The United States has crossed a threshold in Latin America that would have seemed almost unimaginable a year ago. On 3 January, American special forces entered Caracas in Operation Absolute Resolve, captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, and transported them to the United States to face federal charges including narcoterrorism conspiracy. The operation was enormous: according to US officials, more than 150 aircraft were involved, military targets and air-defence systems were struck, and Delta Force personnel entered Maduro’s fortified compound after months of intelligence preparation. Maduro and Flores have since pleaded not guilty. Trump has argued that the operation restored American power in the Western Hemisphere and has invoked the Monroe Doctrine, while also saying Washington intends to exercise substantial influence over Venezuela’s transition and oil sector. Venezuela’s interim leadership remains largely drawn from the existing governing structure, with former vice-president Delcy Rodríguez assuming authority rather than the opposition immediately taking power. The operation may prove tactically extraordinary. Politically, however, it raises a much harder question: does the fact that Maduro governed repressively and faced serious questions over democratic legitimacy give another state the right to enter Venezuela militarily, seize him and determine what political order follows?
Maduro’s record makes the question deliberately uncomfortable. Venezuela’s democratic institutions deteriorated substantially under both Hugo Chávez and Maduro, political opponents were repressed, elections became heavily contested and millions of Venezuelans left the country during a prolonged economic collapse. The disputed 2024 presidential election deepened the legitimacy crisis after the opposition argued that its candidate had actually won and the United States rejected Maduro’s claim to victory. None of this makes Venezuelan sovereignty morally irrelevant, but neither does sovereignty mean governments acquire unlimited authority over their populations. Political philosophy has struggled with this tension for centuries: state sovereignty protects peoples from foreign domination, while popular sovereignty says political authority ultimately belongs to the people rather than whoever controls the presidential palace. Maduro’s government could therefore be internally illegitimate while Venezuela remained externally sovereign. Those are not contradictory propositions.
The American operation risks collapsing that distinction. If one powerful country can decide that another government’s illegitimacy permits military removal, international order moves away from sovereign equality and towards a hierarchy in which strong states possess an informal right to judge weaker ones. Washington would almost certainly reject China using similar reasoning to remove a government it considered illegitimate in Asia, or Russia claiming that democratic failures in a neighbouring country justified military intervention. This is the universalisability test for foreign policy: a rule should be evaluated not only by whether we approve of its application today, but by whether we would accept adversaries invoking the same rule tomorrow. The United States can argue that Maduro also faced criminal charges and represented a direct security and narcotics threat, but forcibly extracting a foreign leader from his own capital remains qualitatively different from arresting him after lawful extradition or travel abroad. The precedent therefore extends beyond Venezuela.
Trump’s invocation of the Monroe Doctrine makes the underlying philosophy unusually explicit. The original 1823 doctrine warned European powers against further intervention in the Western Hemisphere; later presidents, particularly Theodore Roosevelt, transformed it into a much broader claim that Washington possessed special responsibilities and privileges within the Americas. Trump has revived that second tradition, presenting the hemisphere as a strategic space in which American dominance should not be seriously challenged. There is a realist logic here. Great powers throughout history have attempted to prevent hostile powers establishing military or political influence close to their borders. Russia behaves similarly in its neighbourhood and China increasingly treats East Asia through comparable strategic logic. The difficulty is that understanding spheres of influence descriptively does not make them normatively desirable. Small states possess sovereignty precisely because international law is supposed to prevent geography from reducing them to extensions of larger neighbours.
Oil makes the intervention even more politically sensitive. Venezuela possesses the world’s largest proven crude-oil reserves, but production remains far below its historical peak after years of underinvestment, sanctions and institutional deterioration. Trump has spoken openly about American oil companies participating in rebuilding the sector and has said Washington intends to retain substantial leverage through restrictions on Venezuelan oil. There is nothing inherently wrong with American companies investing in Venezuelan energy if a legitimate Venezuelan government agrees to it. The problem arises if military power determines the commercial settlement. A war justified partly through democracy or narcotics enforcement becomes much harder to distinguish from coercive resource politics if the intervening state immediately emphasises access to the defeated country’s most valuable asset.
