado made a daring escape from Venezuela, slipping through military checkpoints to reach the Caribbean coast, where she boarded a fishing boat bound for Dutch island of Curaçao, where she was to board a private jet that was to take her to Norway. Unfortunately, the sea voyage to Curacao was delayed by a combination of mechanical failures, bad weather, and lost communications, which resulted in Machado’s late arrival after the Nobel Prize award ceremony, where her daughter, Ana Corina Sosa, accepted the prize on her mother’s behalf.
Trump’s allies praised Machado’s escape from Venezuela as a step that would ultimately help Machado’s opposition movement gain recognition and take over the country’s government.
Trump’s Warning To Colombia’s President
At the same press conference, on the morning after the successful U.S. military raid on Caracas, Trump had words of warning for Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro, who was quick to condemn the U.S. operation that removed Maduro. “[Petro] has cocaine mills. He has factories where he makes cocaine. … They’re sending it into the United States,” Trump said. “So he does have to watch his [step].”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio also noted in remarks to reporters after the attack on Venezuela that Maduro was a “fugitive [from] American justice with a $50 million reward” from the U.S. government for information that would lead to his arrest.
“But don’t let anybody claim it,” Trump said about the reward. “Nobody deserves it but us.”
Rubio also told reporters at the post-raid news conference at Mar-a-Lago, “He [Maduro] was provided multiple very, very, very generous offers, and chose instead to act like a wild man. [He] chose instead to play around. . . and the result is what we saw tonight,” meaning the U.S. military raid on Caracas.
Trump also described at that news conference the final moments before Maduro and his wife were captured, when they tried but failed to close the steel door to the safe room inside the presidential compound at the Venezuelan military base.
Operation Absolute Resolve Was a U.S. Military Triumph
Following Trump’s remarks, General Dan Caine, the chairman of the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave reporters at the press conference some details about “Operation Absolute Resolve,” which involved more than 150 aircraft as well as extensive supporting naval and ground forces, including CIA personnel.
Caine described how the U.S. military forces were able to retain the element of surprise by having the helicopters carrying the U.S. Army Delta Force commandos fly at just 100 feet above the waters of the Caribbean Sea as they approached Caracas to evade detection by Venezuela’s military radar. Meanwhile, large numbers of U.S. fighter jets and bombers launched strikes that disabled Venezuela’s air defense systems.
“On arrival into the target area, the helicopters [carrying Delta Force commandos] came under fire, and they replied [to] that fire with overwhelming force,” Caine said, and added that Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, “gave up and were taken into custody” by U.S. forces. In the process, Cane noted, “One of our aircraft was hit but remained flyable,” and several of the Delta Force commandoes on board were lightly wounded, but none of the hundreds of American military and security force members who were involved in the virtually flawless simultaneous operation against multiple Venezuelan bases were killed.
How The CIA Kept Track of Maduro’s Movements
Caine also said that it had taken months of intelligence work in order “to find Maduro and understand how he moved, where he lived, where he traveled, what he ate, what he wore, and what his pets were.” The attack plans to capture Maduro were finalized in early December, but before launching the attack, the Trump administration made one more effort to persuade him to leave Venezuela voluntarily for a comfortable life in exile in another country willing to take him in, such as Turkey. But Maduro rejected it.
Trump had initially made it clear early last year that he cared more about reaching an agreement with Maduro to step aside as president of Venezuela that served Trump’s America First agenda than pressing Maduro for a transition of Venezuela back to a more pro-American and democratic form of government. Trump was also initially hoping to win Maduro’s cooperation on the deportation of illegal Venezuelan migrants in America back to their home country, and favorable deals with American oil companies to rejuvenate Venezuela’s long-neglected oil fields and fully exploit the country’s proven 200-years’ worth of reserves of crude oil.
Last May, Trump first offered Maduro a deal to leave Venezuela for a life in exile in exchange for an amnesty that would shield him from prosecution on criminal drug charges. The deal would have also lifted the U.S. sanctions against him and some of his criminal regime cronies, while the U.S. would then work on developing a transition government led initially by Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez.
Maduro rejected that initial offer from Trump, as well as similar but more generous ones that followed. He also said publicly that Trump was trying to justify an American invasion in order to loot Venezuela’s rich natural resources, and especially its oil fields. “They want us to become slaves of the [American] empire again. Never!” Maduro declared defiantly.
