Maduro vs. the Donroe Doctrine

The reprieve was short. Luxuriating in my fluffy Bombas bed socks (a welcome Christmas gift) after a late night return from a serene sun break in the Dominican Republic, the ping of the Venezuela news alert set my ass on fire all over again. More Trump pyromania, and it wasn’t even Monday. Happy 2026!

It reminded me of another such alert at exactly the same time and on the same day—January 3^rd 2020—when we learned that U.S. drones had blown to smithereens Iran’s sinister nuclear Svengali, Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force. But Friday’s U.S. deployment of more than 150 military aircraft from 20 different military bases to “protect” an elite squad of Delta Force superheroes as they extricated a Venezuelan strongman with a hemispheric narco habit was way more jarring in its WTF overkill. One can only hope we get video footage of the snoring thug Nicolas Maduro, who in the Netflix version, will be wearing a striped nightshirt -his wife lathered in La Mer face cream - shouting “hijos de puta!” as the tattooed Rambos of special forces root them out of bed and block their desperate efforts to squeeze through that steel safe room door.

The weekend is not over and we are already pummeled by play-by-play punditry. But surely the most preposterous sentence Trump uttered in his address to the nation on Saturday was that the U.S. is going to “run” Venezuela until “such a time that we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.” That must be reassuring news for any Venezuelan who took note of America’s bollixed-up decades of blunder and blood in Iraq and Afghanistan. It must also be baffling—if welcome—for the hundreds of thousands of now-celebrating Venezuelans who fled to the U.S. from Maduro’s brutality, only to be told last year that they no longer had temporary protected status here and were bundled off by ICE. (There’s a few of these unlucky souls stewing in the same Brooklyn lockup their hated dictator now calls home.) And who are the august U.S. wise men who will form this transitional post-Maduro government Trump conjured up at the press conference? The same jostling gang of real-estate cronies, nepo statesmen, and golf hangers-on putting together the obliterated Gaza Strip’s Board of Peace?

Shock and Bore

In a New Yorker profile in 1996, Mark Singer noted the then 13-year-old Eric Trump fast-forwarding through Bloodsport, at his father’s direction, to bypass the tedious dialogue and get to the next pulse-revving kick in the face. Engorged by the effectiveness of the Fordo air strike in Iran and the global accolades after his ceasefire breakthrough in Gaza, Trump now fast-forwards past any potentially oppositional dialogue with either foreign allies or Congress itself—a surprise, no doubt, to Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who told Vanity Fair a mere three weeks ago, “If he were to authorize some activity on [Venezuelan] land, then it’s war, then [we’d need] Congress.”

President Trump’s press conference after Operation Absolute Resolve

Yep, it’s the “Donroe” Doctrine: chin-jutting hubris, flailing testosterone, and greed, greed, greed. America has the right to intervene, assault, abduct any government it doesn’t like in the Western Hemisphere and plunder the spoils. At least now we can forget about the last few months of fentanyl feint, when the U.S. military kept blowing up fishing boats allegedly loaded with Venezuelan narcotics. Trump said the quiet part out loud in his Saturday press conference. “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela, and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused by that country.” I.e., it’s all a big fat gracias to the oil and gas companies that donated nearly $500 million dollars to get Trump reelected and who have already been rewarded with billions in tax breaks and neutered environmental rules.

Trump has always seethed with jealousy over Obama’s iconic Osama bin Laden operation, authorized the very night in 2011 that the 44th president was humiliating Trump with his birther roast at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner before a room full of laughing liberals. On Saturday, photographs were released of the makeshift Venezuela war room at Mar-a-Lago, showing Trump, Hegseth, Rubio, Miller, and co. perched on gilded ballroom chairs or hovering before screens behind a hastily set up pipe and drape. It was an ersatz version of the famous bin Laden war room photo that captured the awe and incredulity of that historic moment.

The Trump war room during the Maduro raid (Jan 3, 2026) and the Obama war room during the bid Laden raid (May 1, 2011)

These days, Trump doesn’t even try to hide his second-term boredom with domestic policy. As we head into the second year of his second term, it’s all sabre rattling all the time, while the real global security threat, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, plays him like a balalaika in stalled negotiations to end the intractable war in Ukraine. Who knew the America First president would turn into an unabashed 21st-century imperialist? Certainly not the MAGA base, who was promised no more foreign wars. But, like many political leaders before him, Trump quickly figured out that the trivia cops of the national press corp in pursuit of home-based scandals can easily be banished with bellicose foreign action. In the blizzard of recent threats to Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico, it might have been easy to miss a Truth Social tweet on Friday that, in other times, would be an earth-shattering headline. Referencing the political unrest roiling in 25 of Iran’s 31 provinces, Trump posted, “If Iran shots [sic] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded.” For what precisely? Are we soon going to haul Ayatollah Ali Khamenei out of his holy bunker by his beard and into the next Night Stalker helicopter taking off from Tehran?

See You, and See You, and See You in Court

So yes, we have snatched Maduro, and brought him trussed, cuffed, and blindfolded to face American justice. But once the ratings buzz of this cinematic extraction is over, Maduro and his wife (who was once Hugo Chávez’s lawyer) will become a legal quagmire for America, like the fiasco of the last Latin American dictator we spirited to these shores, Panama’s pockmarked General “Pineapple Face” Noriega, convicted of drug trafficking, who preened and schemed for 27 years in jails in Miami, Paris, and Panama City until he died after brain surgery in 2017. Or the cluster of hollow-cheeked unlawful enemy combatants still rotting in Guantánamo Bay, a quarter century after America’s war on terror began. Maduro’s case could become even more of a courthouse nightmare than Noriega’s, with contentious issues around head of state immunity (even though he stole the Venezuelan election, Maduro was actually recognized as president, unlike Noriega), UN Charter violations, and the absence of any congressional authorization to abduct him.

The sixth U.S. president, John Quincy Adams, once said America should not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.’‘ Reflecting on these words in his brilliant 1991 profile of Noriega in Vanity Fair, the late foreign correspondent T.D. Allman posited that attempts to free others by force would “insensibly’‘ tend toward the corruption of our own freedoms and free institutions. “Adams’s argument was subtle and complex,” wrote Allman. “But he foresaw what events in our own time have demonstrated—how a war to impose freedom on Vietnam insensibly leads to Watergate; how turning Colonel Oliver North loose on the Sandinistas leads to the Iran-contra scandal.” And this was before Iraq.

We have yet to find out what violent unconsidered forces will be unleashed by the dawn raid on a sleeping Venezuelan despot on the third day of 2026.