The Venezuela Raid Was A Win. Take The Win.

In the wake of the Trump administration’s successful operation in Venezuela over the weekend, we’ve heard the usual hypocritical objections from the left: that the action was “illegal” (it wasn’t), that Trump is merely after Venezuela’s oil (he isn’t), that the arrest of Nicolas Maduro represents “Iraq 2.0” (it doesn’t).

These objections are of course as disingenuous as they are inaccurate. And anyway, whatever military operation Trump might undertake against America’s foes overseas will always be reflexively denounced by Democrats in the most hysterical terms — even when it’s wildly successful, as this one was.

But it’s the objections and outrage coming from the right that are more important — and more concerning. Rep. Marjory Taylor Greene, lately of MAGA, took to X to post a lengthy dissent, decrying the Venezuela operation as “regime change” and a betrayal of Trump’s base. The people who thought they were voting for Trump to end “our own government’s never ending military aggression and support of foreign wars” were wrong, says Greene.

Her grievances are representative of a not-insignificant swath of the right that is committed to a certain way of doing things, and specifically to a strict adherence to the rules-based international order. Writes Greene: “why is it ok for America to militarily invade, bomb, and arrest a foreign leader but Russia is evil for invading Ukraine and China is bad for aggression against Taiwan? Is it only ok if we do it?”

This is an important question, and it gets to the heart of some pretty deep misunderstandings of American power and national interest on the MAGA right, which is understandably wary of any foreign military action after decades of disastrous neocon adventurism abroad.

The short answer to Greene’s question is yes, it is okay if we do it, because we are doing it for ourselves, in furtherance of our national interests and national security, which is what the rules-based international order was created to safeguard. We had a communist dictator of an oil-rich country on our doorstep, who had not only colluded with narco-terrorist gangs to flood our shores with deadly drugs and illegal migrants, but had invited China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran to take up important roles in his military and industrial base. The radar and missile defenses our aviators had to take out over Caracas were built and operated by Russia. The troops guarding Maduro himself were Cuban. This was a strike above all against the revisionist powers that sought to gain a foothold (that had gained a foothold) in our backyard.

The facile response to this state of affairs is that of Greene: to throw up our hands and declare that if we depose a neighboring head of state it gives a green light to every other major power to do the same. Of course, it does not. It doesn’t even make such an outcome more likely. If anything, Beijing is far less likely to act against Taiwan today after this weekend’s action.

But more to the point, those powers have never adhered to the rules-based international order, which they see above all as an impediment to their rise. They cannot invoke it in their own defense, and we should not invoke it on their behalf.

A more mature response to Trump’s raid on Caracas is to recognize the differences between things and to make distinctions. There is a difference (to state the obvious) between the Maduro regime and the government in Taipei. There is a difference between our arrest of Maduro and Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. To spell out all those differences would be pedantic; everyone knows what they are.

There is a difference, too, between what a foreign country does to pursue its interests and what we do to pursue and safeguard our own. As an American, I’m partial to my own country. I would like our leaders to defend our borders and protects our interests with all the power at their disposal. I expect them to do so. If China invaded Taiwan, that would be contrary to our national interests and we would rightly oppose it. If a neighboring country devolved into a narco-state (as Mexico has), I would want us to take action against that country, international rules be damned.

That’s not to say principles don’t matter, but that they depend on context in the world as it really is. Foreign affairs do not work like math problems. You cannot plug in the numbers — or the principles of international law — to every place on the map and get the same result. States and regimes are different, and unequal. Many are states in name only, and exist at the pleasure and forbearance of real powers, who act on them and sometimes through them to further their interests. Such was the case with China and Russia in Venezuela, until this weekend.

It has been this way for most of human history. Hence the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary, which recognized that the countries of Central and South America were weak and susceptible to manipulation and meddling by European powers, and probably always would be. It was not and is not in our interests to allow that, and for many long years we didn’t. Indeed, up until the upheavals of the First World War, most countries recognized that there were great powers, lesser powers, and various places that were subject to some level of administration by these powers. American foreign policy, especially in Central and South America, was based on that reality. After the Second World War, all of this changed. We in the West accepted the disembodied Wilsonian framework of “territorial integrity” and “popular sovereignty” and “international law.” All of it was, to a large extent, a polite fiction. It still is.

No one, for example, thinks it would be permissible for the U.S. to launch a military expedition into Berlin and arrest German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, for the simple reason that Germany is a real state with real power. So are France and Russia and Poland. But it is absolutely permissible to go into Caracas and grab Maduro, because Venezuela is not a real state and has no real power. There is a different set of rules for regimes like Maduro’s, who place themselves outside of the rules-based order.

Indeed, it was Maduro’s decision to ally with America’s adversaries and allow them to establish military and industrial operations in his country. We did not force him to do that. Having done it, he has now discovered the consequences of doing so while Trump is in office, along with the rest of the world. Good.

It’s often said that Trump’s foreign policy is Jacksonian, and so it is: limited yet sharp military action to advance clear U.S. interests. It’s the opposite of neocon nation-building or regime change war-mongering. Those on the MAGA right tut-tutting the Venezuela action, like Greene, should know better than to make that false comparison. Trump’s Venezuela policy these last three or four months — the stationing of a flotilla of U.S. warships off the coast, the systematic targeting of drug boats, the seizure of the oil tanker — was designed to hew as closely as possible to the anti-interventionist instincts and preferences of his MAGA base. We are not at war with Venezuela. We have no occupation force there. And yet Maduro is gone.

It would be helpful at this juncture not to decry the administration’s Caracas operation as a betrayal of MAGA, but to understand his approach to foreign policy as a return to the historical norm — and a clear rejection of how U.S. foreign policy has been conducted for the last quarter century. If that means limited, unilateral, surprise actions from time to time, like the bombing of Iran’s nuclear program or the arrest and exfiltration of Maduro, actions that our military pulled off without significant casualties or an occupation, then Americans on the right should be grateful. In the case of Venezuela and Maduro, they should take the win.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.