The removal of Nicolás Maduro by United States forces marks one of the most overt acts of imperial intervention in the Americas since the end of the Cold War. In a single operation Washington abandoned decades of rhetorical commitment to sovereignty and non-intervention and replaced it with the blunt reality of power. This was not regime pressure. It was regime seizure. A sitting president of a sovereign state was taken by a foreign military acting without international mandate, regional consent, or legal justification.
The White House presentation was predictable. Carefully framed language about security, criminality, and stability was rolled out for domestic consumption. Trump appeared confident. Marco Rubio sounded triumphant. The narrative was clear. Venezuela had been a problem. The problem had now been removed. What followed would supposedly be order, reform, and compliance.
What was missing from that presentation was any serious acknowledgement of what had actually occurred. The United States had crossed a line that it insists others must never cross. It had acted not as a guarantor of order but as an enforcer of hierarchy. For Latin America this was not a shocking development. It was a confirmation.
There was no United Nations authorization. There was no collective regional request. There was no imminent threat to the United States that could plausibly justify self-defence. The operation happened because Washington decided it should happen. That distinction matters. It is the difference between law and force. Between norms and empire.
Inside Venezuela the immediate reaction was not celebration but shock hardening rapidly into anger. Whatever divisions existed internally were temporarily eclipsed by the reality of foreign intervention. The capture of Maduro was not perceived as a domestic political correction but as a national violation. That framing has shaped everything that followed.
What has happened so far
In the days following the operation the expectations laid out by Washington have failed to materialise. There was no rapid collapse of the Venezuelan state. Ministries continued to function. Regional authorities did not rush to recognise externally endorsed leadership. The armed forces did not fracture into neat camps aligned with US preferences. Instead the system absorbed the shock and closed ranks around the principle of sovereignty.
This outcome directly contradicts years of US policy assumptions. Since at least 2017 Washington has operated on the belief that Venezuela existed in a state of terminal fragility. Sanctions were designed to accelerate internal collapse. Diplomatic isolation was meant to delegitimise the government internationally. Recognition of alternative authorities was intended to split institutional loyalty. None of this worked.
The capture of Maduro was therefore not the beginning of a transition but the end of a failed strategy. Having exhausted economic and diplomatic tools the United States defaulted to what it has always relied upon when patience runs out. Force.
The problem for Washington is that force does not erase legitimacy disputes. It magnifies them. By physically removing the head of state the United States transformed a contested internal political struggle into a clear case of external aggression. This shift fundamentally altered the dynamics on the ground.
Opposition groups that had previously welcomed foreign pressure found themselves unable to endorse foreign seizure. Civil society organisations critical of the government condemned the violation of sovereignty. Even actors deeply opposed to Maduro recognised that accepting a US imposed outcome would permanently discredit any future political process.
International reaction has been similarly fractured. While a handful of US aligned governments offered muted support many states across the Global South expressed alarm. The concern was not ideological sympathy with Venezuela but fear of precedent. If leadership removal by force becomes acceptable then no state outside the core of power is secure.
The longer this situation continues the clearer it becomes that Washington did not remove a problem. It created one. The United States now owns the consequences of its action whether it wishes to or not.
The turnaround and the refusal to play ball
Trump and Rubio clearly expected compliance. Their statements suggested a belief that once Maduro was removed the Venezuelan system would reorient itself around US preferences. This assumption reveals how deeply Washington misunderstands the political culture it seeks to dominate.
Venezuela has not played ball because playing ball would mean accepting the permanent erosion of national agency. It would mean conceding that leadership is conditional on foreign approval. For a country whose modern history is defined by resistance to external control that is a non-starter.
All predictive models used by US analysts assumed fragmentation. They predicted mass defections. Competing factions. Institutional collapse. These models were built on abstractions rather than lived reality. Venezuelan politics is not a binary struggle between government and opposition. It is a dense web of social movements regional interests military structures and ideological currents.
