I’ve been sitting with the Venezuela situation, trying to figure out what I actually think. It’s one of those cases where I find myself agreeing with people I usually disagree with and disagreeing with people who are typically on my side, which is generally a sign that something genuinely complicated is going on.
So here’s where I’ve landed, for whatever it’s worth.
The Part Where the Intervention Seems Defensible
Maduro’s government was genuinely awful. I don’t think you have to be a Trump supporter to acknowledge this. The UN documented crimes against humanity. The Fact-Finding Mission established by the Human Rights Council found evidence of persecution on political grounds, arbitrary detentions, torture, and sexual violence going back more than a decade. The Bolivarian National Guard was implicated in systematic killings, and the report noted a pattern of structural impunity sustained by a judicial system either unable or unwilling to hold perpetrators accountable. As of late September 2025, Foro Penal counted 827 political prisoners. Nearly eight million people fled the country, generating the largest displacement crisis in Latin American history. Colombia alone absorbed 2.8 million refugees. The 2024 election was stolen in broad daylight, with the regime claiming victory despite voting tallies from more than 80% of polling stations showing opposition candidate Edmundo González won by a two-to-one margin.
María Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize for her nonviolent resistance to this regime. She welcomed the intervention. When someone who spent years risking her life organizing peaceful opposition says “the hour of freedom has arrived,” I think that deserves serious weight. It’s easy for those of us watching from a comfortable distance to lecture about sovereignty and international norms. She was actually there. She had been living in hiding for fifteen months before escaping to Norway in December to accept her Nobel. On Saturday morning, she issued a letter calling for Edmundo González to assume his constitutional mandate as president immediately.
And there’s a tricky question that critics have to answer: what was the alternative? Maduro showed no signs of voluntarily stepping down. Every peaceful avenue had been tried and crushed. The Venezuelan judiciary validated his fraudulent election victory. The government rejected any form of inquiry into the results. Human rights defenders were charged and prosecuted. The staff of the UN human rights office was expelled from the country after reporting on the disappearance of activist Rocío San Miguel. The International Criminal Court had authorized resumption of its investigation into crimes against humanity, but the Venezuelan government stonewalled. Waiting for internal change meant accepting indefinite suffering for millions of people. That’s a real cost, even if it doesn’t show up in legal briefs about intervention.
The Part That Keeps Bothering Me
Here’s my problem. Maduro deserved to be removed, but I was deeply uncomfortable with how it happened and who did it.
The legal issues are real. You can’t just dismiss them as anti-Trump bias. International law generally prohibits one country from forcibly removing another country’s government, even a terrible one. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter requires sovereign states to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state, with exceptions only for self-defense or Security Council authorization. Venezuela neither launched armed attacks against the U.S. nor possessed the kind of imminent threat that might justify preemptive action under established legal doctrine. The Trump administration invoked anti-drug operations and the 2020 indictments charging Maduro with narco-terrorism, but legal scholars I’ve read remain skeptical that these provide sufficient grounds for military strikes and the capture of a sitting head of state.
The reasons for that prohibition are compelling when you think about it: who gets to decide which leaders are bad enough to justify invasion? By what standard? The argument that Maduro was exceptionally awful proves too much, because there’s no shortage of brutal governments in the world. If American military power becomes the final arbiter of regime legitimacy, exercised whenever a president decides it’s warranted, that’s a principle with implications far beyond Venezuela.
And then there’s Trump himself. His comments about “running Venezuela” and his earlier annexation musings about Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal are not subtle. At his Mar-a-Lago press conference on Saturday, he said the U.S. would “run the country” until a “safe, proper and judicious transition” could occur. He declined to commit to any timeline for elections or withdrawal. He dismissed María Corina Machado, saying she “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country” despite her Nobel Prize and the millions who voted for her candidate. He appeared comfortable with Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, potentially taking over, even as Venezuela’s Supreme Court directed her to assume presidential duties. These statements suggest Trump understands this intervention in terms that have very little to do with Venezuelan self-determination and a lot to do with American dominance. You can celebrate Maduro’s fall while being alarmed about what the person who orchestrated that fall intends to do next. These aren’t contradictory positions.
