Making sense of the US military operation in Venezuela

The operation to capture Nicolas Maduro underscores the extraordinarily broad authority that modern presidents exercise over military force—and, potentially, its limits.

The executive branch maintains that the president has the constitutional authority to use military force without congressional authorization, so long as it supports U.S. interests and is not expected to result in “prolonged and substantial military engagements.” It’s also argued that this authority is not constrained by international law. Thus it’s not entirely surprising for the Trump administration to argue that the president can take targeted military action like the Maduro operation, even where hugely consequential for Venezuela and contrary to international law.

These views have never been vindicated by the federal courts, which generally avoid war powers issues, absent a conflict with Congress. But this reticence also leaves the executive branch free to rely on its own views without judicial repudiation.

Yet there may still be limits. When asked why congressional authorization wasn’t needed for the Maduro operation, Secretary Rubio responded, “This wasn’t an invasion, we didn’t occupy a country”—suggesting some broader campaigns might still be beyond the president’s unilateral authority. An extended military campaign could also trigger time limits imposed by the 1973 War Powers Resolution. And legislators are introducing measures that would impose further statutory constraints if enacted, creating the sort of interbranch conflicts that federal courts might take on.

In short, the Maduro operation may not have encountered serious legal limits. But a “second wave” of the sort threatened by President Trump still might.

Maduro is gone, but what comes next is unclear. His ouster creates a real but narrow opportunity for a durable democratic transition that puts Venezuela on a path to recovery. Three elements are critical: political legitimacy, economic stabilization, and military realignment. 

Political legitimacy exists. In 2024 elections, Venezuelans voted overwhelmingly for opposition leader Edmundo González—a result that the Maduro regime rejected by clinging to power. Maintaining Delcy Rodríguez, a close Maduro ally, as president indefinitely would not only undermine the clearly expressed will of the Venezuelan people but likely prevent the reestablishment of rule of law that will be essential for Venezuela’s rebuilding. Threatening force to keep the Rodríguez government in line may work in the short term but is not a sustainable strategy for courting the kinds of long-term investment that Venezuela will need to truly rebuild. 

A credible stabilization will require much more than investments from a few U.S. companies. Venezuela’s economy contracted roughly 80 percent over the last decade, the largest peacetime collapse recorded in modern history. Basic infrastructure—electricity grids, water systems, transportation networks—is severely deteriorated. A workable stabilization effort therefore requires scale, starting with an IMF-anchored package of over 50 billion over 18–24 months, combining balance-of-payments support, fiscal financing and debt restructuring, as well as parallel World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank programs. This must be paired with large-scale immediate humanitarian assistance for the nearly 8 million Venezuelans in acute need. 

The transition hinges on the Venezuelan military. Venezuela’s armed forces are fractured, criminalized, and complicit—but not monolithic. A transition requires immediate unity of command under civilian authority; conditional off-ramps—amnesty and reintegration for mid-level officers not implicated in atrocities—paired with targeted prosecutions for grave crimes and the dismantling of irregular armed groups. Justice must be real but sequenced to avoid creating more recruits for the narco-gangs currently operating with impunity within Venezuela.

The United States cannot—and should not—do this alone. While multilateral efforts failed to bring about Maduro’s exit, they can be instrumental in facilitating what comes next. 

A secure, democratic, and prosperous Venezuela is in the U.S. interest. Focusing narrowly on oil access or prioritizing creditor repayment over recovery would risk creating a small set of rent-seekers while keeping Venezuela’s failed institutions largely intact. The courage and persistence of the Venezuelan people has drawn admiration from across the globe. If the United States makes a stable, democratic Venezuela its goal, it can align its interests with those of many allies across the region and beyond. 

Two days after the tactically spectacular and legally-questionable capture of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife under narco-terrorism charges, the Trump administration has provided little clarity as to the post-Maduro order in Venezuela. In a January 3 press conference, Trump explicitly and repeatedly stated that the United States was now running Venezuela, and would do so until Venezuela’s decrepit oil infrastructure has been rebuilt and until the United States could safely hand Venezuela over to local authorities. He also painted a vision of freedom and great new oil-funded prosperity for the Venezuela people. Such a protectorate was deeply at odds with the Trump’s administration’s earlier rejection of “nation building,” a rallying cry of Trump’s MAGA base. 

