London Review of Books
Vol. 48 No. 1 · 22 January 2026
On Venezuela
Tony Wood
3049 words
‘I watched it literally like I was watching a television show,’ Donald Trump said of the US military assault on Venezuela in the early hours of 3 January. After months of covert operations and surveillance, US forces bombed several sites around Caracas to cripple Venezuelan air defences and then kidnapped the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. ‘If you would’ve seen the speed, the violence,’ Trump added, spellbound by the exercise of imperial power. But the intended audience for this show of force was the whole Western hemisphere, and while much remains uncertain about Venezuela’s future, it’s already clear what Trump’s current foreign policy doctrine means for the rest of the world. As Trump himself put it, ‘I watched last night one of the most precise attacks on sovereignty.’ He then corrected himself: ‘I mean, it was an attack for justice.’
That Operation Absolute Resolve involved flagrant breaches of international law scarcely needs repeating. The US committed multiple acts of war against a state that posed no immediate threat to it, without even the flimsiest attempt to establish a casus belli or secure UN authorisation. This trampling of international norms by the world’s most powerful state is not exactly surprising, given the multiple undeclared wars waged by several successive administrations and the US sponsorship of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. Yet the attack on Venezuela does seem to signal something new in its blend of brazen illegality and gleeful coercion.
The aggression against Venezuela is also emblematic of the Trump era in being both shockingly unpredictable and crudely foreshadowed, as well as being conducted under a pretext that makes little sense. Since September 2025, the US has launched several attacks on boats, mostly in international waters, resulting in the deaths of at least 115 people. Both these summary executions and the kidnapping of Maduro were ostensibly carried out to combat drug trafficking, yet the evidentiary basis for this is farcically thin. No trace of drug shipments has been recovered from the wreckage of the boats, and anyway only a fraction of the drugs moving into the US enter via the Caribbean, where the majority of the strikes took place. The original indictment issued against Maduro by a grand jury in New York in 2020 repeatedly described the accused as the head of something called the Cártel de los Soles, which, according to most experts in organised crime, doesn’t exist. A new indictment, unsealed on 3 January, quietly dropped that claim, instead describing Maduro and others in the Venezuelan leadership as narco-traffickers in league with Mexican cartels, Colombian guerrillas and Venezuelan organised crime.
One could legitimately accuse the Maduro government of many things, from rigging elections in 2018 and 2024 to the mass incarceration of protesters and suppression of dissent – to say nothing of its slow corrosion of chavismo’s legacy and support base. But even its detractors must admit that running a fictional cartel is a strange reason for its forcible removal. Then, of course, there’s the fact that many of Washington’s closest partners in the region have actually been involved in the drug trade, from the Contras to Álvaro Uribe in Colombia. In November, Trump pardoned the former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, convicted of drug trafficking in a US court the previous year.
Even before 3 January, Trump couldn’t be bothered to maintain the pretence that the escalation of pressure on Venezuela had anything to do with drugs. The US began a huge military build-up in the Caribbean in the late summer, sending materiel and troops in far greater numbers than would have been needed just to combat drug trafficking. On 10 December, US forces seized an oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast, and a week later Trump announced a blockade of tankers subject to US sanctions, announcing on Truth Social on 16 December that Venezuela must ‘return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us’. Within hours of Maduro’s kidnapping, Trump was again putting a lot of emphasis on oil: ‘We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in,’ he said. ‘We’re gonna be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.’ Four days later, the administration announced it would be taking control of Venezuela’s oil sales ‘indefinitely’.
Is it all about the oil, though? Trump seems to think so, but in December, when reports emerged that the administration was discussing plans for a post-Maduro Venezuela with US oil companies, many of them were apparently unenthusiastic. At current prices, there would be little incentive to make expensive investments in repairing Venezuela’s crumbling infrastructure, especially since the country’s crude oil is ‘heavy’ and ‘sour’ – difficult and costly to extract and refine. This may explain why Trump has floated the idea of using US tax revenues to compensate oil companies for their trouble. But it also strongly implies that the oil companies weren’t pushing for this policy. The larger point to bear in mind is that, while there has rarely been an exact correspondence between the interests of US capitalist firms and the actions of the US government, that connection has become increasingly arbitrary under Trump. It’s entirely possible that the plan for opening up Venezuela to US oil companies is being improvised after the fact; what came first was the decision to oust Maduro.
This plan seems to have taken shape several months ago, but regime change in Venezuela has been the US’s stated policy for more than a decade, and its implicit goal for even longer. US government agencies have funded and trained the more extreme wing of the Venezuelan opposition ever since Hugo Chávez was first elected in 1998. In 2002, the George W. Bush administration backed a failed coup attempt against Chávez, and supported the opposition’s bid to force his removal first through a general strike in 2002-3 and then through a recall referendum in 2004. In 2015, two years after Chávez’s death and the election of Maduro as his successor, Obama declared Venezuela a ‘national security threat’ to the US and placed sanctions on key officials. Starting in 2017, the first Trump administration ratcheted up the pressure with a broader and more punitive array of measures, including sanctions on the state oil company, PDVSA, and on the central bank and the national development bank, as well as executive orders blocking Venezuela from accessing US financial markets or selling its debt.
