Why Venezuela became pawn in Trump's global power play era

US President Donald Trump speaks to journalists from the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025. [AFP]

Donald Trump imagines himself to be a 21st-century Teddy Roosevelt, craving for power and using the presidency as ‘bully pulpit’ to bully his desires into reality. Each proclaimed a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to empower them to do as they wanted.

Roosevelt, an instigator of the Spanish-American War that practically deprived Spain of its remaining colonies in the Western Hemisphere, offered to collect debts for the Europeans in the Caribbean.

Trump invaded Venezuela, plucked and airlifted Nicolas Maduro from Caracas to New York, and claimed rights to stop countries in the Western Hemisphere from befriending America’s rivals. Having little respect for international law, he made Venezuela collateral damage to his pursuit, and display, of raw power.

Other presidents have run roughshod of targeted countries. James K. Polk took Mexican territory from Texas to California which ultimately led to the Civil War. The Americans baptised the aggression ‘Manifest Destiny’ or God’s will for them forcefully to spread Jacksonian democracy across the continent.

William McKinley expelled Spain from its remaining colonies in the Caribbean and Pacific and claimed that God had told him to keep the Philippines. Roosevelt boasted of ‘taking’ Panama from Columbia to build a canal and left Congress to debate it.

Woodrow Wilson invaded Mexico to teach Latin Americans how ‘to elect good men’. Dwight D. Eisenhower overthrew governments in Iran and Guatemala for sounding socialistic.

Ronald Reagan, seemingly to divert attention from embarrassment in Lebanon where terrorists wiped out 240 marines in Beirut, invaded little Granada in the Caribbean because Maurice Bishop looked as if he was a Marxist.

George H.W. Bush kidnapped Manuel Noriega in Panama and sent him to a Miami jail. Thus, in grabbing and jailing Maduro, Trump simply followed an established American path of global aggression.   

While Bush had proclaimed a post-Cold War New World Order, however, Trump’s approach is different. Bent on re-igniting a different Cold War with China on trade and world influence, he also shares a sphere of interest philosophy with Russia in which the US keeps the West and Russia keeps the East.

Trump has made it clear to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he should make peace with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. What declining European powers, with their anti-Russian obsession, think becomes irrelevant to the emerging three ways Trump driven global power reconfigurations.

The Europeans appear to be victims of changing American geopolitical moods. While Joe Biden led them into war in Ukraine, Trump abandoned them and demanded they increase contributions to NATO expenses. With NATO members no longer singing from the same geopolitical and geo-strategic hymn book, thinking of Russia as the only enemy no longer makes sense.

Despite NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s braggadocio in June 2025 at The Hague Summit, “Our deterrence must be credible, our defence must be real, and our unity must be unbreakable,” NATO is internally shaky and seemingly directionless. Its members have to rethink whether or not the Trump-led US is an ally or ‘enemy’. They thus need to protect themselves from the US.

That shakiness is partly because Trump shifted the centre of American security thinking from North Atlantic to South Atlantic or Latin America and the entire Western Hemisphere that includes Greenland and Canada.

In South Atlantic, he can exercise the Trump Corollary as he did in Venezuela and was happy to show Maduro as a prisoner in New York. He is not in a hurry to leave and vows to run Venezuela for probably 15 years in order to benefit US companies and to determine who gets the oil and other resources. He also threatened to attack Mexico, Cuba, Columbia, and Canada as a way of stamping his hemispheric authority.  

Apart from craving for power, within and outside the United States, Trump’s desire to outdo other presidents is the inadvertent reason for his behaviour. He unsuccessfully had demanded a Nobel Peace Prize partly because the Nobel Committee had given it to war-mongering Roosevelt and a black Kenyan-American named Barack Obama. He then managed to get FIFA to give him a ‘Peace Award’ after making Rwanda and DR Congo to sign a ‘peace’ deal in Washington. And since Obama had nailed Osama bin Laden, Trump decided to nail Maduro. In doing so, Trump had practiced quick attacks in Iran and Nigeria and timed his Venezuela venture to open the year 2026 and as warning to other states that were reluctant to toe the American line.

Trump’s Venezuela invasion aroused peculiar behaviour. The Europeans, noisy when Russia went into Ukraine in 2022, cowed and dared not condemn or raise the issue at the UN Security Council.  Instead, they towed the American line, tried to justify the invasion and Maduro kidnaping, and sounded sheepish referring to international law.

After stating that Britain had wanted Maduro ousted, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said, “We shed no tears about the end of his [Maduro’s] regime.” Germany’s Friedrich Metz excused himself, stating, “The legal assessment of the US intervention is complex and requires careful consideration.” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis castigated Maduro and asserted, the “end of his regime brings new hope for the country. Now is not the time to comment on the legality of the latest action.” French President Emmanuel Macron, Maduro had ‘gravely undermined’ his country, calling on Venezuelans to rejoice that the US captured Maduro. Israel praised Trump as “the leader of the free world.”  

Critics accused Trump of aggression and violation of International law. Newly elected Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, declared that “unilaterally attacking a sovereign nation is an act of war and a violation of federal and international law” in “blatant pursuit of regime change.”

Austrian Vice Chancellor Andreas Babler condemned the invasion as moving the world “backward geopolitically” and rejected use of “the law of the jungle” as a political method.

South Africa called for a Security Council meeting and the African Union rejected the American logic. While Russia and China condemned the invasion, they did not raise the matter in the UN Security Council where they are permanent members. In part, this was because Trump had set precedent for them to invoke the ‘sphere of influence’ doctrine in their respective zones.

Trump’s team provided many reasons for others to trash international law and to relegate ‘sovereignty’ to figments of imagination. Trump reportedly declared that only “My own morality. My own mind … can stop me. I don’t need international law.”

With Secretary of State Marc Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hagseth, and Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine to help him run Venezuela, unstoppable Trump showed willingness to have American boots on the ground to ensure US oil companies pay expenses using Venezuelan resources.

“We are going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground … [to go to] the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused by that country.” He said that Delcy Rodriguez, the former Vice President become acting president, will remain in office only if she “does what we want.” He claimed to have superseded the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ and joked about it being called the “Donroe Doctrine.” Former Trump National Security Advisor and current US Ambassador to the UN, Mike Waltz argued: “You cannot continue to have the largest energy reserves in the world under the control of the adversaries of the United States.”

Trump loves to display raw power and Venezuela was an instrument. He had sent American troops to large American cities for ‘training’, and bombed Iran and Nigeria. He tries renaming institutions, destroyed American soft power tools, and downsized UN operations. The message was for the world to accept the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ as updated Trump Corollary that claims the entire Western Hemisphere is US territory. In exercising that display of raw power, Venezuela was simply caught as a pawn in Trump’s geo-strategic crossfire.