BREAKINGVIEWS-US raid on Venezuela threatens new global ruptures

By Gabriel Rubin

WASHINGTON, Jan 3 (Reuters Breakingviews) - The United States has long waged deadly interventions among its neighbors in the Western Hemisphere. Its latest, Saturday’s shock raid on Venezuela and the seizure of autocratic ruler Nicolas Maduro, is particularly brash. The country is already in a state of near-collapse, its economic output falling by roughly 70% since 2013. Yet the Trump administration’s move to decapitate its leadership risks further worsening a crisis that has already displaced 8 million refugees, perhaps magnifying it by destabilizing ally Cuba. It is an ominous harbinger of further jockeying by global superpowers, promising yet more conflict.

The U.S. attack is ostensibly aimed at crushing an alleged state-backed, global narcotics trafficking operation. Maduro will face indictment in New York on these charges, echoing the similar seizure and prosecution of Panamanian ruler Manuel Noriega exactly 36 years ago.

Of course, it contrasts with President Donald Trump’s pardon just last month of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was serving a 45-year prison sentence for drug trafficking. Notably, in a press conference on Saturday, Trump also outlined another justification: Venezuela’s nationalization of key oil assets, including those held by U.S. firms, decades ago.

It’s a remarkably direct admission of material U.S. interest in the country’s oil reserves, which count as the world’s largest. Venezuela’s petrochemical industry has withered, with production in 2025 averaging 1.1 million barrels per day, down from 3.5 million in the 1970s. Trump said that his administration would step in to run the country and oversee the revival of oil extraction under American corporate auspices.

That may be difficult to pull off even in ideal conditions. It’s also a very vague plan for dealing with the collapse of a personalist regime, which U.S. officials have worried will unleash chaos, the New York Times reported. A further outflow of refugees could spark yet more public backlash among Venezuela’s neighbors, like that which, in part, drove Chile’s president-elect Jose Antonio Kast to victory. It could also result in more people attempting to reach the United States, where immigration policies are growing more draconian.

Further instability could also rock Cuba, which depends on Venezuela for the majority of its oil imports, according to the Energy Information Administration, and which has suffered increasing blackouts since the U.S. began blockading Venezuelan exports.

That oil had been largely transported by Russian tankers and purchased mostly by China, as good a reminder as any of the grander geopolitical tensions behind this new assertion of U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere. Increasing Chinese trade, reflected by its interests in Peruvian ports, Bolivian lithium, Brazilian soybeans or Chilean copper, is clearly inflaming U.S. passions. More dangerous, though, is what this strike tells China and Russia about the weakness of norms restraining conflict. If aggressive military intervention is an acceptable tool in Ukraine and Venezuela, then it becomes more conceivable in Taiwan or elsewhere.

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CONTEXT NEWS

U.S. forces struck Venezuela and captured its long-serving leader Nicolas Maduro on January 3, President Donald Trump said.

The announcement came after months of pressuring Maduro over accusations of drug-running and illegitimately holding power.

Washington has not made such a direct intervention in Latin America since the invasion of Panama in 1989 to depose military leader Manuel Noriega, over similar allegations.