Over the past few days, the United States carried out one of the most extraordinary military operations in recent memory: airstrikes in Venezuela, followed by the capture and forcible rendition of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife to New York. Within hours, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would “run Venezuela” until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.

There are very few moments in history that ought to give us pause, but this is one of them - not merely for what has happened, but for what the rhetoric that followed reveals about how power now thinks and speaks in Washington.

A Narrative Untethered from Reality

The official explanation for the operation blended criminal justice language - Maduro is now to face federal prosecution, after all, with broad assertions about the war on drugs. But those assertions collapse under basic scrutiny. Fentanyl, the centrepiece of the drug-war rationale, overwhelmingly enters the United States through land routes via Mexico, facilitated by cartels using cars, legal ports of entry, and internal networks; it does not arrive directly from Venezuela in quantities significant enough to account for the opioid scourge.

Maritime interdictions tied to fentanyl are rare, and Venezuela does not appear as a source or primary conduit in DEA trafficking data. Even more bluntly, a small coastal craft cannot physically travel from Venezuela to the U.S. mainland without refuelling support, a mother ship, or intermediate staging points - none of which feature in documented trafficking patterns. But evidence has never been the indispensable touchstone it once was.

Within 48 hours of seizing Maduro, Mr. Trump’s rhetoric leapt bizarrely and dramatically to other nations. The president publicly predicted that Cuba - long a U.S. geopolitical adversary - is “ready to fall,” and he threatened Colombia over alleged drug production, suggesting that a military operation there “sounds good to me.”

To take things further down the detente rabbit hole, Trump revived demands that the United States should annex Greenland, explicitly linking territorial control to “national security” concerns about Chinese and Russian presence. This was a position and an assertion that Danish and Greenlandic leaders angrily rejected. This is not strategic ambiguity. This is a proclamation of hemispheric dominance, backed by a willingness to weaponize rhetoric and force with little regard for the established norms of international law or the sovereignty of nations.

International Backlash and the Erosion of Norms

The global reaction was swift. Russian officials condemned the Venezuelan strike as “illegal and destabilising,” framing it as a continuation of U.S. strategic interests in controlling oil resources, even warning that similar actions against stronger nations would be considered acts of war.

Across Latin America and beyond, leaders decried the operation. A joint statement from Spain, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay characterized the intervention as “a perilous precedent for peace and regional security,” urged respect for sovereignty, and called for peaceful, inclusive solutions to Venezuela’s crisis. China and France, among others, criticized the use of force, while institutions such as the United Nations and the European Union underlined the primacy of international law.

In the long view, this is not a regional debate; it is a test of the principles that have underpinned global order since World War II. When a significant power abducts a sitting head of state without UN authorization, absent apparent self-defense or international mandate, it signals not strength, but a breakdown in constraint. Some even call America’s stance collective insanity.

A logic of scarcity and power projection drives these actions. What explains this unsettling cascade of posturing? The simplest and most disquieting explanation lies not in opaque moral crusades but in material imperatives. The United States is increasingly dependent on foreign oil and rare earth minerals, and Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves. The White House rhetoric that we will “get the oil flowing” is telling.

The invocation of doctrines like the Monroe Doctrine, only rebranded in Trump’s own words as the “Don-roe Doctrine”, signals a desire not merely to influence but to control strategic resources and political outcomes in the Western Hemisphere. When rhetoric leaps from Nicaragua to Greenland to Cuba like a fevered chessboard of targets, it is not robust strategy; it is the frantic projection of insecurity.

A Dangerous Precedent

This moment is unique and perilous. A permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and a nuclear power has conducted an operation that contradicts the spirit, if not the letter, of the UN Charter. The United States has long championed sovereignty and international law; now it challenges them. The principle that no nation may be overthrown by external force except in narrowly defined circumstances has been eroded not by stealth, but by boastful declaration.

The capture of Nicolás Maduro is likely to be taught in international relations classes for decades. But the lesson will not be about weak or strong states. It will examine how, when power loses its restraints, the global order once again collapses into the logic of empire. What is being sold as progress and greatness is, in fact, a regression into medieval thinking, or worse, a world of lawlessness. Donald Trump seems to be running amok, or at least shooting for the title “Emperor of the Americas.”

Phil Butler is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, and an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. Courtesy

https://journal-neo.su/2026/01/19/when-power-goes-mad-the-u-s-operation-in-venezuela-and-the-danger-to-world-order/