Venezuela

In the middle of the night on Jan. 3, my WhatsApp lit up with hundreds of messages, videos and reports describing unfolding events in Caracas and other cities throughout Venezuela. Confusion gave way to elation when the news finally broke: Nicolás Maduro was in U.S. custody.

President Trump suggested Wednesday that the US will oversee Venezuela for at least a year following the Jan. 3 arrest of the South American country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, on federal drug and weapons charges.

“We will rebuild it in a very profitable way,” Trump told the New York Times in a lengthy interview. “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil. We’re getting oil prices down, and we’re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need.”

Those who equate democratic action with tyrannical abuse in the name of international law will not be remembered as cautious but as complicit.

The United States’ decision to act decisively against Nicolás Maduro has already triggered a familiar chorus of condemnation. Once again, the language of “international law” is being weaponized not to defend human dignity but to protect tyranny.

This moment is not unprecedented. In 1989, the United States intervened militarily in Panama to remove Manuel Noriega, a narco-dictator who had turned a sovereign state into a criminal enterprise. Then, as now, critics warned of catastrophic precedents. Then, as now, they were wrong.

History judged that intervention not as an act of imperialism, but as the overdue enforcement of accountability when all other mechanisms had failed. President George H. W. Bush understood what many of today’s Western leaders appear to have forgotten: that law divorced from justice degenerates into farce.

The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the Islamic Republic of Iran may seem an unlikely pairing in the effort to make sense of the world at the moment, but the dramatic events unfolding in these two decrepit kleptocracies aren’t just coinciding in an inconvenient competition for front-page headlines.

It’s all part of the same story. If you get it wrong you’ll end up badly misreading U.S. President Donald Trump’s theatrically brilliant exfiltration of the Venezuelan caudillo Nicolás Maduro over the weekend. You might even conclude that the United States is truly “locked and loaded and ready to go,” as Trump himself put it last Friday, to defend Iran’s protesters against the Khomeinist regime’s guns.

Failing to intervene would have allowed a narco-terrorist state to wreak havoc at our doorstep.

On Saturday, President Trump ordered the capture and arrest of Nicolas Maduro. The American military successfully extradited the Venezuelan leader to New York, where he awaits trial in federal court.

While skeptics charge that Trump is simply making an oil grab, the facts paint a different picture. America’s intervention in Venezuela could enhance U.S. security, liberate an oppressed nation, and expand freedom in our hemisphere.

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— Vince Langman (@LangmanVince) January 6, 2026

The online wager platform Polymarket has angered some gamblers by declaring it will not pay out yet on millions of dollars’ worth of bets on a US invasion of Venezuela, arguing that the capture of the then president, Nicolás Maduro, does not qualify.

Before Donald Trump’s forces captured Maduro on Saturday morning, some traders appeared to have anticipated the shock move by placing bets on “prediction markets”.

These are gambling platforms that allow individuals to wager on a range of markets that have been created by the host website. They are typically binary bets, punting on yes/no or higher/lower outcomes.