U.S. military intervention south of the border is as American as baseball and apple pie. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to occupy the town of Veracruz, Mexico, to protect U.S. economic interests. During the Cold War, the United States engaged in a variety of overt and covert regime change operations, from Cuba to Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Panama. As recently as 1994, the Clinton administration engaged in an invasion of Haiti to reinstall deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
It was nonetheless shocking to see a U.S. administration openly and proudly engage in the kind of leadership change—effectively an armed kidnapping—that we saw over the weekend. There was little artifice in official explanations for why these actions were taken and no real attempt to finesse the attack into some form of international law. Rather, the Trump administration effectively asserted the primacy of U.S. interests: Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro stood in the way of stemming migration, preventing the flow of drugs, and allowing access for U.S. oil companies to Venezuela’s rich oil fields.
The many rationales on offer were reminiscent of nothing so much as the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq—a buffet of possible justifications for an action the administration had already decided on. But even this is misleading: The explanations for Venezuela were offered with a speed and disregard for the pretense of international law that the Bush administration could have only dreamed of. At least President George W. Bush sought U.N. Security Council authorization before ultimately disregarding that process.
Here, too, none of the rationales are truly persuasive. The United States is the world’s largest oil producer; a glut of Venezuelan oil could even harm producers in places such as Texas by pushing down global prices. Venezuela is not the source of most of the drugs that cause deaths on U.S. soil. And U.S. law enforcement agencies—even with an active warrant—do not typically engage in overseas military action.
In practice, this was clearly an exercise in displaying America’s power—and its need to dominate the region. Maduro had defied the Trump administration repeatedly, refusing to relinquish power and go into a comfortable exile despite pressure and a growing military buildup in the Caribbean. It was always unlikely that continued resistance from Maduro could be met by U.S. concessions, even by Donald Trump—notable among U.S. presidents for his willingness to bluff and back down in high-stakes situations.
This is particularly true given the recent publication of the administration’s National Security Strategy, which offered a so-called Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, promising to shut out extrahemispheric powers such as China by denying them “the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.” The United States, as the document ominously promises, wants “nations to see us as their partner of first choice, and … will (through various means) discourage their collaboration with others.”
The seizure of Maduro serves this goal, potentially sending a signal to China and Russia to steer clear of the Western Hemisphere. And as comments about Cuba and Mexico from administration officials suggest, it also sends a signal to other regional governments to play ball—whether on migration, drugs, or cooperation with other states. If they do not, they risk a U.S. punitive strike. It is a highly risky strategy. If the aftermath of this raid does not go to plan, the Trump administration may end up looking weaker than it hoped.
Perhaps the biggest question is how to interpret this raid in the context of Trump’s broader foreign policy. Some have interpreted this as the triumph of one faction inside the administration, with one headline proclaiming simply: “The hawks are winning.” And it is true that the face of this operation has clearly been hawkish Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Vice President J.D. Vance—a long-running critic of foreign regime change—has been supportive but notably absent from the pictures and press conferences about the raids, with only vague statements about security to explain why.
Yet the hawks and neoconservatives in Trump’s circle are not happy either. The president told journalists that democratic opposition favorite María Corina Machado does not have the support necessary to take over in Venezuela anytime soon, a sentiment quickly echoed by Rubio. Administration officials have instead posited that Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, is expected to work with the administration on a transition, suggesting that this operation is less pro-democracy regime change and more about removing an uncooperative leader.
The Maduro raid is thus simultaneously aggressive and ambitious in its conduct—and highly circumscribed in its political objectives. In this, it perhaps bears the closest resemblance to Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025. In both cases, Trump chose to engage in potent demonstrations of U.S. military power while trying to avoid the escalation, chaos, and unintended consequences that have bedeviled so many of America’s post-9/11 military interventions. He is, in short, testing the proposition that the United States can engage in the largely consequence-free use of force.
It’s an approach that also threads the needle between bickering administration factions, giving neoconservative and Reaganite holdovers the military action they crave while attempting to reassure a less interventionist base that the United States is not headed for another Iraq debacle. So far, this strategy has worked. But it remains a highly risky strategy, both in political and in geopolitical terms. The president has been lucky. His strikes in Iran did not lead to substantial escalation, and for the moment, the seizure of Maduro does not appear to have thrown Venezuela into chaos.
But that does not mean the president’s ability to avoid the consequences of future strikes of this kind—in Mexico, say, or Greenland—couldn’t easily turn into blowback against the United States. And the more that Trump engages in these displays of U.S. force, the more likely it is that one of them will go catastrophically wrong. In Venezuela, that could mean a military coup, state collapse, or broader refugee crisis. Elsewhere, it could mean war or chaos.
The president isn’t just risking alienating the base that elected him. Every time this game of international brinksmanship succeeds, he is likely to become more overconfident, increasing the risks of miscalculation next time around.