The Trump administration thrived on the theatrical nature of the abduction of Venezuela’s president, but now it appears to be stuck in a nation-building exercise that it didn’t think through, a slate of experts said on Tuesday.
They agreed that Venezuela posed no threat to the US, and that Washington carried out its stunning operation in the early hours of Saturday largely because it could.
“If you’re talking about Narco-terrorism or narcotics coming into the United States, you ought to invade and capture the leader of Mexico before you capture the leader of Venezuela,” John Mearsheimer, a renowned political science professor at the University of Chicago, said on a panel organised by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
“It’s a violation of international law and international norms. It doesn’t make sense from a strategic point of view for the United States,” he said.
“First of all, we end up in the business of nation-building, which Trump once wisely said we were going to avoid. And furthermore, we have all sorts of other priorities around the world and inside of the United States that we ought to be privileging over this cockamamie idea of kidnapping the leader of Venezuela and putting him on trial.”
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US special forces abducted Venezuela’s president from the capital, Caracas, as American fighter jets bombed key military installations and bases across the country. No US personnel were killed, but about 80 security forces and civilians were killed, according to the AP.
Along with his wife, Nicolas Maduro is now facing trial in federal court in New York City and will be jailed as the process plays out.
He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
‘There is no plan’
Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative newsmagazine, said US President Donald Trump “seems pretty addicted to these sort of special operations as a way of looking like a wartime commander in chief, without any of the potential risks in his mind of the sort of 2000s George W Bush mess”.
‘I’m not even really sure it’s a war for oil as much as it is a simulated war for oil’
– Curt Mills, The American Conservative
Miguel Tinker Salas, professor emeritus of Latin American history at Pomona College, labelled the abduction as “performative”.
“I thought this was the spectacle of empire. I think this is what Donald Trump likes. This is what he wants. If you looked at his [Saturday] press conference, he talked about it as a video game,” Salas said.
“It also showed the weakness of empire. Because I think the US forces can, of course, strike wherever they want, and they’re very good at it. But what are they doing the next day? What is the plan? There is no plan.”
Trump has said the US will be taking over the “running” of Venezuela. He has seemingly given that task to his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has long called for the removal of the leaders of Venezuela and Cuba. Rubio is the son of Cuban immigrants.
Both countries are under heavy US sanctions.
Trump, to the surprise of some, also cast aside Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, suggesting she does not have enough support among core Venezuelan institutions like the police and the military.
Delcy Rodriguez, who served as Maduro’s vice president, has been appointed by the Venezuelan Supreme Court to lead the country on an interim basis.
It’s unclear whether she has worked with the US to prompt Trump to say that she will do whatever his administration asks her to. But after striking an initially confrontational tone, Rodriguez took a more conciliatory stance, inviting the US to work in cooperation with Venezuela.
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“Does the US military want to be used willy nilly as an empire-building instrument in Cuba, and next in Nicaragua, and next in Panama, and next in Greenland? Does the military want to spread itself so thin while at the same time bombing Nigeria, at the same time threatening war with Iran? I think that there’s other calamitous issues here that we have to confront as well,” Salas said.
And despite the US president making it clear he’s after Venezuela’s oil – the largest proven reserves in the world – Mills said that it’s simply not profitable in the short term.
“I’m not even really sure it’s a war for oil as much as it is a simulated war for oil,” he said.
“There’s no real plan to get this stuff online… The United States has taken Maduro. It hasn’t taken the oil. There’s no plan whatsoever to actually get this stuff out,” he added.
Reuters reported on Tuesday that US oil executives will convene at the White House on Thursday.
“That’s putting aside whether or not it’s moral to basically engage in a war of plunder in our hemisphere at a time when oil prices are basically at historic lows, or at least historic lows in the last 10 years,” Mills continued.
“Is the Trump administration’s policy to drive the price of crude below $50 a barrel? I think you’ll see mass unemployment in places like Texas and throughout the [US] southeast.”
The end of Nato?
There’s also the question of Venezuela’s allies – and US adversaries – Russia and China. Both nations have condemned the abduction of Maduro.
“From a strategic point of view, or geopolitical point of view, this is manna from heaven for the Chinese, just like it’s manna from heaven for the Russians, because the United States is apparently going to get bogged down in a giant nation-building enterprise in the western hemisphere, [and] both Rubio and Trump are talking about doing nation-building in more than just Venezuela,” Mearsheimer said.
“It makes it extremely difficult to pivot to Asia.”
Mearsheimer added that he does not believe US intervention in Venezuela, and its threats against the rest of the hemisphere, will have any impact on Russia’s war in Ukraine, where Moscow is laser-focused.
And despite the administration’s threats, it’s unlikely other Latin American leftist leaders will face a fate similar to Maduro’s.
“I don’t think that what happened in Venezuela can be replicated,” Salas said, saying that Colombian President Gustavo Petro cuts a different figure from Maduro, who was bogged down by a legitimacy crisis after the 2024 election.
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“And in the case of Petro, although he’s a leftist, and although the country produces cocaine, the reality is that he is a democratically elected president that had a level of popularity we had not seen previously,” Mearsheimer said.
Those who are already worried – and should be, the panel argued – are European leaders, given Trump’s insistence that the US take Greenland away from Denmark.
“The utter silence on the part of Europe about what happened in Venezuela has been really dramatic. It shows a tremendous weakness,” Salas said.
“And it could be two factors: the fear that Trump will continue to pull out of Ukraine, or the fear that the tariffs will be used as leverage against Europe over the criticism regarding Venezuela, because we know this president is vindictive.”
Mills noted that after the US took the unprecedented step of bombing Iran’s nuclear sites in June, the Europeans were ‘basically supportive’, as they are now, regarding Maduro’s removal.
“I guess the answer would be that they’re just seemingly weak and monomaniacal on Ukraine, although the irony is… Denmark has all but explicitly stated that if the US annexes Greenland, then that is the end of Nato as far as they’re concerned, which they may well be right,” he added.
On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that at a closed-door meeting with US lawmakers, Rubio said Trump’s threats to take Greenland by force are intended to bring Denmark to the negotiating table.
“The Danes are the best allies the United States could ask for,” Mearsheimer said.
“So why are we doing this? Why are we threatening our relations with the Europeans? I just don’t understand this,” he added. “Watching the Trump administration in action, I think that they are a rogue operation. They’ve turned the United States into a rogue state.”
