January 4, 2026 - 7:30pm
Supporters of this weekend’s US intervention can point to many Venezuelans, especially expatriates, who are celebrating the capture of President Nicolás Maduro. Similarly, there were Iraqi dissidents who celebrated when America invaded the country in 2003. Yet, once again, the real question is what happens next: for Venezuela, for the United States, and for the rest of the world.
What next week and the week after look like in Venezuela is deeply unclear. Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are saying things more crassly reminiscent of 19th-century imperialism than anything George Bush, Dick Cheney or Colin Powell were saying in 2003.
In a social media post boasting about US forces’ capture of Maduro, Vance went beyond his previous accusations of “narcoterrorism” to openly proclaim that part of the casus belli for the intervention was Venezuela’s nationalisation of its oil industry in the Seventies. At a press conference yesterday where he also extensively discussed oil, Trump said that the US would “run” Venezuela until everything was sorted out to Washington’s liking. He even said he had gone “way beyond” the Monroe Doctrine that had justified previous interventions and US-backed coups against Left-wing governments in Latin America. Now, Trump said, there was a “Don-roe Doctrine.”
Still, as far as anyone can tell right now, Maduro’s regime (sans the Venezuelan President himself, who is detained in New York) seems to remain in power. Rubio was not prepared to rule out American boots on the ground, though, and Trump yesterday appeared to assert a broad right for the US to pick Venezuela’s next leader.
If he does end up committing to a military presence, there’s every reason to worry about insurgency, counterinsurgency, and prolonged bloodshed. Armed militias and tanks have already been seen on the streets of Venezuela. Even without Trump deploying troops, there could be a descent into violent chaos within the country, as there was in Libya when Barack Obama backed the overthrow of the government there in 2011 without occupying the country. Either way, it could turbocharge Venezuela’s already severe refugee crisis, while Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has said that Venezuelans with temporary protected status can apply for refugee programmes to the US. Clearly, attempting regime change in your “backyard” can lead to consequences inside your house, as Russia learned in Ukraine.
Perhaps the dregs of the current Venezuelan government have made a deal with Trump, the frustrated opposition will acquiesce, and some kind of miserable stability will prevail. It’s too soon to be certain. What we can know with grim certainty, though, is that this intervention, like Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, inches the world closer to a geopolitical Wild West where regional powers feel free to roll over whoever gets in their way with impunity.
In his defence of the intervention, Vance — who once declared himself an anti-interventionist — said that it wasn’t “illegal” because Maduro had been indicted in an American court, and you don’t “get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States because you live in a palace in Caracas”. By this standard, it would be perfectly legal for any of the numerous nations around the world which recognise the International Criminal Court to send soldiers to Israel and enforce the ICC’s arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu. Had Putin’s push into Kyiv in 2022 been successful, he could have captured Volodymyr Zelensky and brought him back to Moscow just so long as he’d procured an indictment in advance from a Russian judge. Is Zelensky innocent? Well, that’s a matter for a Moscow jury.
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