Donald Trump ran in part on an anti-interventionist, American isolationist campaign, but we have rapidly seen that stance flipped on its head, especially in regards to the United States’ increasingly aggressive stance with Venezuela.
At the beginning of 2025, the Trump administration designated Venezuelan gangs and drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organisations”, then carried out air-strikes against alleged Venezuelan drug boats – strikes which human rights groups and several members of Congress argued breached both executive authority and international law. Yet, even with this escalation, the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in the early hours of January 3rd still came as an undeniable shock to much of the international community. The Irish Government’s official statement stresses that “while we have been clear that President Maduro does not have any democratic legitimacy, we have consistently called for a peaceful and negotiated transition in Venezuela, and have supported all international efforts to that end. Most experts agree that the US’s capture of Maduro is a clear breach of international law under the United Nations (UN) Charter, which prohibits “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”. So, why did America take such extreme action? Why now? And what comes next?
Some analysts argue that, for Trump, this move primarily served as a means to appease his voter base and instil fear in other world leaders, in what one former Trump official called “propaganda through force”. The official government narrative for the mission to capture Maduro was that the military was acting upon the prior US indictment of the former Venezuelan President. Maduro was indicted in 2020 on grounds of narcoterrorism and conspiracy, with the Department of Justice alleging that Maduro conspired with Colombian guerrilla groups to traffic cocaine into the United States. The US remains in the throes of a drug epidemic, but at its core, America has a Fentanyl crisis, not a cocaine crisis. Fentanyl comes primarily from China and Mexico and is an incredibly difficult drug to control, but the Administration wanted to at least appear to be addressing America’s drug issue; it wanted, in officials’ own terms, to do “something kinetic,” to show that when President Trump says something, he is serious and takes action. So, instead of addressing the Fentanyl flow from China and Mexico, the Trump administration decided to target cocaine from Venezuela. For other countries which the president has threatened, this move only increased fears, which was a desired effect for the administration. President Trump made another ulterior motivation very clear during an official press conference at Mar-a-Lago: Venezuelan oil. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, nationalised much of Venezuela’s energy sector in the early 2000s, and several of the American oil companies involved have yet to recoup their losses. During the press briefing, Trump stated that this “constituted one of the largest thefts of American property in the history of our country”. Taking control of the Venezuelan government would, he argued, create lower energy prices for Americans and giant profits for American companies. While none of these motivators are clearly legitimate reasons to breach the sovereignty of another country, they are important in understanding what the future holds for Venezuela.
Yet, Trump’s personal motivators and desires in the region were also not the sole thing that justified and pushed the US to abduct Maduro. Within the Trump administration, there was a complex array of ideological visions which converged on Venezuela as a political landscape ripe for exploitation and the realisation of personal agendas. The essential ideological players besides Trump were the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller. Miller, whose political agenda has been narrowly and intensely focused on immigration for years, adopted the issue of Venezuela by framing Maduro as responsible for the inpouring of “criminal aliens” into the United States and defining mass migration as a “hostile foreign invasion.” For Miller, the political issues in Venezuela are a nexus for his dream of using military-style efforts to crack down on immigration both in the US and abroad. Marco Rubio’s perspective is a more staunchly ideological one. Known as the “Cuba Hawk”, Rubio has been one of the main supporters of increased hostility towards Venezuela because of his personal mission to topple the current Cuban socialist regime. As one former Biden advisor stated, Rubio’s view is that “once Venezuela goes, Cuba will follow”. There are important lessons to be learned from prior instances of the US deposing foreign leaders, as in Iraq, where, similarly, there were many diverse motivations for invading, which made the goals ambiguous and an end date undefined.
With non-concrete US expectations and very little planning on how to run the country or manufacture consensus, what comes next for Venezuela is quite unclear. While scenes of Venezuelans celebrating can be seen in the streets of Caracas, and The Irish Times reports that Venezuelans living in Ireland are cautiously optimistic, it is so far unlikely that Trump will usher in a new era of democracy for the country. From the official press briefing, it can be understood that America will be running Venezuelan policy now and for the foreseeable future. Instead of putting the democratically elected opposition into power, the US has decided to keep the current regime in place by installing the Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez as the interim leader. She is another ideological loyalist to the Socialist Chavez regime and ran the oil portfolio for the country before becoming VP. So far, she has cracked down on the country in even more extreme ways, and the US endorsement of her leadership has effectively eradicated all remaining political opposition in the country. Economic stability through investment from American oil also does not appear to be a near-term likelihood. The Venezuelan oil industry is responsible for less than 1 per cent of the world’s oil output, and analysts claim it will require an estimated 60 billion US dollars’ worth of long-term investment to make the industry reasonably profitable again. The current compounded political instability and unpredictability are further scaring off industry investment. Another potential risk in the highly volatile political climate is a rise of factionism, from Venezuelan “colectivos” and the military to Colombian rebels along the border. The current situation in Venezuela is rapidly evolving and incredibly uncertain, leaving many unanswered questions and raising serious concerns for other countries in the region, as well as other territories that the Trump administration has threatened to overtake.