However, in a radically different vision, Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday stated that the United States would have no direct governing role in Venezuela, and instead structure Venezuela’s oil and counternarcotics policies by maintaining the U.S. blockade of sanctioned tankers carrying Venezuela’s oil. This pressure is meant to stop the complicity and indifference of Venezuelan officials toward cocaine trafficking that many regional armed and criminal groups conduct through Venezuela. It is also intended to prevent oil sales to Cuba, with the hope that this further immiseration of a desperately poor country will finally spur a popular uprising against the authoritarian Castro-ite regime. 

What those two contradictory visions have in common is that they leave the vast majority of the Maduro regime in power, including, for now at least, its Vice President Delcy Rodríguez and its Secretary of Defense Vladimir Padrino López, in what many speculate was a U.S. negotiated deal with them not to resist the Maduros’ arrest. With Trump shockingly dismissing the authority of María Corina Machado, the heroic democratic leader of Venezuela’s popular opposition to the vicious dictatorship, such a dispensation would crush the freedom and accountability aspirations of the Venezuelan people. 

Meanwhile, beyond Cuba, Trump revived his ambitions to wrest Greenland from Denmark, a close U.S. NATO ally, and bring it into a union with the United States. The Trump administration’s proclaimed corollary to the Monroe Doctrine apparently makes it believe it can do what it wants in the Western Hemisphere. 

In his news conference on January 3, 2025, President Trump made clear that the military operation in Venezuela was largely about oil. He said that the United States will “run” Venezuela for a time and will maintain “a presence in Venezuela as it pertains to oil.” He seems to believe that oil revenues will fund the ongoing presence, stating that, “We’ll be selling large amounts of oil to other countries,” and that running Venezuela “won’t cost us anything.” 

This is nonsense.

The oil industry in Venezuela is a shambles. Venezuela’s national oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela Sociedad Anónima (PDVSA), was once a well-run company, but decline began when former president Hugo Chávez fired thousands of employees in 2002-03 after a strike that pressured Chávez to hold early elections. Lack of investment and mismanagement at PDVSA have since resulted in dwindling production over more than 20 years. Production was about 3.2 million barrels per day (mbd) in 2000 and is now about a million mbd. Restoring production to its peak would require years and billions of dollars in investment.

Trump acknowledged the slump in Venezuela’s oil industry, but he has unrealistic ideas about its prospects for rapid recovery. The current environment does not support the needed level of investment. Venezuela’s vast oil reserves consist primarily of very heavy, sour crude, generally similar to Canada’s oil sands. Such oil is expensive and complex to produce and sells at a discount compared to lighter, non-sulfurous oil. Many refineries in the U.S., especially on the Gulf Coast, are equipped to process this crude, but those refineries are already running at very high utilization rates. Oil markets today are well-supplied and prices are falling, narrowing the profit margins for expensive-to-produce crudes. Finally, companies require a stable political environment to make large investments. It’s not clear when Venezuela might achieve political stability, and growing oil revenues certainly won’t be available to ease that transition. 

We’ve heard this story before, when oil revenues were intended to fund the reconstruction of Iraq. It wasn’t true then, and it won’t be true now. 

What to make of the surprise attack on Venezuela and the arrest of its sitting president by the United States? The first thing I will say, since my new book “To Dare Mighty Things: U.S. Defense Strategy Since the Revolution” comes out next week, is that I am NOT surprised to see an American president be extremely assertive with the use of the American armed forces, given our nation’s history (not that I saw this particular operation coming). We have never been isolationist, especially close to home. 

Otherwise, my reactions do not fall neatly into just one category. On the plus side, in addition to being very impressed with the quality and excellence of the operation, I would say that President Maduro deserved no protection, had lots of (especially Venezuelan) blood on his hands, and is alleged to be a drug trafficker. His removal does not trouble me ethically. In addition, the Trump administration’s initial attempt to find a more reasonable leader from within the previous government’s ranks seems pragmatic and offers some (modest) hope of a minimally painful transition.

