Here We Go Again
The US Captured Maduro. Now Comes the Hard Part.
In the early hours of January 3rd, 2026, Delta Force operators breached a residence in Caracas.
Nicolás Maduro tried to reach his steel safe room.
He didn’t make it in time.
Within two hours and twenty minutes, the socialist strongman who had ruled Venezuela for over a decade was aboard the USS Iwo Jima, en route to face narco-terrorism charges in a New York federal courthouse.
The United States has once again done the thing it’s been criticized for across the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Central America for the better part of a century: military intervention and regime change.
At his Mar-a-Lago press conference, Trump announced that the US would “run Venezuela” until a “safe transition” could be carried out.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth that neither side of the American political divide wants to admit: this might actually work.
Not because the US has suddenly gotten good at nation-building.
It hasn’t.
But because Venezuela in 2026 is not Iraq in 2003, Afghanistan in 2001, or Vietnam in 1965.
The conditions on the ground are different.
The strategic calculus is different.
And perhaps most importantly, the alternative (leaving Maduro in power) was getting worse by the year.
This is the first direct US military capture of a foreign leader since Panama in 1989. It will define American foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere for a generation. And almost everyone is asking the wrong questions about it.
What Actually Happened
The operation itself was a masterclass in military precision. Exactly what you’d expect from a country that’s been perfecting this kind of thing since Grenada.
The buildup: Starting in August 2025, US forces quietly expanded their presence in the southern Caribbean. A CIA team spent weeks tracking Maduro’s movements. Since early September, US forces had conducted 35+ strikes against drug smuggling boats, killing over 115 people and establishing air superiority in the region.
The strike: On January 3rd at approximately 1 AM local time, 150+ aircraft launched Operation Absolute Resolve. Helicopters flying at 100 feet above the water carried the extraction team. Delta Force breached Maduro’s residence, catching him and his wife completely off guard.
The aftermath: Maduro was flown to Guantanamo Bay, then transferred to an FBI plane heading to New York. He arrived at federal courthouse in New Windsor on Saturday to face charges: narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, and weapons offenses.
The power vacuum: Vice President Delcy Rodríguez is reportedly in Moscow. Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López has taken control on the ground. And in a move that tells you everything about US priorities, Trump dismissed María Corina Machado (the opposition leader who actually won the 2024 election) as lacking the “respect” to lead. Instead, the US is working with elements of Maduro’s own regime.
The Questions Everyone Is Asking
Who’s Actually in Charge Now?
This is where the story gets complicated.
If you’re having déjà vu, you should.
The US tried this before with Juan Guaidó.
In 2019, Trump recognized the opposition leader as Venezuela’s legitimate president.
At his peak, 57 countries backed Guaidó’s claim.
It went nowhere.
By 2023, even Venezuela’s opposition had dissolved his interim government, and Guaidó fled to the United States.
The current opposition leader is María Corina Machado.
She won Venezuela’s opposition primary in October 2023 but was then banned from running via a 15-year disqualification, a move international observers considered illegal.
Her replacement candidate, Edmundo González, crushed Maduro by more than two-to-one in the July 2024 election according to voting machine records validated by international observers.
Maduro’s government simply ignored the results.
Machado became the face of the opposition, organizing protests and maintaining the movement from hiding.
She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025 for “her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”
She has been underground for 14 months.
And Trump dismissed her as lacking “respect” to lead.
Instead, the US is working with Delcy Rodríguez and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López, the very people who helped maintain Maduro’s grip on power.
The US wants stability more than it wants democracy.
A strongman who cooperates with Washington is easier to manage than a democratic transition that might not go America’s way.
You can be horrified by this or you can be pragmatic about it.
But you should understand what it means: this intervention is about American interests, not Venezuelan freedom.
The Refugee Question
Approximately 8 million Venezuelans have fled over the past decade, the largest displacement crisis in the Western Hemisphere. Colombia alone hosts nearly 3 million. Many more made their way north through Central America and Mexico to the US border.
This is the immigration angle that matters: the Venezuela crisis didn’t stay in Venezuela. It became an American border issue.
If the transition goes well, refugees might return home. Venezuelan expatriates in Miami and elsewhere could bring capital and expertise back to rebuild. If it goes badly (extended chaos, insurgency, economic collapse) we might see another wave attempting to head north, though Trump’s border agreements and crackdowns have made that path harder than it was a few years ago. Colombia has already deployed additional border forces in anticipation of instability either way.
Is This Even Legal?
International law experts are calling it a “crime of aggression” under UN Charter Article 2(4). The UN Secretary-General expressed “deep alarm.”
