The weekend’s events in Venezuela were a textbook US intervention. But how long can Trump stick to the script?
We've seen this all before, but is this president patient enough to stick to the playbook of interventionism seen in Panama and beyond?
Gunboat diplomacy is nothing new. Armadas have been dispatched to loom menacingly off the coast of one’s adversaries at least since the Athenian empire sent triremes to put the squeeze on the Delian League. Gunboat diplomacy isn’t even new to Venezuela. It was on the receiving end of a naval blockade by Italy, Germany and the UK in 1902 and 1903, and the Netherlands imposed something similar in 1908.
When the US Navy began building up its presence in the Caribbean in the second half of 2025, it looked like an endeavour of this sort. If it wasn’t evident why the US suddenly felt it necessary to pressurise the ghastly regime of Venezuela’s then-president, Nicolás Maduro, it was clear that it was committed to the bit, even sending the aircraft-carrier strike group attached to the USS Gerald R Ford, a warship that by itself fields a larger contingent of dedicated combat aircraft than Venezuela.
In the event, the payoff was more akin to the US invasion of Panama in 1989. That was undertaken to capture the country’s then-dictator, Manuel Noriega, a former CIA asset turned pestilential liability. As US paratroopers descended, Noriega holed up in Panama City’s Vatican embassy, where he was berated into surrender by chuckling American soldiers playing heavy metal tunes at deafening volumes.
The Venezuela operation appears to have gone more smoothly than that – indeed, it seems to have gone so precisely to plan that Maduro must be harbouring suspicions about his former colleagues. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were swiftly seized and exfiltrated, and he could now be tried on the charges on which he was indicted in the Southern District of New York in 2020 – or on new charges also naming his wife and son, among others. Noriega is again the obvious precedent: he ended up serving time in the US, France and Panama.
Noriega could also prove a useful marker when it comes to assessing what this will all mean more broadly – which might be not much. Then, as now, the finger-steepling foreign-policy cohort went into hyperdrive about shifting spheres of influence, a revival of the Monroe Doctrine, a new world order and so on, but all that actually happened was that the US installed as president Guillermo Endara, who had won the 1989 election that Noriega ignored, the world continued turning and, though Endara was far from perfect, he was a vast improvement.
The analogy holds up pretty well here. Maduro is, as Noriega was, an inveterate election rigger. Under Joe Biden, the US was among the countries that not only refused to recognise Maduro’s “victory” in Venezuela’s presidential election of 2024 but also acknowledged his opponent, former diplomat Edmundo González, as the rightful president-elect. González is presumably still available; ditto opposition figurehead María Corina Machado, whose politics are not a million miles from those of Trump, and who (and this cannot be altogether discounted as an animating factor of the weekend’s events) dedicated the Nobel Peace Prize that she won last year to the US president.
As of this writing, Trump seems keener on a less disruptive transition, suggesting his willingness to work with Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, so long as she does what she’s told (she has issued pro forma statements of defiance but the offer of power is often persuasive). But Trump has his self-glorifying triumph, his television spectacle, and we have a lifetime’s evidence that this is all that he ever wants until he wants the next one. Readers are invited to recall that it’s less than a fortnight since he decided to bomb Nigeria.
Andrew Mueller is the host of ‘The Foreign Desk’ on Monocle Radio and a regular Monocle contributor. For the latest news and developments in Venezuela, tune in to Monocle Radio.
Further reading? Monocle’s writer in Venezuela reported on the raid here. And after a successful operation in Caracas this weekend, is Marco Rubio hoping to be on the ticket for 2028?
