To the Trump administration’s critics, this month’s U.S. special operations raid that captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro is the epitome of everything that is wrong with President Donald Trump’s worldview. The operation, which included a wave of airstrikes on select Venezuelan military sites across the country, occurred without the slightest consultation with Congress, let alone a vote that authorized the mission. Here was the United States, supposedly the guardian of the so-called rules-based international order, effectively violating another nation’s sovereignty by arresting its head of state and sending him to New York City to answer U.S. criminal charges of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking.
Some have made an even more dramatic claim: Trump’s decision to use force against Venezuela to remove its top leader will have grave geopolitical consequences for the world’s primary hot spots. As Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) said in a statement after the raid, “If the United States asserts the right to use military force to invade and capture foreign leaders it accuses of criminal conduct, what prevents China from claiming the same authority over Taiwan’s leadership?” M. Gessen, a columnist for the New York Times, expressed a similar sentiment in an op-ed published one day following the raid. Trump’s propensity to throw America’s weight around in the Western Hemisphere, Gessen said, will motivate Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to carve out his own sphere of influence in what used to be the Soviet Union.
Taken at face value, these assertions depict an era in which territorial conquest and modern-day empire building are just around the corner. But this scenario, while popular in the current discourse, shouldn’t be treated as gospel. The impressive spectacle that was the U.S. snatch-and-grab mission is likely a less transformative geopolitical event than conventional wisdom suggests.
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