During his presidential campaigns, Donald Trump pledged to end “forever wars”, abandon “nation-building” interventions and focus instead on reviving a US economy that, in his telling, had been deindustrialised by a floodtide of imports. Though Trump’s electoral victories cannot be attributed to any one thing, his “America first” narrative certainly struck a chord.
But Trump’s use of force to seize the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, his full-bore support for Israel’s demolition of Gaza and his bombing of Iran’s nuclear enrichment installations show that he’s no less willing than his predecessors to resort to military interventions.
Trump already had Maduro in his sights. He offered a $50m bounty for information leading to his capture, blockaded Venezuelan ports to stop sanctioned oil tankers and accused Maduro of involvement in drug trafficking. Still, it’s a safe bet that few outside the administration expected Trump to swoop into a country, grab its president and haul him to the US.
Maduro will be tried for drug trafficking and “narco-terrorism” conspiracy, a fuzzy formulation suitably ominous to justify a move of dubious necessity and legality. The Trump administration hasn’t provided evidence tying Maduro to narcotics trafficking, nor has it proven that Venezuela posed a clear and present danger necessitating an armed attack.
Venezuela has many problems, including drug gangs and authoritarian rule, but they hardly justify what Trump has done. If bad governance and repression by foreign leaders justify abducting them, Trump has a long list of offenders to choose from, including some backed by US economic and military support.
Trump’s move can’t be justified by self-defence provisions in international law. Venezuela never threatened to attack the US (it lacks the capacity to do so), let alone attacked it. It’s the other way around: the US has attacked Venezuela and taken steps, such as the naval blockade, generally used in wartime.
Trump says that the US constitution permits his intervention – that as commander in chief, he is duty bound to protect American personnel in danger. But Venezuela hadn’t put any US personnel at risk, let alone harmed them. Plus, Trump was building a case for tightening the screws on Maduro, and the Venezuelan leader would have been a fool to provide him with a casus belli.
Trump’s most prominent charge against Venezuela’s government is that its drug traffickers have, with Maduro’s complicity, deluged the US with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, which is also used to alleviate severe pain. Even a 2 milligram dose can prove fatal.
The illegal use of fentanyl and other opioids in the US has certainly been rampant and deadly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that deaths tied to synthetic drug overdoses, mainly fentanyl, soared from 782 in 2000 to 72,776 in 2023. However, they are estimated to have plummeted to 47,735 in 2024. Even so, the Trump White House reckons that the costs attributable to “illicit opioids, primarily fentanyl” (including death, treatment, crime and lost labour productivity) totalled $2.7tn in 2023.
The question, however, is what Venezuela has to do with any of this. Virtually all of the fentanyl smuggled into the US comes from Mexico, by way of China, which supplies the precursors, something the Trump administration itself concedes. The president nevertheless told an audience of top military officers in September that the US was attacking boats off Venezuela’s coast because they “were stacked up with bags of white powder that’s mostly fentanyl”.
And Trump contends that Maduro is directly linked to Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua criminal gang, adding that it’s “threatening an invasion” of the US – but, again, without providing proof and ignoring the fact that the gang has no army. Besides, Maduro’s government has been on the offensive against the group in recent years. The president also insists that Venezuela “previously stole” oil and land that belonged to the US and that he would get these “assets” back. Like his other allegation, this one is fact-free.
Venezuela began nationalising its oil industry in 1976. Hugo Chávez, who served as president from 1999 till his death in 2013, expanded that policy. He mandated in 2007 that PDVSA, the state oil company, take a majority stake in projects in the oil-rich Orinoco region, including those of the US petroleum behemoths ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, both of whom wound up their operations rather than comply, unlike Chevron, BP, Norway’s Statoil and France’s Total. But there are no grounds for claiming that either the US government or any US petroleum company literally owned Venezuela’s oil or land and was robbed.
The possible consequences of Trump’s intervention are worrisome for at least two reasons.
First, we can’t know what will follow Maduro’s abduction. Venezuela’s state institutions, including the security services, remain intact and an interim president is in place – Delcy Rodríguez, who has been vice-president since 2018. But if street protests segue into clashes between the people and the state, things could quickly spiral out of control, just as they could if Trump’s interventionist agenda expands and encounters resistance.
Venezuela’s main opposition leader, María Corina Machado, who was awarded the 2025 Nobel peace prize, welcomed US pressure to topple Maduro well before he was captured. Now she has hailed Venezuela’s “hour of freedom”. That could provide Trump cover to go further, though, as for Machado herself, he says she “doesn’t have the support within or the respect” to govern. Already, he has announced that the US will “run” Venezuela temporarily, suggesting that he plans to do more than simply put Maduro in the dock. The same can be said for his arrogating the right to open up Venezuela’s oil sector to investments from US corporations.
Second, Iran’s government is facing a nationwide uprising, and Trump warned that “we are locked and loaded and ready to go” if the regime starts killing protesters. Some have already been killed. It’s hardly a given that Trump’s Venezuelan gambit will tempt him to try regime change in Iran. But if he does wade into Iran’s upheaval, the consequences – for Iran, the US and Iran’s neighbours – will be much more dangerous than anything that might happen in Venezuela. And Trump is nothing if not unpredictable.
