IN the wee hours of January 2, the skies of Caracas lit up with fire trails from airborne armaments and aircraft. They were followed by a stream of helicopters used in commando operations, most notably the Delta Force. The world woke up on 3rd morning to the stunning statement by no less than President Donald Trump himself that the US armed forces had taken President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela into custody and he will be taken to an unknown destination under the control of the US administration. By any counts, it was brazen, crude and with the piles of evidence – it was about the crude oil deposits of Venezuela.
That something drastic was going to come was clear from the last couple of months with US Navy buildup in the international waters around Venezuela blocking Venezuela’s oil tankers indiscriminately and shooting down boats allegedly plying drugs and narcotics. The drug-trafficking indictments, by the way, have nothing to do with what Trump did, though we will no doubt hear about them endlessly in the weeks ahead. As analysts have pointed out at length, Venezuela has almost nothing to do with the flow of cocaine.
In the US DEA’s most recent report, Venezuela is mentioned in only a single paragraph. In fact, Venezuela did not merit even a single mention in the one-hundred pages long 2025 UN World Drug Report, just like the EU’s own Annual Drug Assessment Report. How much Trump cares for the drugs menace is shown by the recent elections in Honduras. He demanded that they vote for Tito Asfura, the colleague of the indicted narco-trafficker he just pardoned, Juan Orlando Hernández. Or else the US would withhold aid to the country, effectively “threatening to destroy the Honduran economy unless the country elects the oligarch-run National Party”. Trump was effectively “bribing Honduran voters” to “restore [the] narco-trafficking government to power”. Trump deployed the same strategy in Argentina’s October 2025 midterm elections, in which he threatened to withhold a $20 billion bailout, for successfully strong-arming voters there into backing the party of the country’s President Javier Milei.
Trump publicly mused about how much he’d like to get his hands on Caracas’s proven oil reserve of 303 billion barrels. He is now licking his lips over the field day that “our very large United States oil companies” are going to have as they get “very strongly involved” in Venezuela’s oil industry.
Trump made clear, the attack on Venezuela is to pursue his administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS), which made as its highest priority reviving the Monroe Doctrine – as the “Don-Roe Doctrine” in the president’s own words – to “restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere”. Trump wants to make sure the region’s left-wing governments are replaced by ones aligned with Trump. Within hours of hijacking the Venezuelan president, Trump was threatening Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico with a similar attack.
Trump is candidly stating that the United States will now “run the country,” ‘might put boots on the ground there’, and that he doesn’t “want to be involved with having somebody else get in, and then we have the same situation.” Despite Trump’s acolytes’ claims that there is no loophole, this action unambiguously invalidates the US Constitution’s War Powers Clause that such an audacious intervention can take place only if Justice Department indicts a foreign leader.
US actions had regime change written all over it. Trump and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s statements actually made it so explicit. Criticism of the US action within the country appears to be unprecedented. That the ‘law enforcement’ claim was a sham and without any credibility whatsoever is clear. But in trying to find out why this action, critics within have unambiguously stated that the growing embarrassment of the Trump administration over Epstein revelations and the ever-deepening crisis of the US economy desperately needed a distraction.
This Venezuelan adventure aims to kill two birds. Apart from addressing its own crisis of credibility and governance, it will satisfy the US oil majors like Exxon and Chevron, who had donated liberally for the Trump presidential campaign. The critics point out that in the process Trump has not only violated international laws, like the UN Charter, specifically Clause 2(4), human rights laws, Geneva Convention and a plethora of UN Security Council and General Assembly Resolutions, it has actually violated the US Constitution. The administration cannot initiate such action unilaterally but has to have an endorsement from the US Congress. The response from Trump himself on this last charge was a shocker. He was candid and stated that the Congress has a bad reputation for leaking out such security sensitive information!
However, this commando operation which killed a number of Venezuelan civil population resembled mercenaries and that ‘Rambo Syndrome’. But, having secured Maduro and his wife, it seems that Trump has lost his way. Marco Rubio has changed their narrative several times. The 25-page indictment which Rubio claims is the basis for the action, in fact, finds no mention of Maduro and only one reference in page 9 of the document to his wife in 2007, while she was not yet married to Maduro, nor was he the President. What this actually means is that the US, as has been alleged, is a rogue state and Trump while presiding over, is acting as a super monarch of the world where he is law unto himself.
By the responses the world over, particularly in Venezuela, it is clear that there will be all out resistance. Latin American nations, BRICS and even many of US’s European allies have strongly condemned this action which will destabilise the world. While Trump was claiming that the Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Fernandez, who was solemnised as the President of the Venezuelan government by the top constitutional court of the country, will cooperate with US administration, has stated that Nicolas Maduro remains the one and only legitimate President of Venezuela and Venezuela will never accept extra territorial intervention to undermine the country’s sovereignty. After solidarity with Palestine, solidarity mobilisations have gone electric all over the world in quick time, unequivocally condemning this brazen action.
However, this is a hugely embarrassing moment for India which has been one of the founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement. As much as in the case of taking an unequivocal position against Israel during the Gaza genocide, Modi government was pathetic in failing to indict this crime against international laws and conventions. That they were seen in sharp contrast to the fellow BRICS members has now become a clichéd expression of its foreign policy pusillanimity.
But the Indian people have salvaged some pride of the anti-imperialist legacy of the country. It is clear that this is a protracted battle against US attempts to secure hegemony, unilateralism and greed for the natural resources of the poor and developing nations. The battle will have to be equally directed against our own government which is being humiliated day in and day out by Trump, by referring to our Prime Minister and claiming that if he fails to ensure Trump’s ‘happiness’, India will have to bear the brunt of his tariff fury. Forward to the battle, for our own sake, for the sake of the Venezuelan people and all those for whom the threat of US imperialism is more real than ever before!
(January 06, 2026)