On the other hand, on balance I was against this operation and the way it was done. Constitutionally, Congress should have been asked for authorization in advance of any major mission like this—not on the details, of course, but on the basic concept of pursuing regime change in a foreign country through military action. Moreover, international law cannot sanction the decision of one government, even ours, to use its own legal system as a basis and justification for attacking the government of another country. I am not an international law purist, but would only countenance something as dramatic as this decision if large numbers of American lives were directly at risk due to the incumbent Venezuelan government, and they were not in this case. Even more to the point, given what we have learned in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and building on my colleague Vanda Felbab-Brown’s insightful work on the country, I am very worried about how to build a more stable and secure Venezuela, especially without large numbers of American boots on the ground. There are far too many criminal groups and other violent actors to expect any political transition to go easily; I remember the history of Colombia from the latter parts of the 20th century in particular as a warning. I hope and pray for the best but am not hugely optimistic about the path forward. 

President Trump, as foreshadowed in his newest National Security Strategy, is talking loudly and swinging a big stick at our neighbors, this time aimed at Venezuela. Trump’s particular brand of lawless bravado, narrow-minded nationalism and crony capitalism have combined in Venezuela to lead our nation down a dark hole of open-ended responsibilities for the world’s largest holder of oil reserves and the region’s largest source of migrants (though not narcotics, the alleged threat). The harmful consequences for U.S. national security, and international peace and security more broadly, will unspool for years to come. 

After years of course correction away from direct military intervention in the Western Hemisphere, Trump has resuscitated the Monroe Doctrine not to keep the world safe for democracy (note his dismissal of Venezuela’s democratic opposition), but to ensure U.S. access to whatever natural and other strategic resources it may need. Now coined the “Don-roe Doctrine,” Trump’s scheme to rebuild U.S. primacy in the region comes at a favorable political moment in which conservative U.S.-friendly forces are ascendant in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Leftist leaders in Colombia, Brazil and Mexico are vocally critical but will likely avoid doing much more to preserve their economic and trade interests. Cuba is flat on its back. External powers engaged in the region – particularly China, Russia and Iran – will likely pull back from any provocative actions but will at least hold steady with their current ties in the region. 

The grievous damage that Trump’s illegal attack on Venezuela has inflicted on international law and multilateral cooperation is perhaps the least tangible but most consequential of outcomes. 

When the Trump administration attacked Venezuela and captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro, many commentators naturally sought precedents. Trump’s action against Venezuela fits an infamous pattern of American interventions in Latin America. The closest parallel may be the invasion of Panama in 1989, when the United States captured the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and put him on trial on U.S. soil. 

But the search for precedents should not obscure the unprecedented institutional and international context that makes this time very different.   

Institutionally, in contrast to Trump 1.0., Trump’s second administration is purpose-built to enable his every whim. Additionally, Trump’s current advisers have their own agendas—including Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s desire to cut ties between Venezuela and Cuba, and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s apparent plan to use a wartime footing to further expand presidential power domestically. The result was a highly risky “logroll”: everyone got something different out of the operation, but nobody agreed on a post-Maduro plan. We saw this dynamic in Iraq, where different advisers supported invading for different reasons, obscuring serious post-invasion risks. But today, Trump faces virtually no check on his foreign policy, no experienced advisers to pivot to a plan B, and, by his own design, no allies to help. 

Internationally, Trump’s action took place in what is now a lawless world. Trump did not create this world by himself, but he used the enormous power of the presidency and his position as the leader of a still-dominant United States to throttle what remained of international law and norms.  In seizing a leader by military force, Trump may have opened Pandora’s Box. Greenland, Colombia, Mexico, and Taiwan are watching nervously, while Ukrainians are likely watching in grim recognition. 

The U.S. intervention in Venezuela epitomizes the American way of war since 9/11: stunningly effective tactics by special operations forces, dangerously divorced from any coherent story about how they will produce strategic and political success. 

