The Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro’s regime lasted 12 years before America ended it today. This seems to be what the monthslong American military pressure campaign on Venezuela was building toward—the strikes on boats carrying drugs in international waters, the seizure of oil tankers, and the CIA-engineered port explosion. Early this morning, military installations in Caracas started exploding. Hours later, President Donald Trump announced that he had ordered a “large scale strike against Venezuela”—and that America had captured Maduro and flown him out of the country. The apparent goal is to have him stand trial in America, facing, in the words of Attorney General Pam Bondi, “the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.” In 2020, Maduro was indicted on charges of cocaine and weapons trafficking by federal prosecutors. Having gone here, the Trump administration apparently wishes to go no further: Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, told Republican Senator Mike Lee that he “anticipates no further action in Venezuela.”
This is Trump’s most audacious foreign-policy decision in either term of office—more significant than the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander, in 2020 or even the strike on Iranian nuclear facilities last year. But, alongside the rest of Trump’s decisions, it is an incoherent one: The America First faction of the Republican Party denigrates regime change as a compulsion of neoconservatives—then pulls off a defenestration as spectacular as America’s arrest of Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian dictator, in 1990. Maduro is an authoritarian and a blight to the Venezuelan people, certainly, but this administration is hardly one that finds all autocrats anathema. Trump wants to bring Maduro to justice for allegedly running a narcotrafficking empire while president of Venezuela not even two months after pardoning Juan Orlando Hernández—who ran a narcotrafficking empire while president of Honduras and had been sentenced to 45 years in prison by an American jury. Trump wants to muscularly intervene in Central and South American affairs—what some observers are calling the “Donroe doctrine”—but also does not want to deal with the increased migration that often comes from rupturing regimes.
How do we make sense of this new American arbitrariness—willing to drop massive bombs on buried Iranian nuclear facilities and kidnap dictators, but unwilling to keep providing funds to the defense of Ukraine, even if this risks no actual American soldiers? One interpretation of America First foreign policy is as a halfway station between proper isolationism and neoconservatism: the Trump administration intervenes where it can do so easily and without immediate consequence, but shies away from long-term commitments and occupations. Under George W. Bush, if America broke it, America tried to fix it. No longer—but not because we’ve foresworn breaking other countries.
A second interpretation of the Venezuelan operation is that Trump is inaugurating a return to spheres of influence. Trump rejects the rules-based international order set up after World War II (which placed America as its keystone), and he despises the globalists in the Washington foreign-policy blob and European capitals who still believe in it. In this view, great powers ought to be able to intervene in their own backyards. This is why America can do as it sees fit in Venezuela. It is also why Trump often seems more sympathetic to Russian President Vladimir Putin than to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. The return of spheres-of-influence thinking bodes poorly for the chances of America intervening if China were to invade Taiwan while Trump is still in office. The conflict would be seen as an intramural dispute—one that poses risks to American ships, soldiers, and submarines that are orders of magnitude greater than Trump’s targets so far.
The Venezuelan incursion also reflects the central failing of American domestic politics: the continued declining relevance of Congress. Even though the prescribed Constitutional order is to have Congress declare wars, presidents have run roughshod over this power. In this instance, it is hard to even begin to construct the legal basis for the military action. Vice President J.D. Vance suggested on X that this morning’s incursion is legal because “Maduro has multiple indictments in the United States for narcoterrorism.” But as my colleague Conor Friedersdorf has noted, this logic would mean the president can order an invasion of “any country where a national has an outstanding arrest warrant.”
Of course, circumventing the legislature is not really a Trumpian innovation. Harry Truman described the Korean War as an American “international police action” to avoid needing a formal congressional declaration of war. George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Panama in 1989, which culminated in the arrest of Noriega, was also not authorized by Congress. What is new about the Trump era is taking the blithe disregard for the other branches of government that American presidents have enjoyed in foreign affairs and seeking to apply it to spheres of governance, too—whether that is the declaration of tariffs, the deployment of the national guard, or even the enforcement of ordinary laws. The administration has essentially ignored the law requiring the sale of TikTok. Having allowed the president to encroach on all of these powers already, it is hard to imagine the current Congress demanding actual justification for the administration’s actions in Venezuela.
But as free as Congress leaves him, Trump may find that the rest of the world does not comply with his wish to intervene militarily while avoiding deep entanglements. Perhaps a democratic revolution in Venezuela will place an opposition leader like María Corina Machado in charge of the country; or perhaps another authoritarian figure will inherit Maduro’s regime—just as Maduro was able to reconstitute the regime of Hugo Chávez. Colombia has already had millions of Venezuelans flee into its borders and is worried about further destabilization. The principles of Trump’s foreign policy remain even harder to discern after the Venezuelan intervention than they did before it. But all actions have consequences—even arbitrary and inscrutable ones.
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