Audio By Carbonatix

Nicolás Maduro will be exchanging the trappings of power in Venezuela for an orange jumpsuit in New York.

President Trump capped an extraordinary pressure campaign against the Venezuelan leader with an audacious, technically proficient snatch-and-grab operation in the predawn hours.

That Trump pulled the trigger after months of what many believed was a gigantic bluff sends a message about the seriousness of his threats that will be duly noted from Havana to Tehran. The leaders of Mexican drug cartels, in particular, have to be anxious about their own futures, given that Trump moved against a leader of a sovereign state protected by a security apparatus they can’t possibly match.

The operation demonstrates, once again, that Trump is not an isolationist but rather a hyperactive foreign policy president given to small-scale, relatively low-risk military strikes that eliminate threats and enhance U.S. deterrent power.

It’s a good thing that Maduro has departed Caracas; he wrecked his country, stole elections, facilitated the drug trade, flooded the hemisphere with millions of refugees, and aligned his regime with enemies of the United States.

The question now, of course, is what comes next. At his press conference this morning, President Trump announced vaguely that the U.S. would be “running” Venezuela via a “group.” He also said that Maduro’s vice president, who is formally in control of the country, is willing to cooperate with us. The details here matter, but obviously we have a lot of leverage. The ideal scenario is that the administration negotiates for Edmundo González Urrutia, who won the 2024 election, to return from exile and preside over new elections.

Latin America doesn’t have the deep sectarian and tribal divisions of the Middle East, and has a better track record of replacing dictatorships with (often flawed and fragile) democracies. Unlike in Iraq or Afghanistan, there’s no immediate neighbor to Venezuela from which foreign military power backed by America’s enemies is likely to be projected to attack a new government. But one of the lessons of U.S. foreign policy over the past 25 years is that no matter how bad a regime is, the alternative can be very costly to us and possibly worse. The administration shouldn’t underestimate how much time and energy the next phase in this operation might consume, or the possibility of it going sideways in unpredictable ways.

Then, there’s the question of the legality of the U.S. action. The administration argues that the raid was merely a law enforcement operation to arrest a fugitive from the U.S., with the combat elements protecting the arresting officers. This is a fig leaf, though. This was clearly an act of war to change the Venezuelan regime. The administration can point to plenty of precedents for such operations undertaken on the authority of the U.S. president alone — most pertinently George H. W. Bush’s invasion of Panama to get its drug-running President Manuel Noriega — but this should have been authorized by Congress, and any contemplated further deployment to “run” the country should first be debated and authorized by Congress. Trump barely even bothered to make a public case for the impending operation and never even mentioned we would take a hand in governing Venezuela afterward.

That said, this is a bad day for Cuba, China, Russia, and Iran, which were in cahoots with Maduro and have reason to fear U.S. power. Their instrument for influence in the Western Hemisphere via Venezuela is out of power and out of luck, sitting in a U.S. jail cell.