How Rubio Convinced Trump To Launch The Attack
Ultimately, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had been warning Trump that Maduro could not be trusted, finally convinced the American president that Maduro was a drug-trafficking terrorist who would never agree to give up his power over Venezuela on his own. To further make his point, Rubio reminded Trump that Maduro had made five deals with different White House administrations over the past 10 years and had broken all of them.
Rubio is the son of Cuban-born parents. The success of his political career, first as a member of and then as the Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, followed by three-terms as U.S. senator from Florida, was largely based upon the support of Florida’s large community of Cuban-American voters, who have been dedicated to the overthrow of the communist government of Cuba since Fidel Castro came to power there in 1959. Rubio has long advocated for the overthrow of the anti-U.S. regime in Venezuela as a stepping stone toward the economic collapse of the Cuban communist government, due to the cutoff of the free oil shipments from Venezuela.
Stephen Miller, who serves as Trump’s homeland security adviser and as Trump’s deputy White House chief of staff, cooperated with Rubio in trying to persuade Trump to take military action against Maduro, primarily based on Maduro’s formal designation as a narco-terrorist due to his cooperation with the international illegal drug cartels.
By late last summer, Rubio, Miller, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, War Secretary Pete Hegseth, and General Caine had begun meeting regularly to begin planning for the military operation to arrest Maduro and bring him from Venezuela to the United States to stand trial.
The CIA Had a Spy in the Venezuelan Government
It was also reported that the CIA had a human source within the Venezuelan government who provided real-time information on Maduro’s movements and location, and that the CIA inserted a small team of its own personnel into Venezuela in August to directly monitor Maduro’s routines.
In addition, a senior Trump administration official said, when the Delta Force commandos went into the military compound to find and arrest Maduro, “there were literally Department of Justice personnel on-site to read him his rights [under American law while] taking him into custody.”
Trump said that the commandos were equipped with blow torches to cut through the steel security door of Maduro’s safe room in the compound, but they didn’t need to use them because the commandos “bum-rushed” Maduro and his wife before they could close that door.
Trump also said, “They [Maduro and his wife] were waiting for us. They knew we were coming, so they were in … what’s called a ready position, but they were completely overwhelmed and very quickly incapacitated by the commandos,” which was why, Trump believes, they did not put up much of a fight.
Maduro’s Rejected Many Opportunities To Avoid Capture
Maduro was given numerous opportunities to avoid capture, senior U.S. officials said. “Option A — and the ideal option” was to persuade him to leave office through enticements as well as pressure, one of the officials said. The enticements included moving to a country of his choice, such as Turkey or Qatar, in exchange for the lifting of the U.S economic sanctions against him personally, and a promise from the U.S. government not to seek extradition from the country in which Maduro chose to live out his exile.
“There were multiple places that [Maduro] could have gone [to] and had people there who would have been willing to take him,” the U.S. official said. “He chose not to.”
After Maduro turned down Trump’s generous last offer of amnesty from prosecution and a comfortable life in exile on December 23, Trump gave up in disgust on the effort to negotiate an amnesty deal with him.
Vice President JD Vance said on social media Saturday that Trump had “offered multiple off-ramps” to Maduro before ordering his arrest. Vance framed the operation as primarily a law enforcement mission based upon the federal indictments of Maduro “for narco-terrorism.”
“You don’t get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States because you live in a palace in Caracas,” Vance wrote.
Maduro’s Videos Were the Last Straw for Trump
According to a Wall Street Journal report, the last straw for Trump was a series of videos aimed at an American audience in which Maduro was shown singing and dancing while saying in broken English that he wanted to live in peace with the United States. Trump told his aides in frustration that Maduro’s videos showed he thought that Trump’s threats to launch a military action against him were just a bluff. Trump also said that Maduro was not worthy to be treated as a serious national leader.
Trump then gave the green light to U.S. military commanders to launch the planned attack on “the right day to minimize the potential for civilian harm and maximize the element of surprise and minimize the harm.”
Venezuela Was A “Perfect Storm” To Justify a Trump Attack
Veteran Republican foreign policy expert Elliott Abrams, who handled Venezuelan affairs during Trump’s first term as president, said that “Venezuela is a perfect storm, it’s everything the Trump administration is concerned about,” including illegal immigration, deadly drug-trafficking, and supplying financial support for the communist regime in Cuba, by supplying it with free oil. In return, Cuba has reciprocated by supplying the Maduro regime with extensive support for its internal security and intelligence services, helping it to keep in power.”