Which brings me to the thing I keep coming back to: we don’t actually know yet whether this was a liberation or the beginning of something else. It’s January 4th. The capture happened less than 24 hours ago. Will there be free elections? Under Venezuelan law, if the constitutional path is followed, elections should be held within 30 days. Will the U.S. respect the outcome even if Venezuelans choose leaders Washington doesn’t like? Will American forces leave? Trump said he’s “not afraid of boots on the ground” and mentioned the U.S. would have “a presence in oil.” The answers to those questions will determine whether this looks like a humanitarian intervention or imperial overreach with good PR. Celebrating this as a triumph for freedom before we know the ending feels premature.
The Precedent Problem
This is the part that nags at me most, and I don’t see it discussed enough.
For decades, the United States has anchored its moral authority in international affairs on the claim that it supports a rules-based order. When Russia invaded Ukraine, American condemnation rested on the principle that nations cannot simply seize territory or topple governments by force because they find it convenient. When China threatens Taiwan, American warnings invoke the importance of respecting sovereignty and allowing people to determine their own futures.
These principles have always been applied selectively. American foreign policy history is full of coups, interventions, and regime changes that violated the norms Washington simultaneously preached to others. From the CIA-backed coup in Guatemala in 1954 to the 1989 invasion of Panama that captured Manuel Noriega, the U.S. conducted thirteen intervention operations in Latin America during the Cold War alone. Critics have pointed to this hypocrisy for generations. But there’s a difference between selective application and open abandonment.
What concerns me about Venezuela is what it signals to other great powers. The message is hard to misread: when a sufficiently powerful nation decides that another country’s government is illegitimate or poses a threat to its interests, military force is an acceptable means of resolving the problem. The justifications can vary. Humanitarian concerns. Drug trafficking. Security threats. Protection of co-ethnics abroad. Historical claims. The formula is flexible.
If you’re sitting in Beijing, watching the United States remove a government it dislikes in the Western Hemisphere, what lessons do you draw about Taiwan? The U.S. will say the situations are entirely different: Maduro was a dictator, Taiwan is a democracy. But China has its own narrative about Taiwan, one in which reunification is a historical inevitability and American interference is the obstacle to a legitimate resolution. The point is that great powers always have narratives. They always have reasons. The question is whether we want a world where those narratives and reasons, backed by sufficient military force, are all that matters.
Russia already operates this way. The invasion of Ukraine was dressed up in claims about NATO expansion, protecting Russian speakers, and denazification. The international community rightly rejected these justifications as pretexts for imperial aggression. But the rejection carried weight precisely because it appealed to norms that were supposed to be universal. When the United States acts on the principle that it can remove foreign governments it finds objectionable, it becomes harder to articulate why Russia cannot do the same.
I’m not saying these situations are morally equivalent. Maduro was a genuine human rights abuser in ways that the Ukrainian government was not. Taiwan is a functioning democracy, and China has no legitimate claim to govern it. Context matters. Specifics matter.
But international norms gain their power from consistent application. Every exception a great power carves out for itself becomes a template for other great powers to carve out their own exceptions. The rules-based order, already fragile, becomes a polite fiction that everyone invokes when convenient and ignores when inconvenient.
Maybe that’s where we already are. Maybe the rules-based order was always more fiction than reality, and the Venezuela intervention is unusually honest about how power actually works. I don’t know. But I find myself mourning the principle even as I struggle to condemn its specific application in this case.
The Domestic Constitutional Question
There’s another dimension to this that deserves attention: the question of American constitutional law and the separation of powers.
Trump acknowledged at his press conference that he did not notify Congress until after the strike was underway, saying, “Congress tends to leak. It would not be good if they leaked.” Democratic lawmakers immediately demanded an immediate briefing and criticized the administration for not seeking congressional authorization. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said, “Far too many questions remain unanswered.” Even Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah initially questioned whether the U.S. action was constitutional.