When pressure increases those networks do not simply disintegrate. They adapt. Sanctions did not atomise Venezuelan society. They reinforced a siege mentality. Each escalation strengthened the belief that the country was under attack rather than in need of rescue.
This is why pushback is inevitable. It may not take the form of conventional confrontation. It may manifest through diplomatic resistance economic realignment or asymmetric responses. But the notion that Venezuela will quietly accept the capture of its president without consequence is ahistorical.
The United States has encountered this dynamic before. In Cuba. In Nicaragua. In countless other interventions where anticipated collapse turned into prolonged resistance. Each time Washington insists that this case is different. Each time it is wrong.
The refusal to play ball is not necessarily ideological loyalty to Maduro. It is structural resistance to imperial management. Venezuelans understand that once the principle of sovereignty is surrendered no internal reform is meaningful. Everything becomes conditional. Everything becomes negotiable by outsiders.
This was not about drugs
The drug narrative is a convenient fiction. It provides moral cover for actions that would otherwise be indefensible. The problem is that it does not align with reality.
Drugs entering the United States overwhelmingly originate from Mexico and Colombia. Production distribution and cartel infrastructure are concentrated there. Venezuela functions at most as a secondar transit route. This has been acknowledged repeatedly by US law enforcement agencies.
If narcotics were genuinely the concern the focus of US action would be very different. It would involve demand reduction financial enforcement and addressing cartel power within allied states. Instead the drug argument is deployed selectively against governments that resist US geopolitical alignment.
The hypocrisy is clearest in the case of Honduras. Under Trump the United States pardoned Fabio Lobo son of former Honduran president Porfirio Lobo. Fabio Lobo was convicted in a US court of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and of working directly with major drug trafficking organisations. His guilt was established beyond doubt.
Honduras was not invaded. Its leadership was not seized. Its sovereignty was respected. Why. Because its government aligned with Washington.
The message could not be clearer. Drugs are not the issue. Alignment is.
To invoke narcotics in the Venezuelan case is therefore not an argument. It is a smokescreen. It exists to manufacture consent and obscure the real motive which is political control.
The illegality and the precedent
Under international law the US action against Venezuela is illegal. The UN Charter prohibits the use of force against the political independence or territorial integrity of any state except in cases of self-defence or with Security Council authorisation. Neither condition applies.
There was no armed attack by Venezuela against the United States. There was no imminent threat. There was no multilateral mandate. The capture of Maduro therefore constitutes an unlawful use of force.
Attempts to justify the action through moral arguments or criminal allegations have no standing in international law. If such justifications were accepted the entire system of state sovereignty would collapse. Any powerful state could remove any government it disliked.
This is where the Monroe Doctrine reasserts itself. The idea that the Americas are a US sphere of influence where sovereignty is conditional has never disappeared. It has simply been repackaged. What happened in Venezuela is its modern expression.
The precedent extends far beyond the region. If the United States can seize a sitting president under claims of criminality then Russia can claim corruption or security threats and remove Zelensky. China can claim separatism and detain Taiwan’s leadership. Once leadership removal becomes normalised the international system reverts to raw power.
Washington has spent years warning against precisely this world. In Venezuela it chose to create it.
Where does it stop. That question has no answer because power without restraint has no endpoint.
What next
Venezuela was not perfect. It faced serious economic and political challenges. But it represented something increasingly rare in the Americas. A state willing to resist US dominance and pursue an independent path.
For much of Latin America that mattered. Venezuela functioned as a counterweight. A reminder that the hemisphere was not fully owned or managed. That defiance carried costs but it also carried meaning.
By capturing Maduro the United States did not resolve Venezuela’s problems. It deepened them and exported instability beyond its borders. More importantly it shattered the illusion that the era of overt imperial intervention was over.
This was not about drugs. It was not about democracy. It was about enforcing hierarchy.
And in doing so the United States reminded the Americas why resistance to Yankee imperialism never disappeared in the first place.