US President Donald Trump’s illegal invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife catapult the US into the league of rogue states, preeminent members of which are Russia and Israel. We shall return to this point.
The invasion, though illegal, was not entirely unexpected. In August 2025, the US began an escalated naval deployment in the southern Caribbean waters with warships and military personnel. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sent a team into Venezuela to track Maduro. In September, US forces began military strikes on Venezuelan vessels in the region, and in November 2025, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado pledged to open Venezuela's nationalised oil and gas reserves to private entities in the course of a business meeting in Miami attended by Trump. The Trump administration, it has been unreliably reported, has begun secret talks with Maduro's government about its oil reserves. There was an escalation in December to include seizures of oil tankers carrying sanctioned Venezuelan crude, with cowboy-style vessel boarding.
Falling back on his default template, Trump started lying through his teeth, claiming nonsensically that Venezuela's oil reserves had been stolen from the US. Oil vessel seizures formed part of the broader blockade preceding the January 2026 attacks, which began with a massive aerial bombardment of the sovereign country in the early hours of 3 January. US personnel then captured the country’s first couple.
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Technically, Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez is in charge, having been appointed interim president by Venezuela’s Supreme Court. But that’s as far as the world knows about what exactly is happening in the country. Trump, now effectively an international rogue actor, not unlike North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, has said, ‘We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.’
But it is not at all clear what exactly that means. Especially because Rodríguez has said that she and her country will resist the US’s invasion and attempt to ‘run the country’. She said Maduro was the only president of Venezuela and that her country was open to a respectful relationship with the US ‘within the framework of international and Venezuelan law’. "That is the only type of relationship I will accept, after they have attacked and militarily assaulted our beloved nation," she said.
This was a forceful rebuttal of Trump’s claim that she had expressed her willingness to do ‘whatever the US asks’. It’s easier to believe Rodríguez, because the entire world knows that Trump has no conception of where truth ends and falsehood begins. The point is bolstered by the Venezuelan government’s call to citizens to rise up against the US assault and said Washington risked plunging Latin America into chaos with ‘an extremely serious’ act of ‘military aggression’. “The entire country must mobilise to defeat this imperialist aggression,” it added.
Within a day, the US administration seems to have walked back from its grandiose claims. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on 4 January that the US will not have a day-to-day role in governing.
As a fig leaf, the Trump administration has paraded drug trafficking charges against Maduro to justify the invasion and abduction, but Trump has given the game away with his posturing. It’s all about stealing a sovereign nation’s natural resources: in this case, oil. Venezuela is the country richest in oil reserves in the world. Trump said soon after the operation that the US would be strongly involved in the country’s oil sector. "We have the greatest oil companies in the world, the biggest, the greatest, and we’re going to be very much involved in it," he has said.
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Rubio, in his later clarification, buttressed the point. He said the US would continue to enforce an existing ‘oil quarantine’ and use that power to pressure whatever dispensation was formally at the helm in the beleaguered country. The US would ‘continue enforcing the oil blockade, which was already in place, and use it to press for policy changes in Venezuela’, he said.
Taken together, the elements of what has happened in Venezuela point at a few conclusion. First, and surely foremost, is the inference that the main motive for the invasion is obtaining control over Venezuela’s oil reserves and that Trump is acting, as other presidents have done in the past, at the behest of US corporate and business interests: in this case, the powerful oil companies that want a piece of the action they’ve so long been denied.
The second, given Trump’s posturing, is that megalomaniacal president has finally realized that is approval ratings have been flushed down the toilet and stand at a record low for any incumbent: according to The Economist’s tracker -17 per cent as on 5 January. This is an attempt to rescue this situation. Military adventurism abroad has for long been the preferred solution for incompetent an authoritarian leaders. Whipping up a hypernationalist frenzy is part of the game, as we well know sitting in India, another failing democracy run by an ethnofascist regime.
The third conclusion is that Trump now feels sufficiently emboldened to export his dreams of dictatorship, having successfully torched democratic institutions in the US, stifling the freedom of the press and academic institutions in the process. But we must note that US dispensations that have protected democracy at home, at least in a limited way, have had no qualms about undertaking similar actions abroad. The invasion of Panama and abduction of its president, Manuel Noriega, in 1989, for example. Covert funding of and other support for coups by rightwing dictators was routine during the Cold War, as we know.
Now, the question is how the international order will react to this egregious violation of a country’s sovereignty, especially since Trump has now threatened Colombia and has long-standing designs on resource-rich Greenland. Only a handful of countries have protested, among them Brazil, Russia and China. Only Brazil’s view counts, given geopolitical realities.
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While UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has expressed alarm, the European Union is shamefully sitting on the fence. The UK has practically supported the US through Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s silence, but it is US’s pet poodle; one doesn’t expect any different. France and Germany have backed the action, by calling for a peaceful transfer of power while welcoming Maduros’s ouster.
This will return to haunt Europe, the only bloc which could have made some difference in the situation, as Trump’s actions will strengthen Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hand vis-à-vis Ukraine. Plus, this is an open invitation to China to up the ante in its backyard. Like South America and Greenland, Taiwan should now be running scared.
No one but the naivest believe that the world is organized into a rules-based order or that the UN is anything but a sham, but when the strongest power in the world directly joins known rogues like Israel and Russia in conducting imperialist invasions (though its happened in a different context in West Asia), we are in trouble. If the last four years have been catastrophic, with the invasion of Ukraine and genocide in Palestine, 2026 promises to surpass their horrors.
Nothing that has happened in the week since the abduction suggests that the turmoil created by Trump’s unprovoked aggression will subside. Trump said on 7 January that the US will occupy Venezuela for the near future. He made it absolutely clear that Washington would be extracting oil from Venezuela’s huge reserves for years. He didn’t rule out directly taking over the administration of the occupied country indefinitely. His remarks echoed statements issued by officials in his administration. Though some Republican and Democrat members of the US Senate have initiated a resolution to limit Trump’s power to conduct further acts of aggression against Venezuela, it is unlikely to become law because the president won’t sign it.
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Meanwhile, it has been reported that Trump officials are continuing to discuss the option of launching a military offensive against Greenland. Six European allies have expressed support for Denmark, which has that it wants to discuss the US’s claims on Greenland. A military operation could have repercussions that would be difficult to predict but would certainly be catastrophic. There is no form of international solidarity that can meet this threat, so, there is a real danger that the world will descend into a free for all.
Will Americans help bring some sanity to the proceedings by voting Trumpists out and holding his successors to account? It’s a very faint hope.
