On Monday, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, had their first appearance in federal court in New York City after both were apprehended in a surprise U.S. military incursion into Venezuela last week. The couple is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. They are facing charges brought by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, where Maduro had first been indicted in 2020, making the city itself a character in this whole debacle. Outside the courthouse in downtown Manhattan, dueling groups of protesters faced off either in support of or opposition to Maduro’s arrest.
There’s been a lot of reporting so far on just how U.S. forces managed to pull this off, but I don’t think most of the coverage has been explicit enough on the questions of international law it raises, along with its effect on Venezuela’s stability. Among international law experts, there is relatively broad agreement that the military operation was at best dubious. That’s a separate question from whether Maduro can even be charged and tried in a U.S. court – his lawyers are arguing, among other things, that the charges are barred by the immunity granted to the heads of sovereign country.
Whether or not you happen to believe that Maduro was his country’s legitimate president or a despot — the evidence of his rigging the election is close to ironclad and his record of state repression well-documented — there are good reasons why we don’t just go around detaining foreign heads of state.
That’s a recipe for significant global destabilization, and also one that runs both ways. Shortly after Maduro’s detention, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev (often considered a potential successor to Vladimir Putin) mused about Russia detaining German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. That’s unlikely to actually happen, but it’s an example of how something like the U.S. raid can fray the international order further. There’s also concern that President Donald Trump’s decision to use force to seize Maduro rolls out the red carpet for other countries to engage in military excursions for their own geopolitical and economic objectives, such as China’s long-threatened efforts to annex Taiwan.
As it stands, we don’t really seem to know for sure who’s in charge in Venezuela. Despite Trump’s repeated assertions that the U.S. is in control, Maduro’s government is still in place and calling the shots under Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who was sworn in as interim president on Monday. Trump officials have asserted that at least one member of Maduro’s inner circle assisted with the raid, but their claims that Rodríguez and the rest of her government were closely collaborating with the U.S. in its wake seem at the very least overblown.
Whatever is happening in Caracas, the administration has already begun to use Maduro’s capture as a cudgel in its immigration crackdown domestically. On Monday, Justice Department lawyers told an appellate panel in the 5th Circuit that’s hearing a challenge to Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to quickly deport Venezuelans (remember that?) that the new charges against Maduro underscore Maduro’s supposed control over the Tren de Aragua gang. I don’t think those are particularly strong arguments, and they certainly don’t establish that the U.S. is being actually invaded as the law requires, but this highlights the extent to which the administration sees its use of force in terms of both foreign and domestic policy. Indeed, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz insisted to the U.N. Security Council that this was nothing more than “a law enforcement operation in furtherance of lawful indictments,” which is an odd thing to say about Special Forces whisking a foreign head of state away.
The idea of invading or deposing governments in other countries to secure resources for the United States — whether that be fruit, rare earth minerals or oil — has been a long-running trope of U.S. foreign policy; the idea that we invaded Iraq for oil has become practically a truism across the political spectrum. Such motives are, however, generally not explicitly admitted by the government, which tends to couch such actions in the language of the threat of the moment: anti-communism during the Cold War, terrorism after Sept. 11 and more recently, the opioid epidemic. Not so here. While the charges against Maduro involve narcoterrorism and that’s the language the administration used when first rolling out information about the operation, Trump pretty quickly turned to talking about oil. He suggested in a recent interview that the U.S. could even reimburse energy companies for moving quickly to increase Venezuela’s oil production.
In keeping with the administration’s general degree of subtlety, the State Department posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, this week that this is “OUR Hemisphere.” The phrase was an explicit distillation of the idiotic “Donroe Doctrine,” Trump’s attempt at reviving the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, which called for the Americas to be a U.S.-dominated sphere of influence. Trump has already explicitly threatened Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who unlike Maduro is unquestionably a democratically elected national leader.
So far, most of our European allies have been a bit evasive about all this, neither fully supporting Maduro’s capture nor condemning it absolutely. Trump’s renewed insistence after the Venezuela raid that the U.S. could take Greenland by force, however, definitely seems to have them on edge. European leaders responded with an uncharacteristically forceful series of statements suggesting that any U.S. aggression against Greenland would mark the end of NATO, the alliance that’s been at the heart of U.S. foreign policy for more than 75 years. I don’t really know how all of this is going to turn out, but I think we’re inching closer to a hot war of some type and to finding ourselves with few allies left.
