The United States removed Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela; President Donald Trump declares that the United States will “run” the country. Shocking as it may be, none of this calamity is new: there are four precedents that can help us see elements of the present that might otherwise be lost sight of in propaganda or sentimentality.
To begin with, there is a long history of US interventions in Latin America, based on an implicit (if not self-proclaimed) right to elect the region’s leaders. During the Cold War, the installation of US-approved leaders or governments was often disguised as a pro-democracy crusade, with the argument that America’s primary motive was to curb communism (which was undemocratic).
This time there is no pretense that democracy is the goal. Maduro and his allies. But, instead of punishing him for that very real crime, the Trump administration prefers the (essentially fictitious) charge of “narcoterrorism.” And although Venezuela has a legitimately elected president (Edmundo González), .
It is enough to remember that after Maduro’s capture, Trump dismissed the brave opposition leader and winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, María Corina Machado, whom he described as a “nice woman” but lacking support and respect in Venezuela. So it’s worth returning to the fact that last month she got Machado out of Venezuela, where she had been living in hiding since the 2024 election. At the time, many thought the Trump administration was helping her attend the Nobel Prize ceremony in Oslo. Now it seems more like an attempt to neutralize a popular policy and pave the way for the imposition of a form of US imperialism against Venezuelans.
But this particular imperialist project is even worse planned than most. It seems that Trump is offering Venezuelan oil to American companies in the sector (just as in other times the United States elected Latin American leaders who supported its commercial interests). But Venezuelan oil is not immediately profitable; To realize its potential would require enormous long-term investments, something that in turn depends on political stability.
Another obvious precedent is the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was a turning point for American power. The idea was that defeating an army, overthrowing a bad ruler, and dismantling corrupt institutions would create the conditions for a better, more democratic government; That is why the government of President George Bush (Jr.) barely made any plans for the country’s political future, and the American occupiers ended up having to cooperate with the very people they claimed to have overthrown. By the time the U.S. occupation of Iraq ended, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and some 4,500 Americans had died, and America’s credibility was destroyed.
In the case of Venezuela, there is a similar belief that simply overthrowing a dictator will be enough to achieve the desired result. But the Venezuelan military is not defeated, and the Maduro government remains in power. If the Trump administration has any plan, it boils down to Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez being able to run the country on behalf of the United States (although American violence does not give her more legitimacy). For his part, Rodríguez denounced Maduro’s kidnapping as illegal and maintained that it had “Zionist connotations.”
The third precedent is more recent: the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was shocking to hear Trump describe Maduro’s kidnapping as an “extraordinary military operation,” because Russian President Vladimir Putin in his speech announced the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Putin appropriated international law and ridiculed it, arguing that the United Nations Charter justified Russian aggression. Moscow has done everything possible to create a world in which any country can flout the United Nations Charter; So the fact that the Trump administration has not attempted to justify its actions in Venezuela under international law is a victory for the Kremlin (even if it does not like this particular case).
It should be noted that the US intervention (while still being a clear act of war) appears to be a long-term CIA plan executed with the support of the army. Trump’s description of this intelligence operation as “an assault the likes of which have not been seen since World War II” is absurd. Furthermore, it takes us to the last precedent: the wars used by fascist regimes to legitimize themselves before their defeat in 1945.
In Germany, Italy, and Romania, fascists justified their dictatorships by arguing that their opponents acted in the service of foreign enemies and international conspiracies. Furthermore, these regimes waged wars to put the internal enemy on an equal footing with the external enemy: with a population at war, it was much easier to oppress dissidents.
By accusing Maduro of drug-related crimes, instead of more serious and much easier to prove ones (such as extrajudicial executions and torture), the Trump administration also brings together the external and internal enemy. Because drug trafficking involves actors inside and outside the country, Trump can invent that those who oppose him are pawns in an international conspiracy. A Trumpian “war on drugs” could be used to create a broader domestic security apparatus, just as the exploitation of fear of migrants was used to implement a large-scale expansion of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).
Trump wants the political benefits of a war without having to fight a real war. In his story, the US military did magic in Venezuela, period.
But while Putin understands that fascism requires real combat, Trump apparently is unwilling or unable to go that far (especially since within the United States, his position is precarious). Americans can act to prevent Trump’s “extraordinary military operation” (which aims more at regime change in the United States than in Venezuela) from accelerating their country’s slide into authoritarianism, as long as they recognize the domestic political logic behind Trump’s intervention abroad.
