U.S. President Donald Trump holds a press conference following the U.S. strike on Venezuela, from the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, on Jan. 3.Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
The U.S. raid-and-capture operation in Venezuela that ended the rule of Nicolás Maduro and upended power politics in the Western Hemisphere was unusually complicated. The motivations behind it were perhaps even more complex – and so are the lessons that the Delta Force blitz provide for Americans and for governments across the globe.
Here are some of the important political currents running beneath the surface of the astonishing episode, which has provided a template for evaluating the early 21st-century Trump Corollary to the early 19th-century Monroe Doctrine – two policies that have no legal basis but still establish distinct American spheres of influence and behaviour and enforce them:
The addiction that matters in this affair is not solely Americans’ craving for cocaine and fentanyl, as critical as that is to public health, but also their addiction to oil, which has been critical to the country’s economy since before 1870, when John D. Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company.
U.S. President Donald Trump is famously abstemious when it comes to alcohol and drugs. Not so when it comes to fossil fuels. He chose an ExxonMobil executive, Rex Tillerson, as his first secretary of state. He has opposed solar power projects on farm land, cancelled funding for offshore wind farms, revoked bans on oil drilling in Alaska and advocated opening up federal land, including national forests, for oil exploration. He employed the phrase “Drill, baby, drill” in his 2025 inaugural address.
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Real estate, as the President knows, is the staging ground of power. But oil, as a parade of American presidents have learned, is the lubricant of power.
The 1923 Teapot Dome scandal involving the leasing of oil contracts soiled the brief administration of Warren G. Harding. Eight weeks before he died in 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt met secretly on the USS Quincy with Saudi Arabia’s Ibn Saud to forge an “oil-for-security” agreement that endures with few changes to this day.
The nationalization of Iran’s oil interests led to the CIA operation that toppled Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh during Dwight Eisenhower’s administration. The Arab oil embargoes of 1973 and 1979 challenged the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, respectively.
Many historians believe one of the reasons George H.W. Bush, a one-time oil executive, responded as he did to Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait was to secure continued access to Middle East oil.
Mr. Trump has argued that Venezuela “unilaterally seized and stole American oil, American assets and American platforms” when those assets were expropriated in 2007.
However, some scholars and energy-sector analysts believe that, given Venezuelan law and the compensatory payments made to oil companies, Mr. Trump’s assertions are simplistic if not misleading.
Deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife were returned to jail after a defiant appearance in federal court in which he declared himself the 'president of my country.'
The Associated Press
The extraction operation is consistent with Mr. Trump’s tendency to press limits that have constrained earlier presidents.
In domestic politics, Mr. Trump’s extension of executive powers has permitted him to lay off government employees, fire the heads of agencies, impose tariffs without congressional approval and assert the general argument that as the leader of the executive branch he has prerogatives that other presidents have not exercised.
While other U.S. presidents have projected force without consulting or winning the support of the legislative branch, especially in Latin America, the operation in Venezuela is of a different character designed to disrupt a foreign government but also to expose Mr. Maduro to legal prosecution in the U.S.
“The action against Venezuela,” said Philippe Sands, director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London, “is manifestly illegal under international law and cannot plausibly or by any reasonable standard be characterized as a law enforcement action,” as the Trump administration has done.
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Mr. Trump has brushed aside critiques that he has trampled on customary and legal boundaries. He is likely to pay no mind to future decisions by international institutions that he has spurned and reviled and will likely flick aside condemnations coming from, among other sources, the United Nations General Assembly or the International Court of Justice.
Mr. Trump has intimate knowledge of the use of the legal system to punish political figures and is employing what he derided as “lawfare” in his own indictments for his own purposes.
Frustrated with Mr. Maduro for months, Mr. Trump was finally motivated to act when advisers reminded him that the Venezuelan leader, whom Mr. Trump described as a “kingpin of a vast criminal network,” had been indicted in the Southern District of New York. What followed was not a conventional extradition process.
Mr. Trump lets resentments fester, but not indefinitely.
He grew impatient with seemingly endless negotiations with, and then demands for the resignation of, the Venezuelan leader. This is a personal characteristic that the leaders of Iran discovered when Mr. Trump eventually sent bunker-busting missiles against that country’s nuclear sites last year. And it may bode ill for other leaders who win the President’s enmity – including Gustavo Petro of Colombia, a country “run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States,” Mr. Trump said Sunday, adding portentously, “He’s not going to be doing it for very long.”
Mr. Trump, no student of Newtonian physics, is more interested in action than reaction.
There is apparently little planning to deal with the consequences of this action, and it is uncertain whether the interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, an ardent socialist, will do Washington’s bidding despite her calls for a “balanced and respectful” relationship with Mr. Trump. As George W. Bush learned in Afghanistan and Iraq – and as Russia learned in Afghanistan and Ukraine – an attack on a country is a spectacular disruption, like an overture in a Bizet opera: What follows can take unpredictable turns, often not good.