Dr Adam Quinn explains what Trump's action in Venezuela means for his vision for American security on a global scale.
The Trump administration has apparently developed a taste for bold strokes in the military domain. Just three days into 2026, the Americas awoke to learn that an elite team of US military personnel had, under the cover of air strikes, infiltrated the Venezuelan capital of Caracas and successfully captured the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro.
In public remarks immediately after Maduro’s capture, President Trump invoked the Monroe Doctrine: a two-century-old strategic principle to the effect that the United States will oppose any efforts by great powers from outside the region to establish new strategic footholds in the Western Hemisphere. This was a reference to Venezuela’s having reacted to antagonistic US-Venezuelan relations in recent decades by inviting Russian and Chinese investment and influence into the country.
Rather than echo the president’s heavy focus on the country’s vast oil reserves, however, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was keen to sell a more high-minded case for US intervention, emphasising that Maduro was an illegitimate leader and that the ultimate goal was “a transition to democracy”. This was followed up on 7 January with the announcement of a ‘three-step plan’ for Venezuela of stabilisation, recovery, then transition. But even as Rubio was drafting plans for long-term democratic transition, influential White House advisor Stephen Miller was doubling down on raw power politics. “We’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower,” he observed in a CNN interview. “The future of the free world depends on America to be able to assert ourselves and our interests without an apology.” Taken together, the administration’s varying statements added up to a confusing picture as to the United States’ intentions for who should now govern Venezuela and on what terms.
...the administration’s actions in Venezuela and accompanying pronouncements signalled that its conception of world order and the United States’ role in it diverges profoundly from the previously prevailing view of the American foreign policy establishment.
Emboldened by the ostensibly successful Maduro operation, President Trump moved speedily on to new frontiers, musing aloud about the possibility of using force against Colombia and Mexico and reviving his previously expressed interest in taking possession of Greenland from Denmark. Again, Rubio strained to interpret Trump’s remarks in the most moderate and reasonable form possible, briefing members of Congress that the Greenland initiative was a matter of diplomatic negotiation – the United States was interested in a purchase, not a conquest. Miller, by contrast, played bellicose outrider, eagerly floating the possibility of seizing the territory by force, telling the world via Jake Tapper that, “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland… We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
All things considered, one thing was clear: the administration’s actions in Venezuela and accompanying pronouncements signalled that its conception of world order and the United States’ role in it diverges profoundly from the previously prevailing view of the American foreign policy establishment.
The United States has, it must be stipulated, for a very long time asserted a special prerogative on its part to intervene, by force if deemed necessary, in the internal politics of Latin American nations, especially to ward off encroachment by extra-regional great powers. Its rhetoric and practice in that regard may have been significantly moderated during the latter part of the twentieth century, with the establishment of more consensual norms and regional institutions. But the United States has never truly ceased to regard the Western Hemisphere as its own ‘backyard’, in which, when push comes to shove, it is entitled to superintend the conduct of others. Even with due acknowledgement of this historical context, however, the scale and brazen character of this Trump administration caper – removing the leader of a major Latin American nation by force in an overnight military raid – is far beyond the bounds of anything in recent memory.
In November, the administration published its National Security Strategy, a document via which administrations articulate the larger intellectual vision behind their policies. This 2025 instalment was widely read as signalling that the United States, under Trump, no longer saw itself as engaged in the defence of a ‘liberal world order’ in partnership with politically like-minded European and Asian allies. On the contrary, it harshly criticised traditional allies, while its tone toward adversaries suggested openness to a quite different model for geopolitical order, more reminiscent of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than the post-Cold War era. This would be a world in which the greatest powers divided the world between them, each pre-eminent in its own domain.
To imagine that normative cues sent by the United States in the Americas will determine the military futures of Europe or Asia may, for better or worse, be vanity.
In the aftermath of the Venezuela operation, reports recalled that in 2019, Fiona Hill, a senior official in the first Trump administration’s National Security Council staff, testified to Congress that Russia had repeatedly floated a “swap arrangement between Venezuela and Ukraine”. That is, Russia would give the United States a free hand in its own region, if in exchange America would respect Russia’s claim to a ‘sphere of influence’ in Eastern Europe. In the 2010s, that idea was dismissed out of hand by more traditionally-minded American officials. In 2026, however, the combination of Trump’s moves in Venezuela and his shaky support for aiding Ukraine’s defence against Russian assault have led some to wonder if, in his second term, Trump may be more willing to embrace the logic of such a spheres-of-influence arrangement.
A couple of big caveats apply to that analysis, however. First, Trump has proven himself over the years to be an inconsistent policymaker, an undisciplined strategic thinker, and an unreliable interlocutor when it comes to both formal and informal international agreements. If Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping believe they are fortunate enough to have found a US president willing to limit his ambitions for dominance to the Western Hemisphere, while they get a free hand to quest for hegemony in their own regions, they may join a long line of actors ultimately disappointed by their end of an imagined ‘deal’ with Donald Trump. It is at least as plausible that a run of tactical good fortune in pulling off military operations like that in Venezuela (and, before that, in Iran last summer) gasses Trump up with hubris, emboldening him to play more aggressively in other regions too.
Second, it is far from obvious that how Russia or China will act regarding their top strategic priorities in their own neighbourhoods was ever meaningfully contingent on precedents set by US behaviour in Latin America. Russia began its full-scale military assault to conquer Ukraine years before Trump’s operation in Venezuela was planned. China has had designs on forcibly reuniting with Taiwan for decades and has been making military preparations for the attempt for many years. In both cases, prudential and practical calculations as to the likelihood of success play a far larger role than respect for precedents set, or violated, elsewhere by the US. To imagine that normative cues sent by the United States in the Americas will determine the military futures of Europe or Asia may, for better or worse, be vanity.
Deputy Head of Department
Dr Adam Quinn's primary area of interest is American grand strategy, especially the relationship between America's relative power in the international system and its internal ideological debates over foreign policy.
