Maduro was in Alliance with Our Enemies. He needed to go.
I think all of us, at least those of us who went to school before the radical left took over the educational system, have heard of the Monroe Doctrine. Named after our 5th President, James Monroe (a Virginian) this doctrine asserts that the United States will accept no foreign power, in control of a country, in our hemisphere. Monroe first suggested this in 1823, and over time it became US policy. Reagan enforced it in Grenada in 1983, but Kennedy blinked in 1961 over the Bay of Pigs.
I don’t think most Americans realize just how audacious the Monroe Doctrine was back in the time of James Monroe. We were not a world power (not even close), yet we told the powers of the world, including England, France and Spain, to stay out of our part of the world. For much of our history we didn’t have the power to enforce the doctrine. We do now. This power was demonstrated Friday night, and Saturday morning, when the US military went into Venezuela and arrested the country’s dictator Nicolas Maduro, who has been indicted in New York on drug trafficking charges.
Now, the obvious question: how did Nicolas Maduro run afoul of the Monroe Doctrine? Well, I can tell you this, it wasn’t the fact that he was a drug runner, or the fact that he was a dictator, who stole an election. It wasn’t because of the fact that he released prisoners and mental patients and sent them into the United States, it wasn’t the fact that he drove a great country into the ground and robbed and plundered the nation’s wealth. Rather, it was the fact that as the leader of Venezuela he became an ally of foreign powers, Russia, China and Iran. He was working with them and against our interests. This reality goes against the Monroe Doctrine.
Call it realpolitik. It was in our interest to get rid of him. And it was made easier by the fact that he was illegitimate. He stole the election which kept him in power in 2024, which no one doubts. And, on top of that he had been indicted in the U.S. for drug trafficking. So, Trump sent in the military to get him. I would point out that it was the Biden administration that put a bounty on Maduro’s head. That didn’t work. Trump decided to take direct action.
The hope is that a new leader in Venezuela will help us on a number of fronts, and work against the interests of our enemies.
First is immigration. There are hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who came to America to escape Maduro. Now, with Maduro gone, many of them may go back home. This is something that the Trump administration would like very much.
Second is oil. Now, we don’t need Venezuela’s oil, but a new competent government in Caracas should be able to produce more oil, which will help bring down the global price. However, bringing down the price of oil is about more than economics. There is a foreign policy element involved.
We want to economically squeeze Russia and Iran. They export oil, it is their main source of revenue. Other than vodka and carpets, those countries depend almost entirely on oil money. The Trump administration would like to get the price down to hurt them, and in the case of Russia, more Venezuelan oil on the market could help countries boycott Russian oil. Russia’s aggression in the Ukraine must be stopped, and if we can squeeze them economically, they may have to make peace with Ukraine. And in the case of Iran their economy is in trouble. A cut in oil prices could be enough to sink them.
The third reason to get rid of Maduro deals with the drug issue. Maduro was a drug runner, and we needed to stop it. And we need a new government in Venezuela to help us stop the drug trade.
There are other possible positive ramifications which can come out of Maduro’s overthrow. For example, Cuba’s socialist government has been propped up by Maduro. Now without that continued support, Cuba’s government might fall.
Just think, getting rid of Maduro could cause the downfall of the Cuban and the Iranian governments, and force Putin to make peace in Ukraine. If those things happen, there will be like 20 reasons Trump should get a Nobel Peace Prize.
As far as the legality of Trump’s action to remove Maduro there is a precedent. In 1989 the Bush administration went into Panama and arrested its leader Manuel Noriega, who like Maduro had been indicted on drug charges.
Democrats might want to impeach Trump on the charge of “kidnapping a foreign leader without congressional approval”, but Trump can respond with the fact that Bush did the same thing in Panama, and Democrats, who controlled Congress at the time, didn’t impeach him.
As far as concerns on the right about, “forever wars”, or Trump getting us into another Iraq, I would point out that Venezuela is not Iraq. Venezuela is a western democracy. They simply need to make sure the next election is fair and unrigged. We can help them do that.
