In recent months, President Donald Trump has assembled the largest U.S. naval armada in the Caribbean since the invasion of Panama in 1989. There were far too many forces simply to blow up some suspected drug boats — but not enough to invade Venezuela, a nation of nearly 30 million people. Now we know what all that naval might was for. The U.S. force was the perfect size for a commando raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
That is exactly what the U.S. Army’s Delta Force pulled off under the cover of darkness early Saturday morning in a bold and brilliant operation that showed once again why the U.S. Special Operations Command and the U.S. intelligence community are the best in the world.
A U.S. Special Operations raid in a large foreign capital full of hostile fighters could easily go wrong, as did the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” fiasco in Somalia. That operation damaged President Bill Clinton politically and led to Defense Secretary Les Aspin’s downfall. It must have taken nerves of steel for Trump to give the go-ahead. Because the raid seemingly went like clockwork, Trump was able to take a victory lap at a typically rambling Saturday news conference at his Mar-a-Lago Club.
Maduro was no terrorist leader, and he was no direct threat to the United States, despite the administration’s attempts to label him as a “narco-terrorist.” But he is a vile despot who was implicated not only in corruption and drug trafficking but also in heinous human rights violations. No tears should be shed over the prospect that he will face trial in a U.S. federal court for some of his crimes. But the raid nevertheless raises difficult and troubling questions about why the operation was carried out and what the consequences will be.
Comparisons are being tossed around to President Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada in 1983 and President George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Panama in 1989, when U.S. troops previously deposed Latin American rulers. But the big difference is that in both cases, U.S. troops took over the entire country, enabling a democratic transition.
In Venezuela, by comparison, U.S. troops staged a quick in-and-out raid. It was regime decapitation, not regime change. At his Mar-a-Lago news conference, Trump said, “We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.” What is he talking about? There are no indications that U.S. troops are preparing to occupy Venezuela. If such an operation were attempted, it could easily turn into a debacle, just like the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and it would violate Trump’s repeated pledges not to engage in “nation-building.”
Maduro was not a one-man band. He presided over a large apparatus of oppression that includes the army, the national guard, the national police, the intelligence service and the Colombian guerrilla group ELN. All of those forces remain intact after the U.S. raid. Also still in place are many of Maduro’s top lieutenants, including the ministers of defense and interior, who were implicated in his alleged crimes.
They give no sign of willingness to cede power to the democratic opposition led by María Corina Machado, who recently left the country to accept the Noble Peace Prize. Edmundo González, who was widely believed to have won the rigged 2024 presidential election, is also out of the country. On Saturday, Trump spoke dismissively about Machado and said Secretary of State Marco Rubio is talking with Maduro’s handpicked vice president, Delcy Rodríguez.
So what is the plan, if any, for the “day after” Maduro’s downfall? To leave the Maduro regime in place with a new and more compliant leader?
That is hardly what the Venezuelans who voted for González want, and it raises the issue of why Trump acted in the first place. Unlike President George W. Bush in Iraq or President Barack Obama in Libya, Trump did not offer a rationale about promoting democracy or human rights. On Saturday, Trump focused on Maduro’s complicity in drug trafficking. But just a month ago, Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was tried and convicted in a U.S. court of similar drug trafficking offenses.
More recently, Trump trotted out a different rationale for action. He wrote on social media that he wanted Venezuela to return “to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” This is a fiction — Venezuela nationalized its oil fields in 1976, but many other countries have done the same, including Saudi Arabia to Russia. (More contentious was Hugo Chávez’s 2007 decree that foreign oil companies in joint ventures would have to sell a majority stake to Venezuela’s state-owned oil company.) It does suggest, though, that Trump’s focus is not on bringing freedom to Venezuela but, rather, gaining access to its oil reserves — the world’s largest.
And, indeed, in Saturday’s news conference, Trump vowed that more U.S. oil companies would go back into Venezuela. (Chevron is already drilling for oil there.) The problem is that any new Venezuelan regime would rapidly lose its legitimacy if it allowed its natural resources to be looted by Yanquis.
Like George W. Bush after the invasion of Iraq, Trump enjoyed his “Mission Accomplished” moment on Saturday. But if there is one thing we have learned over the past quarter-century, it is much easier to topple tyrants than to build stable and secure societies afterward. History’s ultimate verdict on Trump’s military operation will be based on the fate of post-Maduro Venezuela, and the U.S., despite what Trump said about running the country, has only limited leverage to determine its fate.
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