Maduro was also providing a base in America’s backyard for spreading the influence of its main geopolitical enemies, including Russia, China, the IRGC, and Iran’s Lebanese terrorist proxy force, Hezbollah. All of them were actively supporting the Maduro regime, while Venezuela’s economy was being slowly destroyed by U.S. and European sanctions applied in retaliation for the fraudulent elections, as well as the Maduro government’s financial mismanagement.
There is no doubt that the American action against Maduro’s regime was intended to change the reality not just in Venezuela itself, but across the U.S. sphere of international influence. It was meant to serve as a signal of U.S. military strength, an increased level of U.S. strategic engagement, and an attempt to reshape the stance of all countries that are close to the United States, both geographically and those that are aligned with American values and shared interests.
Trump Was Also Sending a Message to Other U.S. Enemies
The carefully planned and well-executed “large-scale strike” on Venezuela was the latest in a series of U.S. military actions against foreign targets that Trump has ordered since the start of his second term as president, without providing the traditional advance notification to a select bipartisan group of eight congressional leaders. These include the air-strike on June 22 using B-2 stealth warplanes, which dropped 15-ton bunker-buster bombs to destroy three of Iran’s most crucial nuclear facilities, as well as an attack on December 25 against a radical Islamic ISIS-affiliated terrorist group in Nigeria that has been waging a genocidal war that has killed as many as 125,000 of Nigeria’s Christians since 2009.
During Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s news conference with Trump the morning after the Venezuela strike, he explained that the operation was “just not the kind of mission that you can [safely] prenotify [Congress about] because it [could] endanger [the security of] the mission.”
Trump’s Changing Attitude Towards Foreign Military Operations
These attacks are demonstrations of President Trump’s increased willingness to exert U.S. military power abroad, in sharp contrast to his past criticism of U.S. leaders who, he has argued, acted as “the policemen of the world.” It also seems to be a departure from the Donald Trump who ran for president on an “America First” doctrine, and who promised his MAGA followers that if he were to be elected president, America would have “no new [foreign] wars.”
Long before he first ran for president, Trump had been skeptical of American military entanglements overseas that were not clearly justified by crucial national interests, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and going all the way back to the war in Vietnam.
In justifying the escalating U.S. military interventions against Venezuela that Trump has ordered since returning to the White House, Trump has cited the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, which he has renamed after himself as the “Donroe Doctrine.” In announcing the attack on Venezuela, Trump reasserted “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere” as a high national security priority. It seems to have replaced Trump’s prior policy of restraint and reluctance to lead the United States into any new commitments abroad, even for long-established European allies.
Trump’s Assertion of More Authority During His Second Term
Trump’s greater use of U.S. military power abroad is also consistent with his broader assertion of his presidential authority on domestic issues, such as immigration, law enforcement, and environmental issues. Trump has also displayed a greater willingness to test the limits of his executive powers as president under the U.S. Constitution in legal cases that his administration has brought before the U.S. Supreme Court.
When Trump was asked by reporters how taking control of Venezuela was consistent with his “America First” policy, he answered that it is because he wanted to “surround” America with “good neighbors” and “stability.”
“We have tremendous energy [resources] in that country,” Trump said. “It’s very important that we protect it. We need that for ourselves. We need that for the world.”
The U.S. military operation in Venezuela resulted in the temporary disruption of hundreds of regularly scheduled commercial airline flights to and from that area of the Caribbean Sea and the northern coast of South America by JetBlue, American, Southwest, United, and Delta airlines. The airlines announced that their passengers stranded by the disruption would be permitted to re-book their flights or travel standby without incurring an additional fee.
Exiled Venezuelans Celebrate While Worrying About the Future
As news of the latest successful Trump military operation spread across the United States, immigrants from Venezuela gathered in major cities to celebrate Maduro’s downfall and cautiously speculate with relatives back home about what comes next now that the dictator has been arrested and removed from their home country to be tried in an American courtroom on drug-trafficking and other criminal charges.