Now, while I am generally supportive of Trump and his actions so far in Venezuela, I do have concerns going forward. First, I am not usually in favor of arresting foreign leaders, no matter how bad. However, it could be argued that Maduro was not legitimately in power.
Also, I do worry that Trump will try to pick the new leader of the country like it’s an episode of the Apprentice. And I do worry also that he will try to run and manage the country like it’s the Kennedy Center. Or like he is Douglas MacArthur running post war Japan. Trump, like MacArthur, might want to rewrite the country’s constitution.
In my opinion, we only need to set up the next election and get some promises from Venezuela on immigration and oil production but otherwise get out and get untangled. Our job was to get rid of Maduro. We did that. Great, now let’s leave it to Venezuela to pick their next leader in a free and fair vote.
When it comes to our hemisphere Trump is like a combination of James Monroe and his fellow New Yorker Teddy Roosevelt. For those of you who might have forgotten, Roosevelt, like Trump, believed in a muscular foreign policy. He adopted the concept of “gunboat diplomacy” and he also said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”
Although unlike Roosevelt Trump doesn’t speak softly.
David is the author of two books: Elections Have Consequences, A Cautionary Tale.
Norton’s Choice: An Inside Politics Exposé: Shephard, David: 9781892538802: Amazon.com: Books
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Donald Trump is outsmarting the world.
About those Venezuelans dancing in the streets after Maduro was snatched . . . not so fast.
This video, shared by Alex Jones and others, falsely claims to show millions of Venezuelans in Caracas celebrating Maduro’s capture.
In fact, according to Venezuelan TV, the video shows anti-Maduro protests in July 2024 over a highly disputed election.
Trump is delusional, demented, and deranged. Here he is today on CNN.
QUOTE
Nancy Pelosi was responsible for January 6th, because she didn’t do anything to protect the Capitol. Some men’s wives would be happy they died. Could you imagine Joe Biden coming and doing this?
Millions of people are pouring into the country. Men come up to me and say, “Sir…” I’m being nice because we wanted to have national security. And the Supreme Court. 152 aircraft. We had a lot of boots on the ground. A lot of people on the other side were killed. Biden was a horrible president. Can you believe we had to run against these people? I won’t say cancel the elections because the press will say he said cancel the elections.
END QUOTE
…that’s a synopsis of the three minutes I watched before CNN cut him off. Wolf Blitzer just said “we’ll get back to him when he talks about substantive issues,” so I doubt they will be going back to him any time soon.
Wait a minute – was Venezuela a trade for Ukraine?
As it turns out, Fiona Hill, Trump’s former top Russia adviser, testified under oath to the House Intelligence Committee back in 2019 – the last time Trump was in office – that Russia was “signaling very strongly” through informal channels – including Russian press and commentators – that they wanted to make “some very strange swap agreement between Venezuela and Ukraine.”
The signal: Russia would back off Venezuela if the U.S. backed off Ukraine.
Hill called it a “fictional bargain” being pushed by Russia to reshape spheres of influence. She raised alarms internally because it represented Russia trying to get the U.S. to accept a 19th-century style carve-up of global territory.
The proposal came through Russian media narratives and intermediary channels, not through formal diplomatic channels. Hill testified that the NSC viewed it as dangerous and did not engage with the framing.
Key concept from her testimony: Russia was attempting to signal that “if you want to carve up old spheres of influence, we can do a deal.”
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s getting sold out in real time. Trump’s pushing Zelensky to negotiate directly with Putin. Europe’s being told to handle their own defense. The 2025 National Security Strategy document barely mentions Russia as an adversary anymore.
The 2019 swap proposal gives context to everything that just happened. Russia offered Trump a deal. He turned it down then because he couldn’t get away with it politically. But now, in his second term with no reelection to worry about, with a compliant Congress and a Supreme Court that’s already ruled he has near-total immunity?
So, now they gave the plan the green light?
Russia gets Ukraine. Trump gets Venezuela’s oil. Everyone maintains their public positions for domestic consumption. Maduro probably gets a reduced sentence in exchange for cooperation. The Venezuelan regime stays intact with a new face at the top.
And the people who actually won the election get nothing.