But here’s the thing about international law: it only exists to the extent that powerful nations choose to follow it. The UN has no army. The International Criminal Court has no enforcement mechanism. “International law” is, in practice, a set of norms that constrain the weak and provide rhetorical ammunition against the strong. It rarely stops them.
The more substantive legal question is domestic: did Trump need Congressional authorization? The precedent here is murkier than critics suggest.
Congress has historically required notification for sustained ground operations, not extraction raids. This was closer to the bin Laden operation than the Iraq invasion.
Still, the uncomfortable question remains: Does legality matter if it works?
Panama in 1989 was also legally dubious.
The result was a democratic system, peaceful transfer of governance, and an economy that took off.
Nobody talks about the legal issues anymore.
Latin America Is Divided
Critics:
Brazil (Lula): Called it an “unacceptable line” and a “dangerous precedent” that evokes “the worst moments of interference”
Colombia (Petro): “Rejects aggression against sovereignty of Venezuela and Latin America”
Chile (Boric): “Concern and condemnation”
Mexico (Sheinbaum): Joined in denouncing
Supporters:
Argentina (Milei): Hailed as “victory for freedom”
El Salvador (Bukele): Signaled support via social media
Ecuador (Noboa): Called it a blow to “narco-Chavista” structures
The “Donroe Doctrine”: Venezuela Is Just the Beginning
Here’s what makes this different from every other US intervention in living memory: Trump isn’t pretending.
There’s no talk of weapons of mass destruction.
No “spreading democracy.”
No coalition of the willing.
At his Saturday press conference, Trump was explicit: “The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot. American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”
He’s calling it the “Donroe Doctrine.” It’s not subtle.
And Venezuela isn’t the end. It’s the opening move.
When asked about Colombia, Trump said President Petro needs to “watch his ass.” He accused the country of running cocaine factories and said a military operation there “sounds good.” Cuba, he added, “looks ready to fall.” And with Venezuela no longer shipping oil to prop up Havana, he might be right. Mexico got a warning to “get her act together.”
Petro’s response was sharp: “The US is the first country in the world to bomb a South American capital in all of human history.” He called on Latin American nations to unite or risk being “treated as servants and slaves.”
This is the part that matters for understanding what comes next: the Donroe Doctrine isn’t a one-time thing. It’s a framework. The US is announcing, openly, that it considers the Western Hemisphere its sphere of influence and will use military force to maintain it.
You can see this as a return to naked imperialism. You can see it as a long-overdue reassertion of American interests in its own backyard.
The regional divide reflects this.
Left-leaning governments (Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile) see imperial overreach and issued a joint statement of “profound concern.”
Right-leaning governments (Argentina, El Salvador, Ecuador) see liberation from narco-socialist tyranny.
Both interpretations are correct, depending on your point of view.
What’s undeniable is that the rules in the Western Hemisphere just changed.
What About the Oil?
“I want the oil,” Trump said. At least he’s honest about it.
Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, larger than Saudi Arabia. But the story is more complicated than “capture country, pump oil.”
Venezuelan crude is heavy and sour: dense, sulfur-laden, and full of contaminants that corrode equipment and poison catalysts.
Unlike Saudi Arabia’s light crude or the sweet stuff coming out of Guyana (the small South American nation on Venezuela’s eastern border that has emerged as a major oil producer), Venezuelan crude requires expensive, specialized refining.
US Gulf Coast refineries were built for exactly this kind of oil, though. About 70% of US crude imports are heavy, much of it from Canada’s tar sands. So the infrastructure exists.
The problem is that Venezuela’s oil industry has collapsed.
PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela, the state oil company) says its pipelines haven’t been updated in 50 years. Production crashed from ~2.3 million barrels per day in 2015 to under 500,000 in 2020.
It’s recovered slightly to around 1 million bpd, but experts estimate it would take a decade and over $100 billion in investment to rebuild to peak capacity.
Here’s the reality check: when the Trump administration asked US oil companies if they were interested in returning to Venezuela, they reportedly declined.
According to Politico, several of them told the administration they weren’t interested even with regime change on the table.
The reasons?
Lower oil prices globally, more attractive fields elsewhere, and uncertainty about whether any new Venezuelan government would honor contracts after what happened when Chávez nationalized everything in 2007.
The majors have already placed their bets elsewhere.
Exxon and Chevron have poured billions into Guyana.
Chevron closed a $55 billion acquisition of Hess in July 2025 largely for its 30% stake in Guyana’s Stabroek block.
