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Summary
Washington says its strike on Caracas was about drugs and US security, but the capture of Nicolás Maduro points to a larger game involving oil, regime change and geopolitics. By stretching international law, the US may just have emboldened China over Taiwan—and made the world a more dangerous place.
On 3 January, the US carried out airstrikes on Caracas in the backdrop of heightened tensions in the Caribbean and its recent interdictions of vessels alleged to be carrying narcotics in Venezuelan waters. The White House framed this operation as a necessary move to dismantle narco-terrorist efforts and halt weapons being sold to anti-US forces. This large-scale operation included the ‘capture’ of Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro and there is enough to suggest that its aims were wider than claimed.
US President Donald Trump claimed Caracas has been emptying Venezuelan prisons and mental wards into the US, a narrative critics say was weak justification for the use of force.
The capture of Maduro indicates an attempt at regime change, consistent with a revamped US national security strategy that treats American primacy in the Western Hemisphere as a non-negotiable. Venezuela’s close relationship with the Kremlin, which includes hosting Russian military facilities in violation of the Monroe Doctrine under its left-leaning government, thus appears to have been a key trigger for US action.
The White House has stated that it seeks to oversee a “safe, orderly and judicious” transition of power in Venezuela, signalling continued US involvement in its political future. That Venezuela’s vast oil reserves may be in play as a factor is clear too. This may offer the US strategic gains, but carries heavy geopolitical and economic risks.
The American operation reveals a broader geo-economic strategy for the region that is unfolding against the backdrop of Maduro’s sustained refusal to reopen large-scale oil dealings with US corporations. Venezuela’s intrinsic value in the global energy market has led to stiff US sanctions in the past that impacted India’s hydrocarbon partnerships there.
The latest US actions jeopardize ONGC Videsh Ltd’s $200 million San Cristobal and Carabobo investments; dividends and crude-oil supply had been disrupted before, but now the future of these appears to hang in the air.
US business involvement and extraction activity in Venezuela is negligible, while China has emerged as its principal importer of crude oil. Even as the US administration urged renewed engagement, American oil firms reportedly stayed away amid political volatility in Caracas. This may have made regime change to install a US-friendly government an appealing idea in US geo-strategic circles.
Legally speaking, the US strike on Caracas sits on uncertain ground. International law prohibits the use of force against another state’s territory unless authorized by the UN Security Council, or in self-defence against armed attack. Drug trafficking does not meet that threshold under established standards of international jurisprudence.
Analysts warn that Washington has risked not just an erosion of the rule of law in world affairs, but may have also violated customary international law by compromising Venezuelan sovereignty, and if the airstrikes that accompanied the US capture of Maduro are found to have caused civilian harm, allegations of war crimes under international humanitarian law could be levelled.
Framing warfare as global policing is not unusual of the US, but unilateral military power running roughshod over international principles could have larger implications. It could normalize coercive intervention by a hegemonic force in a way that reshapes global expectations and lowers the cost of external aggression by stronger nations on smaller countries.
Such a global order could embolden China, for example, to encircle Taiwan, on the bet that framing its territorial ambition as a routine enforcement of its rights will yield condemnation without any real deterrence. Beijing’s showed its approach with its ‘Justice Mission 2025’ military drills conducted at the fag end of 2025. These war games were the largest since 2022 by geographical scope. Several exercise zones extended into areas within 12 nautical miles of Taiwan’s coast, marking a significant escalation. The timing and framing of these drills were deliberate.
Justice Mission 2025 followed within days of Washington’s approval of a record $11.1 billion arms package for Taiwan and was accompanied by Beijing’s sanctions on 30 US defence firms and executives. It was a coordinated military-economic response to what Chinese authorities characterized as foreign interference in China’s internal affairs.
China’s ministry of foreign affairs described the drills as a “punitive and deterrent action” against Taiwan’s forces of independence and their external supporters. Beijing thus sought to brand its escalation of a territorial tension as a matter of its own sovereignty.
As Venezuela’s sovereignty is violated with apparent impunity to safeguard Washington’s perceived strategic vulnerabilities arising from Russia’s presence in the region, the future looks bleak for any multilateral peace arrangement to be institutionalized.
Worse, it could encourage aggression in the Eastern hemisphere. After all, Beijing views Taiwan’s reunification as a historical inevitability rather than policy choice. A global environment of unchecked unilateralism and selective law enforcement could give us a more dangerous world than before.
Saksham Raj and Aditi Lazarus contributed to this article.
The author is professor and dean, O.P. Jindal Global University, visiting professor, London School of Economics, and a visiting research fellow at the University of Oxford.
English (US) ·