{"id":195695,"date":"2026-01-04T22:38:41","date_gmt":"2026-01-04T22:38:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/after-trumps-illegal-venezuela-coup-there-are-two-dangers-he-is-emboldened-but-has-no-clue-what-comes-next-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-01-04T22:38:41","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T22:38:41","slug":"after-trumps-illegal-venezuela-coup-there-are-two-dangers-he-is-emboldened-but-has-no-clue-what-comes-next-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/after-trumps-illegal-venezuela-coup-there-are-two-dangers-he-is-emboldened-but-has-no-clue-what-comes-next-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"After Trump\u2019s illegal Venezuela coup, there are two dangers: he is emboldened, but has no clue what comes next – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

The US president used largely fictitious charges to seize control, but can\u2019t know how Venezuelans will react. He may also overstep now as regards Iran
D<\/span>uring his presidential campaigns, Donald Trump<\/a> pledged to end \u201cforever wars\u201d, abandon \u201cnation-building\u201d interventions and focus instead on reviving a US economy that, in his telling, had been deindustrialised by a floodtide of imports. Though Trump\u2019s electoral victories cannot be attributed to any one thing, his \u201cAmerica first\u201d narrative certainly struck a chord.
But Trump\u2019s use of force to seize the Venezuelan president<\/a>, Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, his full-bore support for Israel\u2019s demolition of Gaza and his bombing of Iran\u2019s nuclear enrichment installations<\/a> show that he\u2019s no less willing than his predecessors to resort to military interventions.
Trump already had Maduro in his sights. He offered a $50m bounty<\/a> for information leading to his capture, blockaded Venezuelan ports<\/a> to stop sanctioned oil tankers and accused Maduro of involvement in drug trafficking. Still, it\u2019s a safe bet that few outside the administration expected Trump to swoop into a country, grab its president and haul him to the US.
Maduro will be tried for drug trafficking and \u201cnarco-terrorism\u201d conspiracy, a fuzzy formulation suitably ominous to justify a move of dubious necessity and legality. The Trump administration hasn\u2019t provided evidence tying Maduro to narcotics trafficking, nor has it proven that Venezuela<\/a> posed a clear and present danger necessitating an armed attack.
Venezuela has many problems, including drug gangs and authoritarian rule, but they hardly justify what Trump has done. If bad governance and repression by foreign leaders justify abducting them, Trump has a long list of offenders to choose from, including some backed by US economic and military support.
Trump\u2019s move can\u2019t be justified by self-defence provisions in international law. Venezuela never threatened to attack the US (it lacks the capacity to do so), let alone attacked it. It\u2019s the other way around: the US has attacked Venezuela and taken steps, such as the naval blockade, generally used in wartime.
Trump says that the US constitution permits his intervention \u2013 that as commander in chief, he is duty bound to protect American personnel in danger. But Venezuela hadn\u2019t put any US personnel at risk, let alone harmed them. Plus, Trump was building a case for tightening the screws on Maduro, and the Venezuelan leader would have been a fool to provide him with a casus belli<\/em>.
Trump\u2019s most prominent charge against Venezuela\u2019s government is that its drug traffickers have, with Maduro\u2019s complicity, deluged the US with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, which is also used to alleviate severe pain. Even a 2 milligram<\/a> dose can prove fatal.
The illegal use of fentanyl and other opioids in the US has certainly been rampant and deadly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that<\/a> deaths tied to synthetic drug overdoses, mainly fentanyl, soared from 782 in 2000 to 72,776 in 2023. However, they are estimated to have plummeted to 47,735 in 2024. Even so, the Trump White House reckons that<\/a> the costs attributable to \u201cillicit opioids, primarily fentanyl\u201d (including death, treatment, crime and lost labour productivity) totalled $2.7tn in 2023.
The question, however, is what Venezuela has to do with any of this. Virtually all of the fentanyl smuggled into the US comes from Mexico, by way of China<\/a>, which supplies the precursors, something the Trump administration itself concedes<\/a>. The president nevertheless told an audience<\/a> of top military officers in September that the US was attacking boats off Venezuela\u2019s coast because they \u201cwere stacked up with bags of white powder that\u2019s mostly fentanyl\u201d.
And Trump contends that Maduro is directly linked to Venezuela\u2019s Tren de Aragua criminal gang, adding that it\u2019s \u201cthreatening an invasion<\/a>\u201d of the US \u2013 but, again, without providing proof and ignoring the fact that the gang has no army. Besides, Maduro\u2019s government has been on the offensive<\/a> against the group in recent years. The president also insists<\/a> that Venezuela \u201cpreviously stole\u201d oil and land that belonged to the US and that he would get these \u201cassets\u201d back. Like his other allegation, this one is fact-free.
Venezuela began nationalising its oil industry in 1976<\/a>. Hugo Ch\u00e1vez, who served as president from 1999 till his death in 2013, expanded that policy. He mandated in 2007<\/a> that PDVSA, the state oil company, take a majority stake in projects in the oil-rich Orinoco region, including those of the US petroleum behemoths ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, both of whom wound up their operations rather than comply, unlike Chevron, BP, Norway\u2019s Statoil and France\u2019s Total. But there are no grounds for claiming that either the US government or any US petroleum company literally owned Venezuela\u2019s oil or land and was robbed.
The possible consequences of Trump\u2019s intervention are worrisome for at least two reasons.
First, we can\u2019t know what will follow Maduro\u2019s abduction. Venezuela\u2019s state institutions, including the security services, remain intact and an interim president is in place \u2013 Delcy Rodr\u00edguez<\/a>, who has been vice-president since 2018. But if street protests segue into clashes between the people and the state, things could quickly spiral out of control, just as they could if Trump\u2019s interventionist agenda expands and encounters resistance.
Venezuela\u2019s main opposition leader, Mar\u00eda Corina Machado, who was awarded the 2025 Nobel peace prize, welcomed US pressure<\/a> to topple Maduro well before he was captured. Now she has hailed Venezuela\u2019s \u201chour of freedom<\/a>\u201d. That could provide Trump cover to go further, though, as for Machado herself, he says she<\/a> \u201cdoesn\u2019t have the support within or the respect\u201d to govern. Already, he has announced<\/a> that the US will \u201crun\u201d Venezuela temporarily, suggesting that he plans to do more than simply put Maduro in the dock. The same can be said for his arrogating the right to open up Venezuela\u2019s oil sector to investments from US corporations.
Second, Iran\u2019s government is facing a nationwide uprising, and Trump warned<\/a> that \u201cwe are locked and loaded and ready to go\u201d if the regime starts killing protesters. Some have already been killed.<\/a> It\u2019s hardly a given that Trump\u2019s Venezuelan gambit will tempt him to try regime change in Iran. But if he does wade into Iran\u2019s upheaval, the consequences \u2013 for Iran, the US and Iran\u2019s neighbours \u2013 will be much more dangerous than anything that might happen in Venezuela. And Trump is nothing if not unpredictable.
Rajan Menon is a professor emeritus of international relations at the City College of New York and a senior research scholar at Columbia University\u2019s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The US president used largely fictitious charges to seize control, but can\u2019t know how Venezuelans will react. He may also overstep now as regards IranDuring his presidential campaigns, Donald Trump pledged to end \u201cforever wars\u201d, abandon \u201cnation-building\u201d interventions and focus instead on reviving a US economy that, in his telling, had been deindustrialised by a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":195696,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195695\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}