Exxon actually tried to block the deal through arbitration, claiming it had right of first refusal, but lost that fight.
Now Exxon operates the field with 45% while Chevron owns 30% and China’s CNOOC holds 25%.
Exxon has seven projects approved in Guyana, targeting 1.7 million bpd by 2030.
The oil is lighter, sweeter, cheaper to extract, and comes with lower taxes. The investment decisions have already been made, and pivoting to Venezuela would require redirecting capital from projects that are already working.
That said, a group of about 20 US investors is reportedly planning a trip to Venezuela in March to explore opportunities in oil and tourism.
Charles Myers of Signum Global Advisors describes the mood as “cautious optimism.” But this is early-stage interest, not committed capital.
The bigger strategic play might be less about pumping Venezuelan oil and more about denying it to China. Beijing has invested billions in Venezuela’s energy sector. In fact, a Chinese delegation led by Xi Jinping’s Special Envoy was meeting with Maduro at the presidential palace just hours before the US strike. They were reportedly still in Caracas when the bombs fell.
Beijing is “deeply shocked,” and that’s sharper language than they used after the US strike on Iran. Taking Venezuela offline from Chinese access makes China’s energy more expensive and easier to cut off in a potential Pacific conflict. Stabilizing the region also protects Guyana’s boom from Venezuelan territorial ambitions.
Whether this is about American energy independence, weakening China, or securing Guyana, the answer is probably all three.
The History Everyone Forgets
One thing the coverage consistently gets wrong: Venezuela wasn’t a wealthy paradise that Chavez destroyed. Understanding what Venezuela actually was, and why Chavez rose to power, matters for understanding whether this intervention can succeed.
The peak: By 1970, Venezuela was the richest country in Latin America and one of the twenty richest in the world, ahead of Greece, Israel, and Spain. The oil boom of the 1920s had transformed a poor agricultural nation into a petro-state with the highest growth rates and lowest inequality in the region.
The collapse: Between 1978 and 2001, Venezuela’s economy went sharply in reverse. Non-oil GDP declined by almost 19%. Oil GDP collapsed by 65%. By the mid-1990s, annual inflation hit 50-60%. A banking crisis wiped out savings.
The breaking point: On February 27, 1989, the government raised gas prices 100%, which triggered a 30% increase in bus fares. Venezuelans rioted. The government responded with overwhelming force. Estimates suggest 3,000+ people died in what became known as the Caracazo.
The result: By 1998, Venezuela had a 50% poverty rate. Per capita GDP was back to 1963 levels. The two-party system that had governed since 1958 was discredited. Hugo Chavez, who had attempted a coup in 1992, won the presidential election promising to use oil wealth to reduce poverty and inequality.
Chavez didn’t destroy a healthy economy.
He inherited a broken one.
This matters because Chavismo didn’t come from nowhere. There is a genuine leftist, socialist constituency in Venezuela. They weren’t brainwashed. They were poor, they were angry, and they were desperate for change.
Any successful post-Maduro Venezuela will have to reckon with this history. You can’t just pretend that 40% of the population didn’t have real grievances that Chavez spoke to.
A Brief History of American Viceroys
Before we ask whether Venezuela will work, we should be honest about what we’re talking about: the United States taking control of a foreign country and attempting to reshape it.
We’ve done this before.
Sometimes it worked.
Usually it didn’t.
The successes (Japan and Germany, 1945)
These are the gold standard, and they spoil every conversation about nation-building because they make it look easy.
After World War II, the US occupied both countries, rewrote their constitutions, rebuilt their economies, and turned them into stable democracies and allies. It worked spectacularly.
But the conditions were unique: both were industrialized, literate, modern states with functioning bureaucracies.
They had human capital: educated populations that could be put back to work.
They had been broken by war, not merely defeated.
And critically, there was no insurgency.
The population accepted occupation because the alternative was Soviet domination.
We’ve been chasing that high ever since.
The failures (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan)
Vietnam had none of the preconditions. The US backed a government that lacked legitimacy against a domestic insurgency with genuine popular support. Twenty years and 58,000 American dead later, Saigon fell.
Iraq looked more promising on paper. It was a modern state with educated professionals and oil wealth. But the US dismantled the existing power structures (disbanding the army, banning the Ba’ath party) without having anything to replace them. Sectarian chaos soon filled the void. The Iraqi Army the US spent eight years training and $25 billion equipping collapsed against ISIS in 2014.
