Venezuelans celebrate in Santiago, Chile, on Saturday, after U.S. President Donald Trump announced that President Nicolas Maduro had been captured and flown out of Venezuela.Esteban Felix/The Canadian Press
So much for no foreign engagements, no nation-building and, if Donald Trump is especially unlucky, no forever wars.
By mobilizing an attack force of about 150 aircraft and ordering the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the transport of the blindfolded and handcuffed discredited leader to New York, Mr. Trump took an audacious step that is consistent with his brawny personal style. However, it is in direct conflict with the MAGA movement that he created and that is skeptical, if not viscerally opposed, to international involvement.
As he did with the June nocturnal strike on three Iranian nuclear-weapons production sites and the nearly three dozen attacks on seaborne vessels in and around Venezuelan waters last year, Mr. Trump clearly weighed his muscular foreign-policy inclinations against his movement’s fervent objection to military adventurism and came down on the side of burnishing his reputation as a man of action.
Though American presidents have spoken of a Good Neighbor Policy (Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1933) and an Alliance for Progress (John F. Kennedy, 1961) in Latin America, the country’s leaders repeatedly have regarded the Western Hemisphere as an American zone of influence and have not hesitated to project military force to make the region conform to American interests.
Indeed, Mr. Trump has asserted a “Trump Corollary” to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine to enforce American dominance in Latin America and the Caribbean.
“This is reminiscent of American intervention in Latin America throughout history – but more akin to an earlier era, when military interventions resulted in direct American control,” said Eben Levey, a historian at Rochester Institute of Technology.
“For U.S. interests, these generally work. For Latin Americans, there’s been a staggering human cost of exiles and people tortured and ‘disappeared’ in the name of anti-communism and freedom.”
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Mr. Trump’s “Operation Absolute Resolve” came 36 years after George H.W. Bush dispatched troops to Panama for a similar reason: to battle drug trafficking, and, like Mr. Trump, to arrest the country’s leader, Manuel Noriega, a onetime CIA asset.
The President’s vow to “run the country” for an unspecified time is an echo of the 1915-1934 American control of Haiti – over the course of five presidents.
American interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean date to the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), which gave the United States undisputed possession of Texas, along with territory now comprising all or parts of nine states, including California.
Venezuelans went out Saturday to stock up amid an atmosphere of uncertainty following the capture by the United States of President Nicolás Maduro and the first lady, as well as attacks in several parts of the capital, Caracas, in the early hours of the day.
The Associated Press
It seized Puerto Rico militarily in 1898. A 1954 CIA-engineered Guatemalan coup overthrew Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán after threats to the interests of the United Fruit Corporation, later Chiquita Brands, growing out of a land-reform program. Communist threats in Cuba (1961, a reprise of the 1898 involvement that began the Spanish-American War), the Dominican Republic (1965, a reprise of 1916), Nicaragua (1979), El Salvador (1980), and Grenada (1983), followed.
Mr. Trump moved without congressional approval, prompting questions of shared authority in foreign and military affairs that inevitably are raised when presidents, like Harry Truman (Korea) and Bill Clinton (Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo) take unilateral action. The 1973 War Powers Resolution, intended to limit presidential discretion in military affairs, was passed over Richard Nixon’s veto but has been largely ignored by his successors.
A House resolution to stop Mr. Trump from engaging in hostilities against Venezuela failed by two votes in December. That might not have mattered had it passed and if the GOP-controlled Senate concurred, which would have been unlikely; presidents repeatedly have found loopholes to evade War Powers Act restrictions and even Congresses more inclined than the current one to assert their prerogatives have been foiled.
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Next possible tests: Iran, where Mr. Trump has said he might “come to [the] rescue” of protesters, and Colombia, a known source of drugs. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Cuba is “in a lot of trouble,” though he did not suggest invasion was imminent or contemplated.
“In Donald Trump‘s universe, he’s decided it’s okay to try to run the world outside the rule of law, without consultation of Congress,” said Patrice Franko, a Colby College expert on Latin America. “There’s a strong feeling that Venezuela should return to a democracy and that Maduro violated democratic values, but that does not make this action legal.”
The Delta Force operation raised uncomfortable international-law questions sometimes regarded as legacies of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War but also prohibited asserted countries from interfering in the politics of other sovereign states.
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The President’s action may also violate the United Nations Charter, which upholds the sovereignty of all countries, though with loopholes involving humanitarian and human-rights matters – perhaps safe harbours for Mr. Trump in the unlikely event that, given his contempt for global institutions, he takes international law seriously.
This “law-enforcement operation” clearly is an attempt at regime change, but since Venezuela has several levels of government, including a vice-president who is now acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, the profligate use of that phrase in commentary in recent days is premature.
This episode, for example, differs substantially from the 2011 regime change promulgated by Barack Obama and NATO in toppling Moammar Gadhafi because he essentially was the sole important Libyan government figure.
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“What we have here is a ‘decapitation event,’” said Sarah Burns, author of the 2020 Politics of War Powers. “The immediate future of Venezuela is extremely unpredictable. We don’t know if there’s someone in the wings trying to amass a following. There are many uncertainties.”
The Maduro apprehension almost surely is the easy part. What happens next is far more difficult, requiring sensitivity and attention to nuance – not particular strengths of Mr. Trump but perhaps are in the diplomatic tool set of Mr. Rubio, himself the son of Cuban immigrants.
In any case, even temporary American control of Venezuela involves substantial risks.
“This has all the hallmarks of the work of special-operations forces,” retired General Wayne Eyre, chief of the Canadian defence staff from 2021 to 2024, said in an interview.
“But when it comes to nation-building, nobody’s particularly good at it. Foreign forces quickly become seen as an army of occupation. The quicker you can get home-country forces involved to own the problem and be vested in the situation, the better the outcome.”