After a strong first move, he’s eating all the pieces.
Venezuelans are celebrating—cautiously inside the country, wildly in safer places such as Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Miami, where hundreds of thousands made their homes as a brutal dictatorship impoverished their country, once the second-richest in the Western Hemisphere.
The Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has been removed from power—captured in the dead of night and arraigned before an American judge. That’s the good news. But as is so often the case with the actions of Donald Trump, it isn’t the only storyline. The United States president immediately threw cold water on the idea that the raid could pave the way for a rapid democratic transition under the leadership of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, María Corina Machado. At his first press conference, a few hours after Maduro’s surgical removal, Trump said that he ordered it to get control of Venezuela’s oil, and that Machado didn’t have the “respect” to lead Venezuela.
If anyone expected more from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had a long-standing personal passion for freedom in Cuba before he sold his soul to Trump at a steep discount, they would have been disappointed. During his TV appearances the day after the raid, Rubio, like Trump, emphasized oil over democracy as the operation’s “No. 1” priority.
Trump’s stance in Venezuela is consistent with a geopolitics based on raw power and spheres of influence—the very sort that produced two world wars in the 20th century. In this scenario, the U.S. gets Venezuela and the Western Hemisphere, Russia gets Ukraine and as much of Europe as it can grab, and China gets Taiwan and an Asian sphere without U.S. interference. Trump has already been working to deliver Ukraine into Vladimir Putin’s open arms by cutting off aid and pushing a peace plan practically written by the Kremlin as his own. Fortunately, the Ukrainians haven’t cooperated.
That assumes Trump has any vision at all, of course. His supporters have a tendency to say that he’s playing five-dimensional chess, only to discover too late that he has eaten half the pieces.
I am not here to condemn the U.S. for toppling Maduro on the grounds of international law. Maduro was an illegitimate despot who had violated every agreement, including one in 2023 with the Biden administration, which proposed to lift sanctions in exchange for holding free and fair elections. Maduro was never going to step down unless stepped on. In Russia, Cuba, Iran, Belarus, and Uganda, dictatorships have carried on for decades—oppressing and killing their people, attacking their neighbors, and destabilizing their regions. Regime change isn’t a dirty word when the regime is among the most vicious in the world. As in Syria, no one can predict what will follow the fall of a tyrant, but now there is hope where before there was none.