The United States has once again successfully overthrown a foreign leader. But leadership decapitation does not automatically produce regime change, which requires reprogramming a country’s institutions, including its military, in order to change the country’s behavior. Regime change is harder, riskier, and more resource-intensive than simply extracting a dictator, and there is little evidence that the Trump administration has prepared to do it successfully. But without it or significant further military escalation, it is also unclear how much long-term policy change the United States can really expect from Venezuela. 

Venezuela is twice the size of California with a population of nearly 30 million people, comparable to that of Iraq in 2003. In that war, the United States invaded with a multi-division ground force as part of an overall campaign involving hundreds of thousands of troops. Although the United States quickly toppled the regime in Baghdad, Iraq descended into a brutal civil war and insurgency that took years to arrest even with a long-term U.S. ground presence in the country. The war produced refugees, widespread Iraqi civilian deaths, and tens of thousands of U.S. casualties—not to mention the Islamic State, whose remnants the United States continues to battle. 

The United States has spent months amassing air, naval, and special operations forces in the Caribbean, but there is no large-scale ground force assembled to actually “run” the country. The president’s remarks dismissing opposition leader Maria Corina Machado made clear that he has little interest in a genuine democratic transition either. 

All of this raises the question of how much policy change on drugs, immigration, and oil—the ostensible motives for the operation—will result from Maduro’s capture. His departure alone certainly will not bring overnight political liberalization or economic recovery, outcomes that at best would be years away even with adequate planning and resources.

The administration appears to believe that it can use the threat of further strikes to coerce remaining members of Maduro’s regime to cooperate with U.S. objectives. But what happens when they don’t comply, or when they do and it provokes internal resistance or civil war? Is the United States prepared to significantly escalate its military operations at that point? Will it engage in endless raids and targeted killings (the approach used in the global war on terror), launch a large-scale air campaign (which stands little chance of coercive success if history is any guide), or invade (a campaign that Marco Rubio has implied would require congressional authorization, and which the United States is ill-postured to execute )?

These and many other unanswered questions suggest that the weekend’s tactically impressive raid is unlikely to produce strategic and political success. 

By many measures, Venezuela has more oil in the ground than any other country. A lot of the early commentary about the United States snatching President Maduro out of Venezuela has focused on oil. “No blood for oil” proclaimed opponents. And President Trump, himself, focused a lot of attention on oil during his Saturday press conference: “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies—the biggest anywhere in the world—go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure.” The United States went to Venezuela, many people are saying, to grab the oil.

I am skeptical that the invasion of Venezuela is centrally about oil and energy. There are less costly and risky ways to produce oil; on top of that, the world oil market is already poised for oversupply. But if we take the oil argument seriously, will U.S. firms actually invest massively to make Venezuelan oil great again?

Over the short term, the answer could be a resounding yes. Venezuela, thanks to years of neglect, incompetence, and sanctions is ripe for Western expertise and capital. Investment of modest sums—perhaps a few billion dollars, though it is too early to know—along with enough political stability might allow some U.S. firms to devote capital, technology and people in ways that expand output from existing fields and facilities while getting paid in oil. First in place probably would be Chevron (already operating in Venezuela for years) followed by several other firms that, like Chevron, have seen their assets expropriated but decided to sit on the sidelines until things change politically (e.g., ConocoPhillips). Watch, too, the service companies that specialize in the legwork of finding oil and improving operations (e.g., Halliburton and Baker Hughes). Prompt repayment in oil might reduce or eliminate the need for government funding. One of the many unknowns today is whether a Venezuelan redevelopment scheme, backed by governments and multilateral financial institutions, might sit ready with incentives that could help jump start such projects.

Over the long term, the opening of new fields and massive expansion will require a lot more capital (perhaps on the order of $100 billion) and thus require much bigger oil output longer time horizons to make financial sense. More capital at stake and longer delays in getting repaid spell more risk. Oil firms remember the last time Venezuela was a darling for Western investors, only to turn ugly when Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez forced Western companies to give assets to the government-run oil company. Venezuela’s extra heavy crude competes with similarly goopy supplies from other countries (e.g., Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia) and not every refinery can deal with the stuff—more goopy supply will require still more investment to process it. While instability inside Venezuela is the biggest risk for the long term, there’s another factor to watch: while the Americans were pushed aside, Russian and Chinese firms came to dominate the country. Will they, now, be pushed aside quietly?

