Background:
In 2020, during the first Trump Administration, the US Department of Justice filed a criminal indictment against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Moros. Maduro, who has served as president since the death of Hugo Chávez in 2013, including through disputed elections in 2018 and 2024, stands accused of using his position to lead and accommodate an international drug-trafficking, narco-terrorist ring, alongside his wife and several other Venezuelan officials. On Jan. 3, 2026, the US military conducted an operation to seize Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, transporting them to New York to stand trial. This column debates the decision to capture Maduro.
In favor:
On Jan. 3, President Trump ordered US forces to abduct a foreign head of state and bring him before a US court. His actions were unprecedented. They were also exceptionally promising.
Since 2013, Nicolas Maduro has ruled Venezuela with an iron fist, ruthlessly crushing dissent, falsifying election results and kindling brotherly relations with some of the world’s most vile regimes. In 2024, his mendacious declaration of victory after an election that monitors suggested he lost likely by a wide margin spurred protests, which were swiftly and ferociously put down. The fraudulent 2024 Venezuelan elections, as well as those likewise internationally rejected in 2018, resulted in more than fifty states refusing to recognize his legitimacy as leader of the state. Among them was the United States.
The lead-up to Maduro’s capture was a series of strikes on boats claimed by the US Department of Defense to be trafficking drugs, and later a blockade of some oil tankers, given Venezuela’s role as a major global oil supplier. In the weeks before the operation, many feared the US could find itself trapped in another “forever war” of regime change and statebuilding, like those in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet instead, in one swift go, American forces brought him down.
While pro-Maduro actors have attempted to demonstrate that support for the absent leader remains intact, they have failed to obfuscate the truth: that Venezuelans both in that country and beyond are celebrating. In short, an unpopular tyrant is gone, and US forces are untethered to his former dominion.
Maduro’s unpopularity in the US was bipartisan. While initially indicted under the first Trump administration, it was under his Democratic successor, President Joe Biden, that a $25 million reward was instituted for information leading to his arrest or conviction. His defeat, though he has attempted to plaster over it with lies, has left him an illegal and illegitimate occupant of his office, and one unrecognized by the US and its allies. Meanwhile, this easy triumph has left the US in an even stronger position geopolitically.
Not one week before the operation in Caracas, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the US, under pressure from the Trump administration to make concessions to his country’s attacker, Vladimir Putin. The decision to remove Maduro and apply pressure to and threats against the regime he left behind has shaken a significant Russian ally. With Maduro gone, Washington proves to Moscow that it too will make concessions, whether or not it chooses to make them at the negotiating table. Democratic critics, meanwhile, have lambasted Trump for his comments regarding US seizure of Venezuelan oil as compensation for the deaths suffered on account of Maduro’s alleged narco-terrorism. These critiques, however, may ignore the interconnectedness of global affairs.
Both Russia and Venezuela are major producers of oil, whose output is carefully regulated by OPEC+, an economic cartel of petroleum exporters, to manipulate the prices of oil worldwide. Amid intense sanctions, oil exports have become one of Russia’s most significant lifelines. By increasing the output of Venezuelan oil into the global market, Trump wields an immensely powerful bargaining chip against the Russian economy, which may yet strengthen Kyiv’s hand at negotiations and the democratic world writ large.
To be sure, the abduction of a sitting world leader is an unprecedented foreign policy move for the US. But perhaps it’s worth waiting to judge. Rather than the long-term obligations to which we found ourselves tied after the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the swift fell-swoop liberation of a people who had repeatedly been ignored at the ballot box may yet prove to pad the arsenal of democracy not just across the Americans, but across the world.
