The Administration Plays Whack-a-Mole in Venezuela
And where it stops nobody knows
Barely three days after U.S. forces seized Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, the operation already looks like a geopolitical game of whack-a-mole—one improvised move after another, each raising new problems rather than resolving old ones. What we know, almost certainly, is that it was illegal. What we do not yet know is whether it will also prove to be a full-blown policy debacle. But the early signs are not good.
The administration’s explanations for its campaign of hostilities toward Venezuela have gone through a series of revisions. First, it was about narcotics—fentanyl, even though Venezuela is not a meaningful source of fentanyl. Then it was cocaine. Then it became regime change. Then, and at least in part still, oil—“American assets” supposedly stolen decades ago.
But the final justification for seizing Maduro that the government appears to have settled on is “none of the above.” The argument is no longer about narco-terrorism or acts of war perpetrated by cocaine boats off the Caribbean shore. Instead, the legal claim now rests entirely on domestic law enforcement: the extraterritorial arrest of an indicted criminal who also happens to be a head of state.
Recasting the operation as law enforcement allows the administration to sidestep many of the law-of-war hurdles that plagued its earlier justifications. There is no need for tortured reasoning about “narco-terrorists” or cocaine as a weapon of war, no need for congressional authorization, and no need to explain how invading another sovereign state complies with the U.N. Charter. Instead, we are invited to think of this as a SWAT-style arrest, transposed onto foreign soil.
But this was anything but a routine drug arrest. The seizure of Maduro involved a combined-arms military operation: scores of aircraft, intelligence and strike assets, naval platforms offshore, helicopter extraction, more than forty Venezuelans killed, and the threat of follow-on force. That is war-scale force, repackaged after the fact to avoid the legal and political scrutiny that accompanies the use of military power. Drugs are not weapons of war, smugglers are not enemy combatants, and however destructive narcotics may be, their movement does not transform law enforcement into armed conflict.
The problem was never technical. It was categorical: the administration tried to solve a criminal problem with military tools, then retrofitted legal theories to catch up. It is now attempting the same maneuver in reverse—solving a foreign policy problem with domestic law enforcement tools.
The reframing depends almost entirely on a single legal move: the resurrection of a 1989 Office of Legal Counsel opinion signed by then–Assistant Attorney General William Barr. The Barr memo advanced two propositions the administration now treats as settled law: that the president may order extraterritorial law-enforcement actions even when they violate international law and treaty obligations, and that such actions are permissible under domestic law so long as they enforce federal criminal statutes.
Those propositions were controversial when written, heavily criticized since, and never absorbed into mainstream executive-branch practice. What the memo did not claim is crucial. It did not say that violating the U.N. Charter was lawful. Instead, it argued that because certain treaty obligations are “non-self-executing,” they are not binding on the Executive at all.
That conclusion does not follow.
Non-self-executing means courts may lack a role absent implementing legislation—not that the Executive may disregard the obligation.
International law often carries a whiff of aspiration and malleability. Not this international law. Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Both the United States and Venezuela are parties. Under domestic law, Article VI of the Constitution, treaties are part of the “Supreme Law of the Land,” no less than the Constitution or federal statutes.
Accepting the administration’s theory would eliminate any limiting principle. A U.S. criminal indictment would function as a worldwide arrest warrant, enforceable wherever the president chooses to deploy military force. That is not law enforcement; it is a claim of global jurisdiction enforced through lethal force.
There is, in fact, a lawful alternative, and the United States has used it. When Honduran prosecutors and U.S. authorities targeted former president Juan Orlando Hernández, they proceeded through orthodox law-enforcement channels: indictment, extradition, arrest, and prosecution in federal court. No missiles. No invasions. No contortions of the law of war. No civilian casualties. That case illustrated that drug trafficking is a criminal problem, addressed lawfully through the criminal process.
And then, in a despicable act of sheer hypocrisy when stacked up next to the Maduro arrest, Trump pardoned Hernández after he had barely begun serving his 45-year sentence—echoing the vile January 6 pardons followed by the prosecution of Brian Cole, the alleged January 6th pipe bomber.
At this point the administration is not even defending the Maduro operation as lawful under the Constitution or international law. It is effectively saying the law is being ignored—and that there is nothing anyone can do about it, least of all Maduro.
In fact, Maduro will not be able to defeat the prosecution by arguing that his seizure was illegal. That’s a result of the Supreme Court’s Ker–Frisbie doctrine, which generally forecloses challenges to a criminal case based on the manner in which a defendant is brought before a U.S. court.