Venezuela remains a member of OPEC, but that aspect of this story is probably irrelevant since Venezuela has long made its own decisions about output. What holds the OPEC cartel together are the other producers, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who are more willing and able to swing production up and down. 

The dramatic events that unfolded over the weekend—culminating in the capture of Venezuela’s authoritarian leader Nicolas Maduro—are jaw dropping for many reasons. One that stands out, however, is the baffling indication that U.S. troops could work to stabilize the country and impose regime change. Leaving aside the dissonance of this approach with an “America First” ethos and the disastrous precedent it sets for authoritarians seeking to remove other leaders they don’t like around the world, foreign-imposed regime change as policy is among a handful of tools where there is clear consensus about its efficacy: democratization by force is very expensive and rarely works. That is assuming democratization is the goal at all.  

Other explanations emanating from the administration include drug enforcement and oil extraction. Or even, as Secretary Rubio all but foretold, hoping for—or orchestrating—a subsequent collapse of Cuba. The true answer is different depending on who you ask, and likely a combination of all four.

With 99.9% percent of the original Chavista regime intact, barely even the concept of a plan for what comes next in Venezuela, and the deck stacked against foreign-imposed regime change anywhere, the events of this past weekend seem at best unlikely to improve the dismal situation Venezuelans face. Instead, they could quite possibly lead to regional destabilization, power vacuums, and further entrenchment of organized crime—absent an unlikely, huge, multi-year U.S. investment. Even with such a resource commitment, success is far from guaranteed. Rather than making the Western Hemisphere better off, Trump’s ‘Donroe Doctrine‘—his rebranding of the Monroe Doctrine aimed at building a U.S. sphere of influence in Central and South America—seems to have made a relatively secure region meaningfully less stable overnight. 

Several U.N. officials, foreign leaders, prominent U.S. Democrats, and legal and political commentators agree that the U.S. strikes on Venezuela on Saturday (and the capture of President Maduro and First Lady Flores) violate international law. The attacks, and President Trump’s announcement that Washington will “run” Venezuela (which Secretary of State Rubio tried walking back on Sunday), challenge customary international law and treaty law (embodied in Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter, among other key texts), specifically the prohibition on using force against another state or interfering in a state’s internal affairs. Yet there is little that international institutions, particularly the United Nations, can do to punish this conduct. 

Notably, U.N. sanctions are applied through the Security Council, the U.N.’s enforcement arm, where the United States is a veto-wielding permanent member. Moreover, the U.S. government doesn’t accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the U.N.’s judicial arm. Venezuela could one day try to challenge the United States at the ICJ for violating customary international law and treaty law (including Article 2(4)), like Nicaragua did in the 1980s. Nicaragua argued—and the ICJ agreed—that U.S. assistance to the Contras in their insurgency against the Sandinista government was unlawful. But the Reagan administration declined to participate in the merits phase of the case, didn’t recognize the judgment, and ended the U.S. practice of automatically recognizing ICJ jurisdiction. Trump, or a future U.S. president, could simply refuse to consent to ICJ jurisdiction. 

For its part, the International Criminal Court (ICC) lacks jurisdiction over the crime of aggression for nationals of nonmember states like the United States. So U.S. decision makers, intelligence personnel, and those involved in military operations are immunized from prosecution at the ICC, and thus lack an important deterrent against aggressive action such as we saw on Saturday. 

More problematic still, many foreign leaders, notably in neighboring Canada and within the European Union, have been reluctant to push back against Washington and are instead encouraging a peaceful transition negotiated and led by Venezuelans. Unrestrained by international institutions or key allies, Trump has set more countries in his crosshairs, including Greenland, Cuba, and Mexico. This may be the end of the rules-based international order as we have known it since World War II.