2026 opened with a shock. On January 3, the United States executed a rapid military operation that seized Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s sitting president. Tactically, the raid was impressive. In under two hours, American special forces penetrated Miraflores Palace—Venezuela’s command center, and completed the capture.
Legally, the operation was indefensible. It involved a direct attack on a sovereign state without international authorization and without domestic legal sanction. Washington’s attempt to reframe the raid as “law enforcement” does not change the core fact: the United States used military force to abduct a head of state. That act violated long-standing international norms.
What followed made the strike even harder to interpret. Days after the operation, the administration’s justification remained ambiguous. Washington anchored its case in narcotics trafficking, claiming that Maduro issued diplomatic passports to members of the Cartel of the Suns and that the Venezuelan state took 15 percent of the proceeds from the drug trade. Those allegations remain unverified. Even if they were accurate, the moral posture would still be radically selective.
The United States has its own history here. The Central Intelligence Agency has repeatedly been accused of cultivating drug-linked networks and financing operations through narcotics flows, from Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle to Central America. During the Iran–Contra scandal, the CIA was exposed for tolerating or enabling cocaine trafficking as a means of underwriting anti-communist operations in Nicaragua.
If Washington were applying a consistent anti-narcotics logic, Venezuela would not be the first target. The most significant source of illicit drugs entering the United States is Mexico, followed by Colombia. None of these realities has produced anything resembling a U.S. military strike.
The inconsistency becomes impossible to ignore when placed alongside an event that occurred just a month earlier. On December 1, 2025, roughly thirty days before the raid, Donald Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who had been extradited to the United States in 2022 and convicted of drug trafficking in an American court. A counter-narcotics narrative that ends with a pardon for a convicted trafficker does not function as a principle. It functions as a pretext.
For decades, the “war on drugs” has operated as a malleable instrument of American power. The root of the U.S. drug crisis lies in domestic demand, a reality Washington struggles to confront. The expansion of cartels across the hemisphere has been driven largely by the purchasing power of the American market. Unable to solve that internal problem, the United States has repeatedly externalized it, turning a domestic failure into a flexible justification for intervention and coercion. In this framework, cartels can be alternately tolerated and weaponized, depending on the needs of the moment.
In Venezuela’s case, many observers assume the needs is oil. Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves, roughly 17 percent of the global total. After Hugo Chávez’s election in 1999 and the consolidation of the Bolivarian Republic, assets tied to American oil firms were nationalized. Trump has repeatedly pointed to that history as a motivating grievance.
Yet the oil explanation is less coherent than it appears. Most energy analysts describe today’s global oil market as shaped by weak demand rather than scarcity. Slowing global growth—partly worsened by Trump’s tariffs, combined with the expansion of renewable energy constrains prices and compresses margins for oil majors. Venezuela’s reserves do not solve that problem.
Venezuelan crude is also unusually heavy and viscous, making extraction and refining costly. U.S. shale, by contrast, remains cheaper to produce and requires less capital expenditure. Even if Venezuelan fields were transferred at bargain prices, profitability would remain uncertain. A resource-capture motive is easy to announce, but harder to justify as strategy.
A strategically coherent oil-related logic exists, though it looks very different from the usual story. One could imagine Washington auctioning Venezuelan oil fields to major importers such as China and India. If sanctions were lifted to enable sufficient production, Venezuelan supply could flood global markets, depress prices, and potentially pressure Russia into concessions over Ukraine. But that scenario faces obvious constraints. It assumes buyers would accept assets seized through an unlawful intervention inside an unstable political environment. It also assumes U.S. oil majors would benefit from lower prices, even though such price pressure typically hurts them. The incentives do not align.
If drugs and oil do not fully explain the strike, democracy might appear to offer another answer. A segment of Trump’s political base holds a quasi-religious belief that, despite his transactional and ideologically indifferent foreign policy, he represents a Reagan-style crusader against dictators. Trump’s first term did include an explicit regime-change attempt in Venezuela: Washington backed Juan Guaidó as interim president and nearly toppled Maduro in 2019.
Yet the aftermath of the 2026 raid suggests something closer to improvisation than to a democracy-promotion plan. Opposition figures long cultivated by Washington—including Guaidó—appear to have been uninformed about U.S. intentions. The most widely anticipated successor to Maduro, María Corina Machado, the disputed winner of 2024 election and a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, shows no evidence of being integrated into a U.S.-designed transition. Even elements of the Chavista establishment that likely provided intelligence enabling Maduro’s capture appear uncertain about Washington’s endgame. Strangest of all, Trump seems content with the existing leadership so long as it “cooperates with the transition.”
That gap between decisive violence and vague political design raises another possibility: perhaps the United States did not expect such a clean outcome. The raid could have been intended as the opening shot of a broader campaign. Washington has assembled the largest fleet ever seen in the Caribbean and deployed nearly 20,000 personnel. The plan could still be an old-fashioned invasion and regime change, resembling the 1989 U.S. operation that abducted Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega.
Such a campaign would likely be framed as enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine: no external powers should enter Latin America, the presumed U.S. backyard. Venezuela, like many targets of twentieth-century U.S. intervention, committed the cardinal sin of collaborating with external powers, most notably China, which imports nearly half of Venezuela’s oil. A raid executed with this speed sends a message that the sheriff is back, and that Latin American states should downgrade relations with China or risk the same fate.