Afghanistan was never a modern state to begin with. You’ll see photos circulating online of Kabul in the 1970s: women in miniskirts, university students, a cosmopolitan capital. But that was one city, a thin urban elite, before the Soviet invasion.
The country as a whole had almost no trappings of modernity: no industrial base, minimal literacy, tribal governance structures that predated any central authority. US efforts were construction, not reconstruction. After twenty years and $2 trillion, the Taliban retook Kabul in eleven days.
The pattern: Nation-building works when you’re rebuilding something that existed before. It fails when you’re trying to build something that was never there, or when you dismantle what exists without understanding why it existed.
Where does Venezuela fit?
This is the genuine uncertainty. Venezuela was a functioning state. It had a democracy, a middle class, oil infrastructure, an educated population.
It’s been hollowed out by nearly three decades of Chavismo (Chávez took power in 1999), but the bones might still be there.
Or they might not.
We’re about to find out.
The Intervention Playbook: A Timeline
For the past twenty years, American foreign policy discourse has focused on the Middle East: the Global War on Terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan, ISIS.
But the US has a much longer history in its own hemisphere. And that history is directly relevant to what’s happening now.
Guatemala, 1954: The CIA overthrew President Jacobo Árbenz after his land reforms threatened the United Fruit Company. The Dulles brothers, one ran the CIA, the other was Secretary of State, had represented United Fruit through their law firm. (Yes, that’s the same Dulles that Washington’s airport is named after.) Árbenz was replaced by a series of US-backed dictators. Civil war followed, lasting until the mid-1980s. This established the template.
Cuba, 1961: The Bay of Pigs. CIA-trained Cuban exiles attempted to overthrow Castro. It failed spectacularly, and Cuba has been communist ever since. But the intervention had a lasting domestic consequence: waves of Cuban refugees transformed South Florida. Cuban-Americans became a powerful political constituency, overwhelmingly conservative and virulently anti-communist.
Miami became the de facto capital of Latin American business and exile politics. The Cuban vote has shaped Florida elections, and therefore presidential elections, for decades. It’s one reason Florida has shifted from swing state to reliably Republican. And it’s why any move against Cuba (or Venezuela, which has propped up Havana with oil) plays well with a crucial voting bloc.
Chile, 1973: The Nixon administration funded opposition parties and right-wing media to destabilize socialist President Salvador Allende, who had won a free and fair election. General Augusto Pinochet seized power in a coup on September 11th. Thousands were killed or “disappeared” and the US only officially acknowledged its role decades later.
Nicaragua, 1980s: Reagan’s presidency was defined by Central America. He secretly authorized funding to the Contras fighting the socialist Sandinista government. When Congress cut off the money, the administration sold weapons to Iran and funneled the proceeds to the Contras anyway.
The Iran-Contra scandal nearly brought down Reagan’s presidency. The civil war killed 50,000 Nicaraguans. With the Soviet Union collapsing and Middle East terrorism still a secondary concern, Reagan-era foreign policy was heavily focused on the Western Hemisphere and the war on drugs. That era may be returning.
Panama, 1989: The last direct US military intervention before Venezuela. Noriega, a former US ally who had trained at the School of the Americas, was captured and brought to the US on drug charges. This one actually worked. Panama transitioned to democracy and its economy took off. But Panama is tiny, and there was an opposition ready to govern.
Operation Condor, 1970s-80s: Six South American dictatorships (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil) coordinated to eliminate leftist opponents. The US provided tacit support through the CIA. At least 60,000 people were killed across the region.
The School of the Americas: Throughout this period, the US trained Latin American military officers at a facility in Fort Benning, Georgia. By 2000, over 60,000 had graduated. The school’s alumni include Manuel Noriega, Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer, and numerous officers later implicated in torture and political killings. In 1996, the Pentagon released training manuals that advocated torture, extortion, and execution. The school was briefly closed and reopened under a new name, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, but the curriculum and instructors remained largely the same. Several Latin American countries, including Venezuela, now refuse to send officers there.
This is the history that Latin American leaders have in mind when they condemn US intervention. It’s also the playbook that shaped the current generation of American military and intelligence leadership.
Can the US Actually Rebuild Venezuela?
US military supremacy is not in question.
We’ve known since Desert Storm that America can destroy any conventional military on Earth in a matter of days.
This operation demonstrated it again: the precision, the speed, the overwhelming force projection.
Chinese commenters online are already talking about replicating this kind of strike against Taiwan, though they’re likely overestimating their capabilities. (More on the Asia implications later this week.)
The question is what comes after the military victory.
