Few, except a rabble of deluded Leftist fanatics, will mourn the dramatic departure of Venezuela’s despot Nicolas Maduro, or the end of the spiteful, repressive and incompetent regime which he inherited from the equally disagreeable Hugo Chavez.
Millions of people in that country have suffered for years at their hands. Democrats and decent people in that unhappy state have sought for many years to bring about a change for the better, in a nation which ought by rights to be prosperous and happy. Maduro and his intolerant machine have repeatedly crushed such efforts. Now they have been swept aside by a force far greater than themselves.
We can all hope that Maduro’s downfall will eventually lead to freedom, peace and democracy in Venezuela. That is not impossible. So far, so good.
Yet how will all this look a year hence, and what wider implications does it have? Well, it was ludicrous for Moscow to complain piously (as it did) that the operation was an ‘act of armed aggression’.
The Kremlin may be sad about losing one of its few friends in the region, but too bad. It lost all moral force when it invaded sovereign Ukraine nearly four years ago in what was certainly an act of armed aggression.
But this cuts both ways. Western democracies that condemn Russia‘s actions will from now on be constantly embarrassed with the fact that the USA, the absolute keystone of democratic, law-governed power in the world, has undoubtedly forced its way into a sovereign capital and taken over somebody else’s country by the use of irresistible force.
China issued its own ritual condemnation of the seizure. But it will also have watched Mr Trump’s Florida press conference with interest. Perhaps one day his justifications for the Caracas attack will be sarcastically recycled by Beijing to justify its own future behaviour.
This, alas, is how foreign policy has worked since 1945, when aggressive war was supposedly outlawed.
President Trump standing near CIA Director John Ratcliffe as they watch the U.S. military operation in Venezuela from Trump’s Mar a Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida
Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro speaks during a press conference with international media at Hotel Eurobuilding in Caracas on September 15, 2025
There were other awkward problems lurking in the shadows at Mar-a-Lago, as President Trump praised the undoubted prowess of his military.
His own supporters were promised an end to ‘forever wars’ abroad. Mr Trump pledged that he would follow a policy of ‘America First’.
Those supporters will wonder quite how all this fits in with an armed attack on someone else’s government, and an indefinite commitment to govern an unstable, crime-plagued country of 30 million people.
Yes, Venezuela has huge oil reserves, but so does Iraq, and the USA’s attempts to hand that country back to its own people after the 2003 invasion are a textbook example of how not to do it.
The USA has traditionally been bad at running other countries, and Mr Trump’s bluster about Venezuelan drug gangs and the alleged crimes of President Maduro and his wife does not really get the President around the fact that he has burst into a sovereign country without UN permission and without the pretext that America is under attack.
Also, the old rules still apply, that it is far easier to start wars than it is to end them and far easier to get troops into foreign countries than it is to get them out again.
The old warnings still apply. Whatever you start, be sure you know how to finish it.