They are among at least 6.8 million Venezuelan refugees from starvation and other forms of oppression who are now living in the U.S. and other countries across the Western Hemisphere. They have been yearning for Maduro’s ouster for years, and because so many years had gone by with Maduro still in power, many had begun to worry that they might not live long enough to see their homeland’s liberation from his despotic rule.
For many of these exiled Venezuelans, their initial glee at hearing of Maduro’s capture is mixed with growing angst over the fact that while Maduro is gone, his regime henchmen remain in place, and appear to be set to stay in power for the foreseeable future.
“Venezuelans are alternating between euphoria that Maduro is out, but disappointment that the guys with guns and the structure of guns and corruption are still running the show,” Moisés Naím, a former Venezuelan trade minister and currently an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the Wall Street Journal.
Gercimar Botia, who arrived in Miami’s Venezuelan community two years ago after she and her children braved a dangerous journey across a jungle to seek asylum at the U.S. border, first received the news of Madura’s arrest when her phone rang before dawn Saturday. Her relatives were calling from Caracas to tell her that explosions were rocking the city.
She immediately got up and drove her car to the El Arepazo section of the Miami suburb of Doral, where hundreds of other Venezuelan migrants had already gathered to celebrate the news, cheer, and wave U.S. flags.
Botia, age 29, who works odd jobs, including cleaning homes, cried as she told a reporter, “I’m so happy — my country is finally liberated.”
Exiles Distrust Maduro’s Current Replacement
But despite the joy of these Venezuelan refugees at Maduro’s removal through a U.S. military intervention, the continuing presence of his allies running the Venezuelan government has fueled anxiety. Many of them were also deeply concerned when President Trump said at his Saturday news conference that, for the time being, the other members of Maduro’s corrupt government, including his socialist vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, would be remaining in office.
“Getting Maduro out of power is the right move,” said Venezuelan-American activist Adelys Ferro. But he was still worried because there are so many other would-be Maduros who were around the original, and who are still in power in Venezuela.
In Washington, D.C., Nestor Galavis, who arrived from Venezuela in 2019, told the Washington Post that he was keenly aware of the uncertainty unfolding inside his old homeland. But he also said that fear of what may happen to Venezuela going forward should wait because the joy of millions of immigrants from Venezuela was too overwhelming to set aside after decades of repression and exile under the rule of Chávez and Maduro.
“Today, just let me be happy,” said Galavis, “We’ve been suffering for 27 years.”
On the other hand, a crowd organized by an anti-war group calling itself the ANSWER coalition formed in New York City’s Times Square on Saturday afternoon to protest U.S. military action in Venezuela. Some held Venezuelan flags and signs that demanded “no blood for oil” and an end to U.S. military intervention in the Caribbean. Similar protest demonstrations against the Trump-ordered attack on Caracas were held in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., while Trump’s harshest critics rejected his decision to use the U.S. military to arrest Venezuela’s leader and his wife in order to bring them to a federal court in New York City to try them on drug-trafficking and other criminal charges.
Trump’s GOP Enemies Were Quick to Criticize
One of those critics was alienated former Trump supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican Congresswoman from Georgia who angrily criticized the president for prioritizing regime change in Venezuela while Americans at home face rising housing and health care costs.
“Americans’ disgust with our own government’s never-ending military aggression and support of foreign wars is justified because we are forced to pay for it and both parties, Republicans and Democrats, always keep the Washington military machine funded and going,” Greene said in a post on social media. “This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end. Boy, were we wrong.”
Another embittered anti-Trump Republican in the House was Kentucky’s Thomas Massie. He posted on social media, “If this action [the invasion of Venezuela] were constitutionally sound, the Attorney General wouldn’t be tweeting that they’ve arrested the president of a sovereign country and his wife for possessing guns in violation of a 1934 U.S. firearm law.”
Most Republicans Are Supporting Trump’s Attack for Now
However, a majority of GOP House members, including Speaker Mike Johnson, applauded the president’s decision and characterized the military action he ordered against Maduro in Venezuela as “decisive” and justified.”
Congressional Republicans largely refrained from criticizing Trump for not seeking their authorization or providing the traditional briefing for the eight most senior members of the House and Senate in advance of the Venezuela operation. But a few Republicans expressed concern about the possibility that the strike would lead to a long-term involvement by the United States military in Venezuela.