While declining oil prices, corruption and economic mismanagement by the Maduro government were already taking a toll on Venezuela’s economy, there is no doubt that the sanctions made an already dire economic situation far worse. Even the most conservative estimates show GDP dropping by more than two-thirds between 2014 and 2021. Hyperinflation and shortages took their toll on living standards, fuelling a surge in migration over the last decade. In both absolute and relative terms, this is one of the largest peacetime population movements on record: according to the UNHCR, 7.9 million are now estimated to have left, out of a total population of around 30 million. There were around 760,000 Venezuelan migrants in the US by mid-2024, but the vast majority have moved to neighbouring countries; there are nearly three million in Colombia alone.
In 2019, Trump made a botched attempt at regime change, recognising Juan Guaidó, head of the National Assembly, as Venezuela’s president. US policymakers apparently expected the Venezuelan military to rally to Guaidó amid a popular revolt, but the regime held firm and anti-Maduro protests quickly subsided. A year later, a combination of Venezuelan oppositionists and US mercenaries bungled another attempt at regime change (the operation has become known as the ‘Bay of Piglets’). These failures must have stung, giving the second Trump administration additional motivation to finish the job. Admittedly, hostility to Maduro has been a bipartisan affair: in 2020, Trump offered a bounty of $15 million for information leading to his arrest; in January 2025, the outgoing Biden administration increased it to $25 million, only for Trump to double it again in August. (On 3 January the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, smugly pointed out that, by kidnapping Maduro, the US had saved itself $50 million.) Biden also kept all of Trump’s sanctions in place, and even criticised him for ‘talking tough’ on Venezuela while admiring ‘thugs and dictators like Nicolás Maduro’.
The direction of US policy has been consistent, but it has not always been given the same priority. Venezuela looms much larger for Trump than for his predecessors, because it represents a convergence of different policy strands, promoted by rival factions within the administration and appealing to distinct components of the MAGA coalition. Elliott Abrams, the neocon regime-change enthusiast who handled Venezuela policy under the first Trump administration, recently told the Wall Street Journal that Venezuela is ‘a perfect storm, it’s everything the Trump administration is concerned about.’ Under Trump’s second administration the issue of Venezuela has brought together those pushing for a militarised anti-drug strategy, those committed to regime change in the Caribbean basin and those in favour of demonising foreign governments mainly for domestic reasons, to fuel anti-migrant sentiment. If the secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, and the White House policy supremo, Stephen Miller, represent the first and third groups, Rubio and Senator Lindsey Graham are the foremost proponents of regime change – and for them, the ultimate target is Cuba.
The assault on Venezuela is a characteristic Trump move not only in its wanton aggression, but in its use of violent spectacle to reconcile competing short-term policy objectives. There’s the use of force to please the military hawks, something that looks like regime change for Rubio, and for the anti-immigrant agenda there’s the prospect of scaling up deportations of Venezuelans from the US now that their home country has been rendered ‘safe’ (they’ve already been stripped of Temporary Protected Status). And then there’s a possible bonanza for US hedge funds, which are looking for ways to cash in on Venezuela’s unpaid debts.
Yet the performative aspects of Trump’s Venezuelan venture – Adam Tooze has called it ‘feckless reality TV cosplay resource imperialism’ – shouldn’t distract from its substantive reshaping of US strategy. The administration’s new National Security Strategy, released in November, was abundantly clear: ‘After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,’ adding that ‘we will deny non-hemispheric competitors [i.e. China] the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our hemisphere.’
We have already seen plenty of examples of what this means in practice. Trump began his second term by threatening to retake the Panama Canal and putting pressure on the Chinese conglomerate that owns ports at either end to sell them to US companies. In October, Trump’s Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, propped up Javier Milei’s government in Argentina with a $20 billion currency swap line before the country’s mid-term elections, with Trump openly saying that the wrong result would mean the withdrawal of US backing. In Honduras, Trump made clear that US aid was conditional on his preferred candidate winning the November election (after a contested vote and recount, Nasry Asfura duly won by 26,000 votes). US officials have repeatedly talked about launching drone strikes against cartels in Mexico, and may yet do so. The common denominator here is the naked deployment of threats in pursuit of US goals, ungarnished by rhetorical appeals to principles or common hemispheric interests.