The Constitution grants Congress the power to declare war. Over decades, presidents have stretched that constraint through creative interpretations, emergency powers, and the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force that was passed initially for Afghanistan but has been invoked to justify operations across the globe. But Venezuela is a new situation. There’s no plausible argument that Maduro was connected to the September 11 attacks. There’s no treaty obligation at stake. The drug trafficking charges, while serious, don’t obviously rise to the level of imminent threat that would justify unilateral executive action.
The question of whether this operation was constitutional was a matter beyond Venezuela. If presidents can launch military strikes, capture foreign heads of state, and occupy countries without congressional approval whenever they invoke drug trafficking or humanitarian concerns, then the war powers clause of the Constitution has been effectively nullified. The legislature becomes an afterthought in decisions of war and peace. This should concern Americans across the political spectrum, regardless of how they feel about Maduro.
On Partisan Epistemology
One correct observation: many of the people criticizing this intervention would have praised the same action if Obama or Biden had done it. I suspect that’s true.
But here’s the thing. That hypocrisy, if it exists, doesn’t tell us whether the intervention was proper. “Your opponents are inconsistent” is a valuable point for scoring political wins and a useless point for figuring out what’s actually true. The same applies in reverse, obviously. Plenty of people cheering this on would have called it unconstitutional overreach under a Democratic president.
Would I feel the same way about this if the partisan valence were reversed? I think I would still have the same mix of “Maduro was a monster and his removal is defensible on humanitarian grounds” and “the legal precedent is troubling, and the stated intentions of the administration are alarming.” But I’m aware that I might be fooling myself. We’re all susceptible to motivated reasoning.
The Regional Response
The reaction from Latin America has been telling. Colombian President Gustavo Petro confirmed multiple strikes in Caracas and condemned the attack as an aggression against Venezuela and Latin America. Brazil’s President Lula da Silva said the strikes “crossed an unacceptable line” and set a “dangerous precedent.” Mexico’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum, invoked Article 2 of the UN Charter. Chile issued a strong condemnation. Cuba’s President called it “state terrorism.”
These are not Maduro allies speaking. Brazil refused to recognize Maduro’s disputed 2024 election victory. Colombia and Mexico have democratic governments with their own concerns about Venezuelan authoritarianism. Yet they’re united in condemning the method used to address it. That should give Americans pause. When the entire region, including governments that have no love for Maduro, views American action as a violation of sovereignty and international law, we should at least consider the possibility that they’re seeing something we’re missing.
The U.N. Security Council is set to meet on Monday on an emergency request from Colombia. The international community is treating this as a serious breach. Whether anything comes of that remains to be seen, given the United States’ veto power. But the diplomatic isolation is real, and it carries costs that will outlast this particular operation.
Where I End Up (for now)
Genuinely uncertain. And that’s okay.
The Maduro regime was a horror. Its end will likely improve the lives of millions of people. The nearly eight million Venezuelans scattered across Latin America and the Caribbean may finally have reason to hope they can return home. The political prisoners may be freed. The torture may stop. That matters enormously.
The method was legally questionable, procedurally concerning, domestically unconstitutional by reasonable interpretation, and carried out by an administration whose vision for Venezuela’s future ranges from vague to actively disturbing.
Both things are true. I don’t have to pick one. The satisfaction of seeing a dictator fall doesn’t require pretending the operation raised no serious concerns. The concerns don’t require minimizing the dictator’s crimes or the real suffering his government caused.
The following year or two will clarify a lot. If Venezuela gets genuine self-determination, free elections, and American withdrawal, this will look better in hindsight. If we see prolonged occupation, manipulated elections, or resource extraction that benefits American interests while Venezuelans stay poor, the humanitarian framing will look like it was always a pretense.
For now, I’m holding both the hope and the worry. The Venezuelan people deserve freedom. They deserve to choose their own leaders and build their own future. They’ve suffered enormously, and their suffering deserves to end. Whether this intervention actually delivers that, or replaces one form of external control with another, is a question we can’t answer yet.
I’ll be watching. We all should be.
