On the morning of January 3, U.S. forces struck Caracas, seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and flew them out of the country.
Once again, the United States has undertaken a military operation that was efficiently executed in pursuit of an uncertain political objective. A dramatic first step has been taken, while the second step remains conspicuously undefined. The operation was carried out at the request of the Department of Justice, which accused Maduro and his wife of drug trafficking into the United States. That is not the same thing as regime change in Venezuela — yet President Trump has spoken as if regime change has already occurred, before adding that there could be a “second wave” of intervention if it turns out the old regime is still functioning.
This confusion is not accidental. It reflects how Trump understands foreign policy.
Mercantilism with Troops
Trump sees Venezuela less as a sovereign state to be managed than as an asset to be exploited. The United States, he insists, will “run the country,” extract and sell Venezuelan oil, and convert geopolitical leverage into tangible return. This is mercantilism applied without embarrassment: state power blurred with profit, diplomacy merged with deal-making, and opportunity created not just for U.S. firms but for political allies and intermediaries close to power.
Some observers see this as evidence of confidence — MAGA crowds cheering on the idea of annexing Greenland, oil fields treated as spoils of victory. The bigger risk is simpler and more dangerous: Trump has no idea what comes next.
This is not the beginning of the end of Washington’s long struggle with Venezuela. It is the end of the beginning — and the start of a far more perilous phase. By announcing that the United States will “run Venezuela,” Trump is not merely projecting strength. He is explicitly assuming responsibility for the political, economic, and security consequences that follow.
History offers a warning.
Mission Accomplished, Again
In May 2003, George W. Bush stood beneath a “Mission Accomplished” banner and declared victory in Iraq. What followed was not stability, but fragmentation: insurgency, legitimacy collapse, and years of costly entanglement. Venezuela now sits at a similar inflection point. Removing Maduro could open the door to a durable transition. It could just as easily pull the United States into a slow, grinding quagmire.
There is also a more specific precedent. Exactly 35 years ago, on January 3, 1990, Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega surrendered to U.S. forces and was flown to Miami to stand trial. That episode is often cited as a clean intervention. It was not. Panama endured years of instability, corruption, and external dependency that Washington largely chose to forget.
What is different today is not the willingness to intervene — it is the absence of any attempt to justify intervention beyond naked self-interest.
Law, Selectively Applied
Trump’s treatment of “narco-terrorism” charges exposes the hollowness of the legal rationale. Juan Orlando Hernández, former president of Honduras — once described by U.S. prosecutors as central to a cocaine trafficking network that flooded the United States with hundreds of tonnes of drugs — now walks free after receiving a Trump pardon. Ross Ulbricht and Larry Hoover, both serving life sentences for serious criminal convictions, have also been released.
If these crimes are so grave as to justify invasion and abduction, why are they so easily forgiven when politically convenient?
The answer is obvious. Law is not the point. Power is.
During the “war on terror,” the United States at least went through the motions of moral justification: weapons of mass destruction, women’s rights, democracy promotion. Those arguments were often dishonest, but they existed. Now they are not even attempted. Maduro was, in effect, abducted. Venezuela has been taken over. And no one in Washington feels the need to pretend this is anything other than an assertion of dominance.
As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth put it: Maduro “effed around and found out.” America, he added, “can project our will anywhere, any time.”
Strategic Blowback
The intervention may also embolden America’s rivals. The contest for influence in Latin America is no longer primarily military. It is economic and technological. China understood this years ago, embedding itself in ports, power grids, supply chains, and digital infrastructure — often stepping in where Washington relied on sanctions and lectures.
A heavy-handed U.S. military presence risks reinforcing the perception that Washington offers coercion while Beijing offers development. That is not a contest America is guaranteed to win.
Why Venezuela?
Oil is the obvious answer. Control over Venezuelan oil carries global implications. In the short term, infrastructure decay, political risk, and creditor claims will limit production. Over time, however, Venezuelan supply could reshape global markets — effectively inserting Washington into the logic of OPEC+ without formal membership.
But Venezuela’s collapse has also been the single largest driver of irregular migration, transnational crime, and illicit financial flows in the hemisphere. Fixing that would benefit the United States. The problem is timing. In the short run, removing Maduro will almost certainly increase migration, not reduce it. Criminal networks may flourish in the chaos, not disappear.