The political transition may therefore matter more than Maduro’s capture itself. The United States has not simply installed opposition leader María Corina Machado or transferred authority immediately to the political forces claiming victory in 2024. Instead, much of the existing Venezuelan state remains intact under Rodríguez. This may appear contradictory, but institutionally it makes some sense. Iraq demonstrated the danger of destroying an authoritarian regime’s entire administrative apparatus simultaneously. Governments are not only presidents and ruling parties; they are ministries, electricity operators, police forces, tax administrations and thousands of ordinary civil servants. Removing every institution associated with the previous regime can create a vacuum in which nobody possesses enough authority to govern. Regime change and state destruction are different things, and confusing them can turn liberation into collapse.
The challenge is avoiding the opposite mistake: preserving so much of the old regime that Maduro disappears while authoritarian structures remain. If security agencies, patronage networks and political restrictions survive largely unchanged, Venezuela has experienced a change of leadership rather than democratisation. The objective should therefore be institutional transition rather than either total purge or total continuity. Political prisoners should be released, opposition parties should be able to organise, electoral institutions should become credible and a timetable should lead towards elections Venezuelans themselves can determine. American military power can remove a leader in several hours; it cannot manufacture democratic legitimacy because legitimacy depends on Venezuelans believing they possess meaningful authorship over the political order that follows.
This distinction is where Trump’s statement that America is effectively “in charge” becomes particularly problematic. Even if American intervention eventually produces freer elections, democracy imposed through indefinite external control contains an obvious contradiction. The purpose of self-government is that citizens determine their own political institutions. Foreign powers can create conditions in which that becomes possible, but the longer Washington directly determines Venezuela’s leadership, oil policy or domestic administration, the harder it becomes to claim the resulting system rests on Venezuelan sovereignty rather than American permission.
The operation nevertheless demonstrates something important about state power and intelligence capacity. American forces were able to penetrate a heavily defended capital, suppress elements of Venezuela’s air defence and seize its leader without losing an American service member. Reuters reports that the CIA had developed intelligence close to Maduro and that special forces rehearsed the assault using a replica of his compound. This is an extraordinary tactical achievement, but tactical dominance can create strategic overconfidence. The United States removed Saddam Hussein’s government extremely quickly in 2003; the difficult part was everything afterwards. Military organisations are designed to destroy or seize targets. Political orders require bargaining, administration and consent. The ability to remove a government is not evidence of the ability to build its successor.
Latin America will therefore watch the precedent carefully. Many governments have little sympathy for Maduro, but they also possess historical memories of American interventions, coups and political interference across the region. Even democratic governments that welcome Maduro’s removal may hesitate to endorse a doctrine granting Washington broad authority to determine which Latin American governments are acceptable. China and Russia will exploit that discomfort rhetorically, arguing that American claims about sovereignty in Ukraine or elsewhere are inconsistent with its behaviour in Venezuela. That argument does not justify Russian aggression, but perceived inconsistency weakens the normative power of American criticism. International rules become more persuasive when states accept constraints on themselves as well as demanding them from rivals.
The most successful outcome now would therefore be one in which America’s own role becomes progressively less necessary. Stabilise the immediate security environment, preserve essential state institutions, release political space, establish credible electoral rules and then allow Venezuelans to choose their government. Oil investment should occur through transparent contracts negotiated by legitimate Venezuelan institutions rather than appearing to be compensation for intervention. The United States should define an exit mechanism rather than an open-ended claim of supervision. If Washington remains indispensable indefinitely, the intervention will have failed at the very objective of political self-government it can most plausibly claim to advance.
Maduro’s removal could still become a turning point for a country that has suffered years of repression, economic collapse and mass emigration. It could also become another example of a great power confusing its ability to destroy an authoritarian equilibrium with its ability to create a legitimate one. The difference will not be determined by how spectacular the raid looked on television. It will be determined by whether Venezuelans eventually gain more political agency rather than merely exchanging a domestic ruler they could not remove for a foreign power they never elected. That is the real test of whether 3 January becomes remembered as Venezuela’s liberation or simply another chapter in the long history of powerful states deciding the political future of weaker ones.
