A hard lesson in foreign policy comes to mind: if you break it, you own it. America is now responsible for Venezuela’s failures, factions and future grievances
On a quiet Saturday morning, American special forces seized Nicolas Maduro in Caracas and flew him to the United States. Within hours, US President Donald Trump announced that Washington would “run” Venezuela – at least temporarily.
What sounds like a 1990s action film plot marked the final burial of the notion that Trump is a president of peace, an illusion sustained largely by his own rhetoric. More importantly, it marked the day the world’s former arbiter of international law and norms showed it no longer respects either.
That Maduro was a tyrant is beyond dispute. He presided over the systematic destruction of one of Latin America’s richest nations – economically, institutionally and morally. Elections were farcical, opposition leaders were imprisoned or exiled, and millions fled a country rendered unliveable by corruption and misrule. His fall is not being mourned in Caracas, London or Berlin.
The US formally charged Maduro with serious criminal offences. A federal indictment in the Southern District of New York accuses him of narco-terrorism, cocaine trafficking and kidnappings, alleging Maduro used the Venezuelan state to facilitate the production and export of vast quantities of cocaine to the US.
Supporters of the operation retreat, predictably, to moralism: Maduro deserved it. True. But moral revulsion is not a legal doctrine. If it were, Western democracies would be rather busy around the globe. A system that authorises force based on virtue rather than law does not remain virtuous for long. It becomes discretionary. And discretion, in the hands of power, is the enemy of order.
One could argue America has broken international law before. Perhaps in Kosovo, where it stretched humanitarian intervention beyond its legal frame. Maybe in Iraq, under a doctrine of pre-emption that proved strategically disastrous. But even those transgressions were cloaked in coalition-building, congressional authorisation and a strenuous effort at legal justification.
Venezuela is different. There was no vote in Congress. No Nato consultation. No allied notification. No UN fig leaf. No claim of imminent self-defence. No pretence this was anything other than a unilateral act of force against a sovereign state, culminating in the arrest of its head of government.
The Trump administration insists the operation was law enforcement – a narcotics case, no different in principle from a cartel takedown. This claim rings hollow coming from a president who recently pardoned a former Honduran president convicted of drug trafficking.
Most importantly, however, Trump, as he often does, said the quiet part out loud during the Saturday press conference, namely that this was not about indictments, but administration – of oil. US oil companies would fix Venezuela’s “broken infrastructure” and “start making money for the country”, Trump said.
Indeed, Venezuela sits atop the largest proven oil reserves on earth. In an era of energy volatility and geopolitical competition, it would be naive to believe this was irrelevant. What we are witnessing is petro-imperialism.
Speaking of toppled dictators, Iraq taught us, regime change is never a moment but a mortgage. Regime change is easy. Governing the aftermath is not. Venezuela is a hollowed-out state: institutions degraded, civil society traumatised, the economy shattered. The opposition, though courageous, is fragmented and organisationally brittle.
As we also know from previous US interventions, power vacuums do not remain empty. They are filled – by militias, criminal networks, new authoritarians promising order where democracy cannot yet deliver it.
But the danger does not stop at Venezuela’s borders. Internationally, this marks another fracture in the post-war order. The US was not merely a participant in that system but its architect and chief enforcer. When Washington dispenses with the rules altogether, it signals not strength but impatience – and invites imitation.
This is not, as some suggest, about emboldening Russia or China. They never required permission. Ukraine proved that. Rather, it is a structural consequence: the world is hardening into three spheres of influence – American, Chinese and Russian – where law gives way to leverage, and smaller states exist at the sufferance of three nearby giants.
The domestic implications are equally troubling. A president who can declare a state of war – undefined, undeclared and unbounded – acquires extraordinary latitude at home. Surveillance expands. Dissent is reframed as disloyalty. Emergency becomes habit.
Trump has long exhibited a propensity for authoritarian tendencies. Venezuela offers a convenient pretext to take things even further. “We are at war” is the oldest alibi for the erosion of liberty. It allows power to consolidate under the banner of necessity, and necessity, as history teaches, is infinitely elastic.
None of this requires conspiracy. Only precedent.
There is an old rule in foreign policy, learned the hard way: if you break it, you own it. America now owns Venezuela – not just its oilfields, but its failures, factions, future grievances. It owns the resentment that will follow if promises go unmet, and the blame if order collapses.
Unless the administration can articulate a strategy that reconciles legality with legitimacy – and thus far it hasn’t come close to it – force with foresight, and victory with stewardship, this operation will be remembered as the moment America did something morally defensible in the most morally indefensible way – toppling a dictator not to free a people or defend itself, but to seize their wealth.
Tyranny deserved to fall. But mere thiefdom does not deserve to replace it.
