Dressed in a navy-blue suit and a light blue tie, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio flanking him on one side and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the other, President Donalf Trump strolled to the podium on January 3 to deliver a stark message: “Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”
Trump had a reason for bragging. Hours earlier, U.S. special operations forces, with the support of U.S. air power, had nabbed Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their residence.
Maduro, a former union boss and bus driver, had ascended to the presidency when his mentor, President Hugo Chávez, died from cancer in 2013. Maduro had been a constant irritant to the United States, and he informed anyone who listened that Washington was the region’s, if not the world’s, principal menace. For years, he had survived against all odds, despite an economic collapse that lopped off about three-quarters of Venezuela’s economy and caused about 20 percent of its population to migrate to greener pastures. The first Trump administration had tried to isolate Maduro diplomatically and economically by recognizing Juan Guaidó, the leader of the Venezuelan national assembly, as the country’s rightful interim president, and by instituting sanctions against Venezuela’s oil industry. That strategy failed. The Biden administration had taken a different tack by negotiating with Maduro on everything from prisoner releases to scheduling presidential elections, only to discover that Maduro pocketed the concessions and failed to meet his end of the bargain.
Trump’s decision to nab Maduro and prosecute him on drug trafficking charges wasn’t a given. In the first few months of his second term, Trump opted to send his senior envoy, Richard Grenell, to Caracas to determine whether a grand deal with the Venezuelan despot was possible. The early outreach produced some deliverables for the Trump administration, including freedom for six Americans. For Maduro, that decision was a low-cost, potentially high-reward move to ingratiate himself with the mercurial U.S. president. “President Donald Trump, we have made a first step, hopefully it can continue,” Maduro said on January 31, 2025. “We would like it to continue.”
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