In that respect, Trump’s approach to Latin America fits an all too familiar pattern. The past week has seen many commentators draw parallels between the kidnapping of Maduro and the 1989 capture of the Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, similarly accused of drug trafficking and whisked to the US for trial (there are key differences: Noriega had been a CIA asset for decades, and Panama is a far smaller country than Venezuela). But Panama is the least of it: there have been dozens of examples of US intervention in Latin America in the last century or so, from the repeated landings by Marines in Honduras in the early 1900s to the toppling of Maurice Bishop in Grenada in 1983.
During the Cold War, US-sponsored regime change was most often carried out at arm’s length and in the name of anti-communism, as with the removal of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954 and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. The kidnapping of Maduro seems to follow an older model, closer to the gunboat diplomacy which saw US troops occupy Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic between 1900 and 1934. (Though the US has intervened serially across the Americas, the Caribbean has always been particularly vulnerable to imperial violence.) The ideological basis for all this was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, laid out in Theodore Roosevelt’s State of the Union address in December 1904. ‘If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States,’ he said. But ‘chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilised society, may ... ultimately require intervention by some civilised nation.’ In the Western hemisphere, this meant that the US might be forced, ‘however reluctantly ... to the exercise of an international police power’.
On 3 January, Trump boasted of having ‘superseded’ the Monroe Doctrine: ‘They now call it the Donroe Doctrine.’ In reality, he has merely remodelled the Roosevelt Corollary for the age of drone warfare and social media. The choice of narco-trafficking as the pretext is partly motivated by a desire to skirt even the feeble murmurs that pass for congressional scrutiny these days; Rubio has stuck especially closely to the line that this is not a war. But the larger implication of calling such interventions ‘policing’ is that it enables the administration to depict everything from drone strikes to full-blown invasions as matters of law enforcement rather than warfare. The whole hemisphere becomes a space where the US can deploy military force at will, with no legitimating arguments beyond the pathological fiction of its self-proclaimed superiority.
What does all this mean for Venezuela? For now, the post-Maduro regime looks a lot like Maduro’s: his vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, was immediately sworn in as acting president. There are widespread rumours, fanned by the White House itself, that she made a deal with Trump, offering up Maduro and access to oil in exchange for the survival of the regime. Rodríguez was also oil minister, and over the past year led negotiations with Trump’s envoy Richard Grenell, so on one level this is plausible. But it’s also possible no such deal was agreed, and that kidnapping Maduro and bombing the country was the administration’s way of imposing its terms. Either way, the January attacks have decapitated the regime while leaving the rest of it intact for now.
That situation may change quickly, but there would be a certain logic to Trump’s leaving a rump Maduro regime in place: the current government can guarantee stability while giving Trump what he wants, whereas full-blown regime change would be much less predictable, and would probably require an actual invasion and occupation. An operation of that scale would be long and bloody, and at the moment it seems unlikely that Trump will put boots on the ground. For now, the US can inflict massive damage on Venezuela from a distance should the new government fail to comply. As Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, put it on 7 January, ‘Their decisions are going to continue to be dictated by the United States of America.’
It’s possible that at some point the Trump administration will push what’s left of the Maduro regime to concede new elections. But it’s notable that Trump didn’t mention the word ‘democracy’ once during his press conference on 3 January, which suggests it’s not high on the list of priorities. The Trump administration’s recognition of Rodríguez as acting president also runs counter to one of the basic premises of US policy, which is that Maduro’s government was not legitimate because the opposition candidate, Edmundo González, won the 2024 elections. Not only has the administration not called for González to be installed as president; it has sidelined the opposition leader María Corina Machado, for whom González ran as a surrogate. Machado repeatedly called for US military intervention to topple Maduro and grovelled to Trump to secure this outcome, dedicating her Nobel Peace Prize to him. Yet he made a point of dismissing her as ‘a very nice woman’ who ‘doesn’t have the support within, or the respect within the country’ to be its leader. This was a body blow for the Venezuelan opposition, as well as in its own way a damning assessment of two decades of US policy.
Any predictions about what happens next are going to be tenuous. But the most likely scenario in the short run is a retrenchment of the existing regime under continuing US pressure, whether a tightening of the blockade or further armed incursions. The situation of most of the Venezuelan population is unlikely to improve any time soon, especially if the US is taking the oil revenues that fund its threadbare social safety net. There have been sizeable protests in Caracas and elsewhere against US actions and in defence of the country’s sovereignty; further attacks may bolster the regime rather than undermine it. Outside Venezuela, many of the millions who have left the country were gladdened by Maduro’s downfall. But it’s not clear that his overthrow will benefit them either. If anything, it may make their predicament worse: if the US now insists on deporting large numbers of Venezuelans, its allies in the region – especially those who have stoked anti-migrant sentiment such as Milei and Kast – may follow suit. Far from signalling the end of Venezuela’s prolonged crisis, Maduro’s removal may only inaugurate a new stage.
9 January
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