It was said that a certain class of analysts was shocked by the US night attack on Venezuela, which took away strongman Nicolás Maduro and his wife.
China has been given the green light to invade Taiwan. Russia is finally free to invade… I don’t know, maybe Ukraine?
Even by today’s declining standards, that analysis is pathetically superficial.
PRESIDENT TRUMP SAYS THERE WILL NOT BE A ‘SECOND WAVE OF ATTACKS’ AGAINST VENEZUELA BECAUSE OF THEIR ‘COOPERATION’
Neither Xi Jinping nor Vladimir Putin look to the US for permission. The opposite is closer to the truth: they want to cause trouble and undermine hegemonic power.
Russia attacked Ukraine and China conducted naval exercises in Taiwanese territorial waters, all without completing the White House’s Permission to Invade form.
What will be the lesson for Xi and Putin from the major invasion of Venezuela?
I would think it is this: that Trump will take enormous risks to protect American interests.
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I leave it to the intelligent reader to consider whether this will encourage or discourage rash adventures.
Trump has no desire to divide the world like an apple into spheres of influence, in which China, Russia and the US can plunder smaller countries at will.
His involvement in conflicts in Africa and Asia is proof of that – and anyone who has watched Trump for more than half a minute knows that he sets no limits on his actions.
In reality, Trump’s style of geopolitical gaming has no precedent, at least in my experience.
TRUMP SIGNALS A LONG WAY AHEAD IN VENEZUELA IN HIS CLEAREST INTERVENTIONIST MOVE YET
In any theater, he looks for the tactical attack that will completely change the strategic landscape in our country’s favor.
What will be the lesson for Xi and Putin from the major invasion of Venezuela? I would think it is this: that Trump will take enormous risks to protect American interests.
After allowing the Israelis to plow and sow the field in Iran, Trump scored a strategic victory by dropping bunker-busting bombs on the regime’s nuclear facilities. From that moment on, events in the Middle East tilted our way – and the negative consequences for Iran continue to multiply as I write this.
Likewise, Maduro’s withdrawal from his Venezuelan fortress has had a domino effect that has benefited the US not only in Latin America but around the world.
Let me count the ways.
IN VENEZUELA ITSELF
Here the dice are still rolling, and the ultimate consequences of the raid won’t be known until months, perhaps years, later. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio chose to keep the Maduro people in power over the Venezuelan democratic opposition – a gamble on stability against the possibility of chaos and violence.
It could backfire, but the signs so far look encouraging.
The new Venezuelan president, Delcy Rodriguez, who happened to be Maduro’s vice president, has been nice to the Trump administration. She may have played a role in the overthrow of her former boss.
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American officials are setting up shop in Caracas. It seems that the Cubans, Russians and Chinese are left out in the cold. Political prisoners are released.
From a strategic perspective, the most important thing is that the Venezuelan oil industry is about to be revived with the help of American companies – and Venezuelan oil will soon flood global markets.
CUBA
The once-vaunted military and intelligence personnel protected Maduro. In a humiliating blow to the country’s prestige, they were wiped out without much of a fight.
Cuba imports all its energy, but lacks the foreign currency to keep the lights on. Venezuelan oil, offered on a barter basis, represented 60 percent of fuel imports.
That has now disappeared with the wind. What still functions in the Cuban economy is about to disintegrate into darkness and silence.
President Trump said the post-Castro regime is “ready to fall.” He also threatened, in his inimitable all-caps way: “THERE WILL NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO!”
Nothing is certain.
But if the Cuban military, which already runs the country, believes that their equipment will grind to a halt within weeks, they may decide to do away with their Communist Party middlemen and make a deal with Yankee imperialism.
LATIN AMERICA
The region was already moving to the right – the fall of Maduro will only accelerate this trend. Conservative governments welcomed the US intervention, something unheard of in Latin America.
Radical left governments, on the other hand, are in panic.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro, once leader of the Marxist M-19 guerrillas, worried about his own fate. He received a reassuring phone call from the president and will visit the White House in February.