The plausible failure modes are familiar: cosmetic political change that leaves criminal structures intact; prolonged limbo that sustains instability; or a creeping U.S. security commitment that was never intended but proves hard to unwind. Too little engagement invites chaos. Too much invites entanglement. America’s position is complicated because Trump won’t work with the main opposition leader María Corina Machado because she won the Nobel Peace Prize, and he didn’t. But without political stability big oil companies will be cautious investing.
The margin for error is thin.
The Zaibatsu State
There is a third reason Trump is interested in Venezuela — and Greenland. The United States has begun to resemble a Zaibatsu state. The relationship between Trump, his financial backers, and major tech firms has become so intertwined that it is difficult to see where one ends and the other begins.
Pre–Second World War Japan followed the same path. Giant corporations sat alongside military and political leaders, shaping policy to secure raw materials under the banner of the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” It ended in catastrophe.
Venezuela offers something similar: an oil-rich offshore zone where regulation can be stripped away, data centres and AI infrastructure can be built without oversight, and political experiments can be conducted that would never pass Congress. Chile was once the laboratory for Chicago School economics while opponents were jailed, tortured, or killed. Venezuela risks becoming something darker still.
Postscript: What This Says About Us
Some Reform voters in Britain have expressed excitement at the idea of Trump invading the UK and deposing Keir Starmer — the same people who wanted the King to sack Starmer and appoint Farage as prime minister.
That tells us several things:
- They are less confident about Reform winning an election than they claim
- They do not care much for democracy
- They are content to betray their own country to get their way
- They are so politically infantilised by social media that any absurd fantasy fed to them by an algorithm is treated as a serious proposal
None of this is accidental. We are watching the erosion of democratic norms not through coups and tanks, but through indifference, spectacle, and the casual acceptance of power without accountability.
Venezuela is not an aberration. It is a warning.
A great comment from Dino Alonso on Paul Krugman’s Substack post The ignominious death of Drill, Baby, Drill:
Paul, your piece lands because it punctures a fantasy that keeps getting recycled as policy.
What struck me reading it wasn’t just the bad economics. It was the persistence of a story about American wealth that refuses to die. The idea that richness is simply waiting underground, stalled only by the wrong people and the wrong values. Break the spell, drill the hole, flip the switch, and abundance returns
That story does a lot of emotional work for MAGA. It says we’re not struggling because conditions changed. We’re struggling because we were betrayed. Because we chose cooperation over dominance. Because someone picked windmills over muscle.
But as you lay out plainly, drill baby drill isn’t an energy strategy anymore. It’s nostalgia dressed up as resolve. The gushers are gone. The math doesn’t work. The executives know it. The markets know it. Even the land auctions know it.
And that lie is just one of several they keep clinging to.
There’s the belief that tariffs magically pay for themselves, that you can tax your way to prosperity without prices rising or supply chains breaking. There’s the idea that manufacturing can be summoned home by willpower alone, without skilled labor, without infrastructure, without time. There’s the promise that strongman deals will bring peace, that you can bully the world into stability while hollowing out the institutions that actually manage conflict.
There’s the coal forever fantasy, which isn’t about energy at all. It’s about refusing to admit that some chapters end. And there’s the law and order myth, the claim that force creates safety, even as trust erodes and violence grows more unpredictable.
What ties these together is a deeper belief that American greatness came from toughness rather than context. That we were rich because we were ruthless, not because we happened to sit at the center of a shattered world after World War Two. That public investment, rules, alliances, and shared systems had nothing to do with it.
That’s not history. It’s a bedtime story.
And here’s the part I think matters most. The people selling these stories know better. Drill baby drill is theater. Venezuela is theater. The ballroom talk is theater. Behind it is something colder and more familiar. Extract while you can. Strip public land. Reward loyalty. Punish dissent. Sell revival while practicing private gain.
The faithful get the myth. The insiders get the spoils.
That’s why the oil executives squirmed. They live in a world where geology and balance sheets don’t care about slogans. They know there’s no easy money left to unlock. They also know it’s safer to nod than to tell the truth too loudly.
So when MAGA sneers at climate action or global cooperation, what they’re really rejecting is the idea that the future makes claims on us. That limits exist. That adaptation requires humility.
Myths can carry a movement for a while. But they don’t survive contact with arithmetic, physics, or greed. And when this one breaks, it won’t be because of environmentalists or windmills.
It’ll be because pretending the past can be revived is easier than admitting the present needs to be faced.