And we learn, once again, that TRUTH does not matter in TrumpWorld.
Oil giants Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips and Chevron were not consulted about Venezuela before or after the capture of President Nicolás Maduro, industry executives told Reuters. Their accounts contradict President Donald Trump’s statement on Sunday that he spoke with all three companies “before and after” the operation about investing in the country.
Four sources told Reuters the firms had no prior knowledge of the U.S. plan and have held no talks with the administration since Maduro’s removal. However, a White House official told Newsweek Monday afternoon that the Trump administration has had conversations with multiple oil companies.
Almost everyone now sees Iraq as a cautionary tale about the lies of the powerful: We were taken to war on false pretenses. Almost everyone also thinks of Iraq as a prime example of the power of delusional thinking on the part of the powerful themselves. Slogans of the time — “We will be welcomed as liberators”; “Mission Accomplished” — are now routinely used ironically, to denote foolish projects doomed to catastrophic failure. And Donald Trump’s Venezuela adventure is another tale of lies and delusion.
But in other ways the Trump/Venezuela story is very different from the Bush/Iraq story.
Two days after the abduction, it’s clear that Trump wasn’t seeking regime change, at least not in any fundamental way. He’s more like a mob boss trying to expand his territory, believing that if he knocks off a rival boss he can bully the guy’s former capos into giving him a cut of their take.
If that sounds harsh, bear in mind that before Trump stepped in, Maduro and his fellow Chavistas — the movement founded by Hugo Chavez — faced strong opposition from domestic pro-democracy forces led by María Corina Machado. Edmundo González, a Machado ally, clearly won Venezuela’s 2024 election, only to have Maduro steal it. So, if Trump wanted regime change he would be supporting Machado and her movement.
But in his triumphal Saturday press conference, Trump sneeringly dismissed Machado, declaring that “it’d be very tough for her to be the leader, she doesn’t have the support. She doesn’t have the respect.”
Instead, he appeared eager to support Maduro’s second-in-command, Delcy Rodriguez, implying that she was ready to cooperate with his designs. Indeed, during the press conference and afterward Trump repeatedly declared that he was already “running” Venezuela.
Rejecting Machado at least in part because he thinks she stole his Nobel Peace Prize is evidently someone who isn’t serious about anything, but democracy is the last thing Trump is interested in, domestically or internationally.
It’s clear that Trump sees this much more as a war from oil, which in addition to not being a moral or legal justification for war makes no sense on its own terms:
Trump’s self-image as the ultimate dealmaker explains why he was so ready to believe, falsely, that he controlled Venezuela. It also explains his insistence that by, as he imagined, seizing Venezuela, he had gained a valuable prize in the form of its oil. “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.” Many Trump critics share his view that there’s a lot of money to be made from Venezuelan oil and condemn his intervention as an attempt to steal that money.
But you know who doesn’t think there’s a lot of money to be made in Venezuela? Oil companies. They see a dilapidated infrastructure that would cost billions to repair. They don’t see a stable political environment above ground. And while Venezuela has large oil reserves, much of its oil is “extra heavy, making it polluting and expensive to process.”
You can’t expect Trump to understand the unsubtle differences between the oil reserves in Venezuela and the oil reserves in Saudi Arabia, but he will find out the hard way.
He also probably thinks this will be good politics, and wrong again:
So, why did Trump have Maduro abducted? There were surely multiple motivations. Fantasies of dominance and control and dreams of oil-soaked riches played their part. So did ego. The snatch gave Trump an opportunity to strut, and assuage his Obama envy: Trump’s minions set up a “war room” at Mar-a-Lago that looks as if it was designed to let him emulate the famous photo of Obama and his officials tracking the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Obama’s team did not, however, have X/Twitter on the screen behind them.
Trump also surely hoped that abducting Maduro would help him politically. The abduction pushed the Epstein files out of the headlines for a few days. And Trump is definitely trying to wag the dog, seeking a boost in popularity as the nation rallies around the flag. However, he’s almost certain to be disappointed. Before the abduction, Americans overwhelmingly opposed military action in Venezuela. Early polling since the abduction remains highly unfavorable.