While Trump’s decision to mount a military operation to arrest Maduro initially appeared to have the strong backing of almost all traditional, hawkish Republicans, there were later signs that some of his staunchest supporters were uneasy about the president’s reluctance to discuss how long American military control over Venezuela was likely to last.
Veteran Trump supporter and popular MAGA social media commentator Stephen Bannon said initially during his “War Room” show the morning after the attack on Venezuela that it was “a stunning and dazzling overnight strike by U.S. forces.” But after Trump declared in his press conference that the United States would “run” the country of Venezuela for a while, Bannon withheld further any endorsement of the military action and questioned whether the regime change aspects of the operation would “harken back to our fiasco in Iraq under [President George W.] Bush.”
Democrats Still Won’t Give Trump Credit for Anything
On the other side of the political aisle in Congress, virtually all Democrat lawmakers called the Venezuela operation “illegal” and an “act of war.” They also condemned the Trump administration for failing to inform members of Congress about the extraction of Maduro from Venezuela until after it had been completed and called Trump’s actions another abuse of his presidential powers. Some Democrats also warned that Trump’s order to attack Venezuelan military bases amounted to another Trump overreach of his executive authority that could set a dangerous precedent, while giving them a pretext to push for another Trump impeachment effort.
Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, agreed that Maduro is “a tyrant,” but said that the military operation to remove him from Venezuela “is entirely inconsistent with what [members of Trump’s] cabinet repeatedly briefed to Congress and goes against the expressed wishes of the American people.”
Jacky Rosen, a Nevada Democrat who sits on both the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the extraction an “illegal regime change operation,” and called upon the Trump Administration to “be held accountable and explain why it lied to us when it claimed in its briefings that regime change wasn’t the U.S. goal in Venezuela.”
Tim Kaine of Virginia, a Democrat who sits on the same two Senate committees as Rosen, asked, “Where will this go next? Will the President deploy our troops to protect Iranian protesters? To enforce the fragile ceasefire in Gaza? To battle terrorists in Nigeria? To seize Greenland or the Panama Canal? To suppress Americans peacefully assembling to protest his policies? Trump has threatened to do all this and more and sees no need to seek legal authorization from the people’s elected legislature before putting service members at risk.”
Maryland Democrat Chris Van Hollen called the operation in Venezuela an “act of war,” and challenged the Trump administration’s stated motive for Maduro’s arrest and extraction by pointing out that Trump recently pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been convicted by a U.S. court on charges that he also ran his nation as a “narco-state” that helped to send South American cocaine to the United States. He then concluded that the military operation was “about trying to grab Venezuela’s oil for Trump’s billionaire buddies.”
Mixed International Reaction to The Venezuela
European heads of state were split over the U.S. military operation in Venezuela. Most acknowledged Maduro’s increasingly authoritarian rule over the country but questioned the legality of the military raid ordered by Trump, which resulted in Maduro’s arrest and transfer to New York City to stand trial on criminal charges in a federal courtroom.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz took a more measured approach by writing on X: “The legal assessment of the U.S. intervention is complex and requires careful consideration. International law remains the guiding framework.”
So did Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He expressed his “support for international law,” and said that members of his government would meet with their U.S. counterparts, “as we seek a safe and peaceful transition to a legitimate government [for Venezuela].”
French President Emmanuel Macron also called for a peaceful transition of power in Venezuela. He suggested that Edmundo González Urrutia, who legitimately won Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election before Maduro stole it, is the person who “can swiftly ensure this.”
In Latin America, Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino, who has strongly opposed Maduro, urged Trump to ensure a prompt democratic transition in Venezuela and criticized Trump for backing Rodríguez’s authority as Venezuela’s interim president. He called Rodríguez one of those most committed to Maduro’s “nefarious” dictatorship, and asked, “With what moral authority can she come to lead a transition to democracy?”
How Will Trump’s Experiment In Nation-Building Work Out?
Meanwhile, we are left to wonder how Trump’s experiment in American nation-building in the Western Hemisphere will eventually turn out.
A Wall Street Journal editorial suggests that “the greatest benefit of a democratic, pro-American Venezuela is what it means for freedom and stability in the region. The left has had a 20-year heyday in the Americas that has done great harm to its people and allowed deep inroads by China. A reversal [towards democracy] is [already] underway in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, and Bolivia, and a right turn in Venezuela would continue the hopeful trend.”