Why Panama worked: An opposition was ready to govern. US troops were already stationed in the Canal Zone and could withdraw quickly. The country is tiny: 7x smaller population, 12x smaller land mass than Venezuela. There was no insurgency.
Why Venezuela is harder: No coherent transition plan. No democratic institutions ready to assume power. 7x the population and 12x the land mass of Panama, with mountains, jungles, and coastlines that complicate any occupation. And there’s a genuine Chavista constituency that won’t simply disappear.
“Removing Maduro,” as one analyst put it, “does not remove Chavismo.”
The insurgency risk is real. Colombia’s ELN (the National Liberation Army, the largest remaining leftist rebel group in the region) controls nearly the entire border with Venezuela.
In December, before the intervention even happened, they ordered Colombians to stay home and bombed state installations across the country in response to Trump’s threats. Colombia’s Ministry of Defense has activated “all capabilities of the security forces” in anticipation of ELN action.
The ELN competes with former FARC fighters who refused to disarm under the 2016 peace deal for control of coca cultivation zones (coca is the plant used to produce cocaine) and smuggling corridors. If Venezuela descends into chaos, these groups could flood across the border, not unlike how ISIS emerged from the wreckage of Iraq. And if China decides it’s not getting what it wants from the new arrangement, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for them to fund these insurgents as a low-cost way to bleed American resources.
The hope: Venezuela has better bones than Afghanistan or Iraq. The infrastructure exists (decayed, but not destroyed). There’s an educated population, historic ties to the US, and regional partners like Argentina’s Milei who want to see this succeed.
The honest answer is that nobody knows how this ends.
The outcome depends on decisions that haven’t been made yet: how much the US invests in reconstruction, whether genuine political pluralism is allowed, whether regional partners step up, whether the Chavista constituency is accommodated or alienated.
We’ll know more once the transitional government takes shape. The March investor trip might provide early signals about whether serious capital sees opportunity here or just risk.
For now, cautious optimism seems about right, with the emphasis on cautious.
What This Means for You
Immigration: A stable Venezuela means fewer refugees heading north. A chaotic Venezuela means more. The eight million who already left didn’t stay in South America. Many ended up at the US border. If you care about immigration, you should care about what happens next in Caracas.
Gas prices: Don’t expect dramatic changes either way. Venezuelan production is down to about 1 million barrels per day, and rebuilding will take years. If stability returns and investment flows in, prices could ease slightly over time. If chaos ensues and regional production gets disrupted, prices could spike. The more immediate factor is whether the intervention affects Guyana’s booming output next door.
Your tax dollars: Nation-building is expensive. Iraq cost $2 trillion. If Venezuela goes badly, the bill lands on American taxpayers. On the flip side, if the US ends up controlling or benefiting from Venezuelan oil sales, that’s a potential new revenue stream, though the exact mechanism for how the US would financially benefit remains unclear.
Investment opportunities: This isn’t going to be a bonanza for Silicon Valley. The opportunities here are in real estate, infrastructure, tourism, and natural resources, which means Miami businesses and New York investors are better positioned than tech companies looking for growth.
Venezuela could become the counterpoint to Vietnam as an emerging market story: if Southeast Asia has been the growth narrative of the 2010s and 2020s, a stabilized Venezuela could be part of the Latin American growth narrative of the 2030s.
That’s a big “if”.
Who benefits and who pays: What’s unclear is how Trump’s core Rust Belt and MAGA voters stand to benefit from this intervention.
Miami’s Cuban-American and Venezuelan-American communities are already celebrating.
Wall Street sees potential deals.
But a factory worker in Ohio? The connection is harder to draw.
They might get cheaper gas, but 'nation-building in Caracas' can quickly become 'sending my tax dollars to rebuild foreign roads while mine have potholes.
What is mostly certain is if this goes wrong, American taxpayers are on the hook for the cleanup, same as they were for Iraq and Afghanistan.
The benefits flow to specific constituencies; the costs get spread around.
The Bottom Line
This intervention might work. Venezuela might stabilize, develop its oil wealth, and become the pearl of South America that its geography and resources always suggested it could be.
Or it might become another chapter in America’s long history of interventions that produce chaos, resentment, and blowback.
The military victory was the easy part.
Everything that follows is hard.
And the questions that matter now aren’t about whether the US should have done this.
It’s done.
The questions that matter are about what America, and Venezuela, do next.
Later this week: This was just the Western Hemisphere story. The real geopolitical earthquake might be happening between Beijing and Taipei. What does Operation Absolute Resolve mean for Taiwan, for China’s energy security, and for the possibility of a Pacific conflict?
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