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Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega, normally addicted to repression, decided, following Delcy Rodriguez, to release political prisoners.
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega arrives for the inauguration of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on January 10, 2019. (Bloomberg via Getty Images)
He also canceled an anniversary celebration — in case the U.S. military looks for more unfriendly Latin American presidents.
CHINA
One condition Trump set for Rodriguez is that Venezuela end its alliance with China and Russia. Rodriguez wants to survive and seems willing to do so.
If so, Maduro’s departure will spell a strategic disaster for Xi — the loss not only of his most useful ally in the region, but also of access to 800,000 barrels of cheap oil per day, along with the total loss of what has been called China’s “$100 billion gamble” on Venezuela.
Furthermore, Maduro’s hideout was surrounded by Chinese military technology, including air defense systems. They were neutralized with remarkable ease.
When Xi calculates the costs of invading Taiwan, he must now add that mainland China itself appears vulnerable to air attack.
IRAN
Venezuela had become a playground for Iran and its terrorist allies such as Hezbollah. Not anymore.
As the Islamic regime fights to survive a fierce street uprising, Trump has condemned the slaughter of civilians and told protesters that “help is on the way.”
The fate of Nicolás Maduro therefore weighs heavily on the minds of the ayatollahs.
The anti-regime demonstrators also see the parallel with Venezuela and have cheered the president. There is a video of a young man, somewhere in Iran, solemnly changing a street sign to ‘President Trump Street.’
EUROPE
Venezuela has demonstrated – once again – the absolute irrelevance of the Old World in times of crisis.
European governments could neither help nor hinder the US, before or after the attack. They just mumbled from the sidelines.
Mostly they complained about America’s violation of international law – but then overcame their scruples long enough to inquire about paying Venezuelan debts to European energy companies.
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In a decade of repeated arguments, Europeans are still figuring out how to live in Donald Trump’s world. They have yet to admit that their static “rules-based order” has been swept away by a storm of change of which Trump is simply the avatar, not the cause.
It would be a shame if Europe’s geopolitical weakness encouraged the president to swallow Greenland whole.
RUSSIA
The most complex consequences will fall on this land.
Even more than China, Russia enjoyed a formal “strategic partnership” with Maduro, explicitly aimed at the US
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro shake hands as they exchange documents during a signing ceremony after their talks at the Kremlin in Moscow on May 7, 2025. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images)
Venezuela purchased billions of dollars worth of Russian military equipment, aircraft and weapons. Russia backed Maduro on the world stage and supported his blatantly rigged elections.
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Putin and Maduro stood shoulder to shoulder in Moscow as recently as May 2025.
That all ended literally overnight. But curiously, the Russians responded to the fiasco by saying little and doing nothing.
What’s going on?
There is, with regard to Russia, a bigger picture to think about.
The country is deeply mired in the quagmire of the war in Ukraine and has limited room to maneuver elsewhere. Western sanctions have put Putin in a position of complete dependence on China.
I believe the strategic intent of Trump and his people is to sever that link.
They want Russia to become a competitor rather than a satellite of China. That would explain the continued efforts to end a war that would otherwise have distracted and diminished an antagonistic force.
Because Russia is a major exporter of oil and natural gas, its economy rises and falls with the global price of those commodities.
Trump has clearly taken advantage of this. He has tightened sanctions on Russian fuel purchases even as he works overtime to drive down energy costs.
The ouster of Maduro apparently plays a role in this plan. The president expects to send a flood of Venezuelan oil into the markets.
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It’s his usual trick: a tactical blow that generates enough strategic influence to boost Russia’s peace with Ukraine.
In this case that has not yet happened.
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That may never happen – after all, Putin represents the Russian bear, while Maduro resembled a noisier but far less dangerous denizen of the tropical canopy. Frustrating American presidents is a habit the Russian leader has refined over the decades.
But it is a sign of the strange moment we are living through — and perhaps of Trump’s skill at turning tactics into strategic outcomes — that we can imagine an attack on a Caribbean dictator helping to end a bloody war in the heart of Eastern Europe.
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