Against:
It is a historically rare occurrence for the United States to lose a war, but it is also a cataclysmic one. When a foreign military intervention goes awry, it weighs on the American people in a fashion described by foreign policy scholars as a “syndrome.” Over the last century, the American collective consciousness has been afflicted by several of these syndromes. Whether it was photos of Americans fleeing Saigon as the Viet Cong took over, live satellite news showing the charred bodies of U.S. troops in Mogadishu after Black Hawk Down or endless coverage on the internet of American soldiers coming home from Iraq in coffins during a search for weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, images like these decrease the American people’s faith in our military, and fan the flames of isolationist sentiment even when it is detrimental. Any exceptions require both a perceived interest and a perceived success in an intervention. Our burgeoning intervention in Venezuela, which did not begin nor end with the capture of Nicolás Maduro, fails thus far to fulfill either criterion.
Proper intervention requires pressing interests that Americans will understand and appreciate. If U.S. troops are lost, their friends and families must know that their sacrifice was not for nothing. To that end, President Trump has posed the drug war and Venezuela’s oil reserves as American national interests in toppling Maduro. However, the drug epidemic that plagues our country is overwhelmingly not tied to Venezuela’s purported cocaine exports. The vast majority of U.S. overdose deaths occur due to fentanyl and methamphetamine, both of which are primarily sourced from cartels in Mexico. Meanwhile, the president (to his credit) has been exceedingly honest about his perceived oil interests, admitting that the U.S. would simply seize and sell Venezuela’s oil (an action both morally and legally dubious). Still, U.S. oil companies such as ExxonMobil have already expressed hesitance at the prospect of operating in Venezuela due to its instability and poor infrastructure.
What the president has been less upfront about is the administration’s likely perception of immigration interests in Venezuela. Even prior to Maduro’s capture, the Trump administration revoked the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) of Venezuelan asylees in the U.S., who fled cartel violence and the oppression of Maduro’s socialist regime. This would result in the deportation of these asylees back to Venezuela, indicating that humanitarian concerns for Venezuelans suffering under Maduro are not exactly prioritized by this administration. With Maduro now gone, the Trump administration will likely attempt to parlay the dwindling power of his regime into the creation of a new government friendly to the Trump administration. The administration would almost certainly use a friendly Venezuelan government to expand its inhumane immigration crackdown, at best creating a third country removal program for immigrants or, at worst, establishing an offshore prison akin to El Salvador’s CECOT, where dozens of Venezuelan deportees reportedly experienced torture last year.
Only time will completely tell if there will be a perceived success in Venezuela, but so far, the results are not very promising. Despite Maduro’s arrest, his socialist regime remains in power. The operation has already endangered U.S. citizens in Venezuela, as pro-Maduro vigilantes known as colectivos have been roaming the streets of Caracas searching for Americans. In the search for new leadership in Venezuela, President Trump has already refused to help potential democratic successors of Maduro. The president dismissed the overwhelmingly popular opposition leader María Corina Machado (who was selected over Trump to win last year’s Nobel Peace Prize), claiming that she “doesn’t have the respect” necessary to govern Venezuela, while also ruling out supporting Maduro’s 2024 electoral opponent Edmundo González. And this is without even considering that the operation in Venezuela lacked congressional authorization, which is necessary as the U.S. and Venezuela are not in a declared state of war.
The rule of Nicolás Maduro need not be mourned. Maduro operated as a brutal dictator, violently oppressing political dissent, all while driving his country’s economy into the ground and exacerbating the suffering of his people. The brave Venezuelan people, from Caracas to Florida, are right to celebrate that he is gone. However, Maduro’s despotism — like that of Saddam Hussein — does not alone justify the risks associated with a prolonged regime change operation in Venezuela. The decision to abduct Maduro from foreign soil without a plan for democratization already in place was ill-advised and may come to severely destabilize Latin America and its relations with the U.S. Ultimately, what’s done is done, but any further U.S. action in Venezuela must occur organically by the will of the Venezuelan people.
Qualifier:
On the Other Hand is a recurring column in The Hoot, which seeks to promote critical approaches to the issues of our time and respectful dialogue. The arguments made here should not be taken as the views of The Hoot and its staff, or even as those of the writers, unless explicitly stated. In this edition, Stephen wrote in favor of Maduro’s capture, while Jack wrote against. They decline to state their personal views.
