On January 3, the Trump Administration successfully completed an operation striking the Venezuelan capital and capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, bringing them to the US to face charges.
The operation has led to much debate about US ownership of Venezuelan oil, the future of Venezuela’s regime, and the political theories behind regime change. Venezuelans living abroad have largely celebrated the capture, although some still worry about an uncertain future.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he does not expect further US military action in the state.
On the right, commentators were more likely to support a move for regime change, justifying that Venezuela is a dangerous force and the US as one of the only nations powerful enough to stop it. Those on the left were more likely to see it as the US taking a bullying and internationally illegal approach. Though, reactions were not entirely partisan. Venezuelans abroad, even those on the left, supported Trump’s move, while some non-interventionists on the right, including former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene opposed it.
Richard Hanania (Lean Right bias) argued that regime change in Venezuela was a calculated risk. “As a former noninterventionist, I find the arguments against regime change in this case to be quite unimpressive. First, there is the general appeal to ‘unintended consequences.’ Yes, anything might have unintended consequences. There are also consequences to leaving a socialist dictator in power… Venezuela could have descended into unspeakable horrors by the time you read this. But we have to make the best judgments we can in the moment, and I simply reject the non-interventionist principle that fear of the unknown means evil regimes get to last forever. There is no hope without taking risks, and this one in particular just makes sense.”
Michelle Goldberg (Left) in the New York Times Opinion (Left) said this isn’t about regime change at all. “But for Donald Trump, the preservation of something close to the status quo makes sense, given that his goal is extortion, not political transformation. Rather than the moralistic imperialism of George W. Bush, Trump’s foreign policy is imperialistic gangsterism. As one administration official put it to me, there’s ‘something refreshing about Trump just saying, “Yeah, we are taking the oil.”’…The danger to the rest of us isn’t a military quagmire, at least in the short term, but an emboldened president who has learned that audacious thuggery works. American foreign policy will shed its last vestiges of restraint and become fully and nakedly predatory.”
A Federalist (Right) writer rebutted concerns that Marjorie Taylor Greene posed. “A more mature response to Trump’s raid on Caracas is to recognize the differences between things and to make distinctions. There is a difference (to state the obvious) between the Maduro regime and the government in Taipei. There is a difference between our arrest of Maduro and Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. To spell out all those differences would be pedantic; everyone knows what they are…That’s not to say principles don’t matter, but that they depend on context in the world as it really is. Foreign affairs do not work like math problems. You cannot plug in the numbers — or the principles of international law — to every place on the map and get the same result. States and regimes are different, and unequal.”
A Common Dreams (Left) opinion read, “Whether Maduro was a dictator is irrelevant to this equation. Even leaving aside the fraught history of US regime change in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, the US is not the world’s judge, jury and executioner. The US does not get to invade other nations simply because it decides they are not ‘good neighbors.’ Latin America is not ‘our backyard.’ This language is inherently colonialist. It symbolically reduces a region of the world that contains over 30 nations into America’s property…What Venezuela needed was a people’s revolution. The removal of Maduro and the destiny of Venezuela should have been left to the Venezuelan people to decide.”