Nevertheless, Maduro’s case is less straightforward than a normal large drug conspiracy. Maduro has colorable claims of head-of-state and official-acts immunity, doctrines the Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized as limiting the justiciability of suits against foreign sovereigns and their officials. A corollary point is that the case will not proceed to trial for two to three years, at which point the practical, foreign-policy consequences of the abduction will have long since played out.
Maduro’s abduction immediately put many in mind of the 1990 seizure of Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega. On reflection, however, the Noriega case only undermines the administration’s argument. Noriega’s arrest followed a full-scale U.S. invasion of Panama, launched after attacks on U.S. service members and justified by the president as a military operation to protect U.S. nationals and treaty obligations. Whatever the legality of that invasion, the arrest came after the use of force, not as its justification. Here, by contrast, there was no armed conflict, no attacks on Americans, and no congressional authorization. The arrest itself is offered as the legal basis for the force.
None of this turns on whether Maduro trafficked in massive quantities of drugs, as it appears. Likewise, we can stipulate that his rule, though initially grounded in electoral politics after Chávez, became illegitimate after the deeply flawed 2018 election. And it does not depend on denying the obvious proposition that Venezuela, the United States, and the broader international community would all be better off with a genuinely democratic government in Caracas.
As obvious as these points may be, it is no less clear that they do not confer unilateral authority on the President to use military force. They are political and moral judgments, not legal predicates.
The law here is clear—and the Trump Administration has violated it, both in the broader Caribbean operation and Maduro’s seizure. But there is unlikely to be any legal remedy, which means the real judgment on this operation will come not from courts, but from the aftermath that is now beginning to unfold.
Even setting illegality aside, the more immediate question is whether this operation will succeed on its own terms—or instead collapse into a policy and strategic debacle. On that score, the early signs are not encouraging. President Trump has said the United States will “run” Venezuela, condition sovereignty on compliance, exploit oil resources, and threaten further military action, including “boots on the ground.” Allies across Latin America and Europe have condemned the operation. The Secretary of State has begun walking back the president’s words even as the -resident repeats them.
We have seen this film before. “Mission accomplished” moments have a way of dissolving once the moving parts stop moving—and once the harder questions of governance, legitimacy, and responsibility come due.
And our apparent indifference to the strictures of international law can only harm our standing on the world stage, where so much of American power depends on moral probity and the persuasive value of legal compliance. It’s fair to conclude that the snatching of Maduro was greeted with a certain cynical glee in Moscow and Beijing, knowing that it sharply undermines our ability to preach against similar violations of sovereignty in Ukraine and Taiwan.
And what is the grand strategic payoff that justifies this legal pap and the further surrender of the United States’s higher moral ground? As much as anything, it seems like a vanity project for Steve Miller and Marco Rubio and a path to billions of dollars for Chevron.
Regime decapitation rarely produces democratic success. In occasional cases it can fracture elite cohesion and open space for transition. Far more often, it yields repression, factional struggle, or external manipulation. History offers many more examples of botched regime change than of clean democratic transitions, especially when criminal accountability is mistaken for political strategy.
The warning signs are already flashing. The administration has shown little interest in democratic restoration and a great deal of interest in transactional control—particularly over oil. If the United States slides from seizure to stewardship, from arrest to “running” Venezuela, the operation will quickly resemble the very interventionist failures it claims to transcend. And this morning’s meeting in the General Assembly of Venezuela began with a fiery speech condeming Maduro’s abduction as “barbaric and cowardly attack.”
For now, the operation remains suspended between an illegal execution and an unknown resolution. Without a genuine commitment to democratic restoration, the seizure of Maduro will not be remembered as a turning point. It will be remembered instead as another moment when American power left country-wide wreckage in its wake, alienating Venezuela’s citizens and undermining the foundations required for democratic repair.
This is the current posture of the administration’s whack-a-mole approach: a flurry of illegal military blows; no settled objective; no international support and consensus; and no clear sense of what remains standing once the noise dies down.
Talk to you later.
We need regime change, now. Here in the United States.
This morning, I called my congressman and senators and told them to tie up Congress until Trump and his accomplices relent. I know that Congress has been notably absent since last January 20th, but there are things it must do, and if Democrats simply block everything and anything, that will be powerful. And, even though they are in the minority, they can do it.
A masterpiece of aftermath analysis. Thank you.
The place that needs regime change now—right now—is the Fractured States of America.