Even that hegemonic reading runs into contradictions. China–Latin America trade is structurally complementary: China sells industrial goods and buys food, energy, and minerals. The United States cannot replace China as a manufacturing supplier to the region, and it does not seriously try. This dynamic explains why governments elected on anti-China rhetoric—Javier Milei’s Argentina is a clear example, typically preserve commercial ties after taking office.
The United States also profits indirectly from this trade. Roughly 80 percent of transactions are settled in U.S. dollars. Contracts often rely on Anglo-American legal standards. U.S. finance, insurance, and consulting firms capture ancillary value throughout these supply chains. The United States has maintained a consistent trade surplus with Latin America, and wealth generated through China-facing commerce frequently cycles back into U.S. education, real estate, and capital markets. That reality helps explain why, despite decades of rhetoric, Washington has done little to meaningfully disrupt China’s economic relationship with the hemisphere.
When these inconsistencies are taken together, the Venezuelan operation looks less like a coherent attempt to secure resources, prosecute narcotics crime, promote democracy, or even enforce regional hegemony. The traditional Monroe Doctrine, imperial as it was, combined dominance with obligations. Written by the then Secretary State, John Quincy Adams, his worldview included an expectation that U.S. primacy would defend hemispheric stability, repel external conquest, and underwrite economic stability.
There was at least an identifiable order to maintain. The Venezuelan raid reflects none of that. It points to something cruder. America’s behavior now resembles the logic of Andrew Jackson, president from 1829 to 1837, who presided over a period marked by violent frontier warfare against Native American tribes and their external allies. What later became known as Jacksonian diplomacy prioritized the elimination of adversaries, the extraction of tangible gains or symbolic trophies, and a withdrawal that disclaimed responsibility for the aftermath.
Patterns during Trump’s first presidency already hinted at this style. In 2018, Trump ordered the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou and left Canada to manage the fallout with China. In 2020, the United States assassinated Iranian general Qasem Soleimani and then proceeded toward withdrawal from Afghanistan. Violence in this worldview does not serve the construction of an order. Violence becomes a demonstration of agency—an end in itself.
That helps explain the absence of a serious post-raid plan for Venezuela. The reported appointment of Secretary of State Marco Rubio to oversee the “transition,” supposedly with the title of “Governor General,” appears more symbolic than administrative. Rubio already serves as secretary of state and as national security adviser—the first person to combine those two roles since Henry Kissinger, leaving little space for a third substantive portfolio. The gesture resembles a Roman tradition: conquered territories as tribute, governance as a trophy.
In this framework, the seizure of Venezuelan oil, regardless of its economic utility, and the public display of captured foreign leaders operate as spoils of war rather than as rational investment. The act resembles performative punishment, closer in spirit to the slaughter of bison during westward expansion than to a calculated strategy. It signals who may take, and who exists to be taken from.
History suggests the United States will not stop at Venezuela. Greenland and Canada may serve as temporary distractions, but Trump still has three years in office and appears determined to build a hemispheric legacy. The 2025 National Security Strategy explicitly references a “Trump Corollary,” asserting a right to intervene throughout the hemisphere. The last time a president attached his name to such a doctrine was Theodore Roosevelt. His “Big Stick” policy coerced states such as the Dominican Republic into surrendering customs authority and accepting U.S. financial supervision. Later administrations deepened these practices, turning large parts of Latin America into networks of “banana republics” shaped by American corporate interests.
Cuba could become an immediate target. Highly dependent on Venezuelan oil, it will suffer acutely from disruption. Washington’s objective could be punishment more than regime change: an enduring reminder that defiance carries costs. Left-wing governments in Colombia and Nicaragua would then face early tests of this neo-Jacksonian diplomacy.
The ultimate prize would be Brazil. Trump has cultivated ties with the Bolsonaro family. Portuguese has become one of the most used languages on Truth Social. The fall of Lula’s government would mark the culmination of Trump’s hemispheric ambition. Subordinating Brazil would bring the region’s largest country deeper into an extractive pipeline while weakening the BRICS bloc.
The broader trajectory is grim. Latin American states may no longer be treated as sovereign equals, but as subnational entities closer to the status of Native American tribes in the nineteenth-century U.S. imagination. Washington’s extraction could extend beyond natural resources into every economic frontier: communications equipment, cybersecurity standards, AI protocols, legal standards, and strategic infrastructure. Control would creep through water, electricity, and transportation systems. A crucial difference from earlier eras would sharpen the brutality: America would close its borders, denying populations even the last escape valve of migration.
Latin America enters this moment dangerously unprepared. The region has enjoyed nearly a century of relative peace, cultivating geopolitical complacency that in some ways exceeds even that of the European Union. That peace sustained an illusion that the United States, whatever its faults, still served as an exporter of order. Venezuela shatters the illusion.
If survival becomes the central question, Latin American states confront a stark choice: accept domination, or pursue collective security while the option still exists. The immediate priority should be the creation of a NATO-like collective defense alliance, coupled with rearmament and the development of a serious defense industrial base.
Despite its brutality and illegality, the Venezuelan operation clarifies something essential. It reveals a United States that no longer even pretends to uphold the order, and that has devolved into the kind of rogue state it once claimed to oppose. From this point forward, anyone who continues to proclaim the virtues of America’s “rules-based international order” or “multilateralism” deserves to be treated as either dangerously naive or malignantly destructive.
Editor: Charriot Zhai
