The Return of Gunboat Diplomacy: The Trump administration's Capture of Nicolas Maduro

This is the slightly revised version of an essay first published in German in the German daily newspaper 'Koelner Stadtanzeiger' on January 5, 2026.

The era of gunboat diplomacy of Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt has returned. Between 1898 and the 1990s, the US carried out over 40 successful but entirely illegal interventions in many South American countries in order to undermine and overthrow governments it did not approve of. The best known interventions are probably the 1954 coup in Guatemala organized by the Eisenhower administration and John F. Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba in 1961.

The military action recently carried out by the Trump administration in Venezuela, which led to the arrest of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife and their enforced removal to New York, has some similarities with the much larger invasion of Panama in December 1989, carried out by President George H.W. Bush. It led to the overthrow of dictator Manuel Noriega. The latter, like Maduro at present, was accused of being deeply involved in international drug trafficking and narcotics smuggling and thus causing great damage to the US.

It seems that those who are strong and have sufficient military power can get away with almost anything without having to fear major negative consequences. At least, that is the lesson that the dictatorships of our time will learn from Trump’s policies. Still, it is unacceptable to use Trump’s high-handed actions in Venezuela to retrospectively justify Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, as is already happening in some quarters.

Trump has recently been paying increasing attention to the Western Hemisphere – i.e., South America and the Caribbean – and has revived the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. In 1823, US President James Monroe warned the European powers not to interfere in the region or even to continue colonizing it. In return, he promised, the US would not interfere in European affairs. This established the US as the dominant power in South America and the Caribbean and the Monroe Doctrine was used to justify American interventions in the following period. The Roosevelt Corollary of 1904 continued this policy by declaring the US as the “international police force” for the region and intervening militarily on numerous occasions, not least in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and many other countries, in order to assert American interests.

Maduro was not a good person. He was the exact opposite. He completely ruined oil-rich Venezuela, established an increasingly authoritarian regime, and jailed many opposition politicians and anyone else who opposed him. Maduro clearly lost the 2024 elections, yet he still had himself re-elected president against all protests. It was entirely justified to describe him as an illegitimate president and dictator. The US, the EU, and many other countries no longer recognized Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela in 2024. The vast majority of the Venezuelan population rejected Maduro.

Nevertheless, does that justify the Trump administration simply overpowering him in a very skillfully executed military blitz lasting only a few hours and taking him by force to the US so that he can be put on trial there? Of course not. This is completely contrary to international law and breaches the sovereignty of nations states. It also sets a dangerous precedent that will have negative repercussions in global politics for a long time to come. Putin, Xi Jinping, and many other autocrats and strongmen of our times will be watching closely to see how the international community reacts.

Essentially, the intervention in Venezuela also contradicts Trump’s own professed policy preferences. He has repeatedly said that he wants to be a peacemaker. He boasts of having ended eight wars, including the Gaza War. For months, he has been trying, albeit with little success so far, to bring peace about between Russia and Ukraine. This is also what his MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement wants to see. The majority of them are fed up with the US wasting its resources and the lives of American soldiers in international conflicts. They believe that the country has no business getting involved in all these conflicts that do not directly threaten the US. Many MAGA supporters are convinced that Trump should just focus on addressing social and economic problems within the US itself.

Nevertheless, Trump, together with Israel, bombed Iran, for example, and recently had terrorist positions in Syria bombed. And now he has announced quite imprecisely that the US wants to take over the government of Venezuela for the foreseeable future by means of a small, unspecified group. “We run it,” “we are in charge,” he replied when asked who was governing the country after the enforced removal of Maduro. How are we to understand all this?

Trump seems to have three main goals:

1. He wants to clearly demonstrate who is in charge in the Western Hemisphere. Unlike his predecessors as president, he is not willing to accept dictators in the region who are unfriendly toward the US or to come to terms with them in any way. He and his Secretary of State Marco Rubio have already indicated that Colombia and Cuba are also on the hit list. Trump is serious about enforcing the Monroe Doctrine, which he now calls the Don-roe Doctrine because of his own first name. Trump’s goal is “regime change” and the imposition of US-friendly governments – regardless of what the MAGA people think (though he may be forced to re-consider this approach for domestic political reasons).

2. Trump wishes to enforce the economic interests of the US, or rather American corporations, without any ifs or buts. In Venezuela, he not only wants Chevron, which has been producing oil in Venezuela for over 100 years (even during the Maduro era), but also other American oil companies to have free rein to exploit Venezuela’s huge oil reserves. Despite the huge investments needed to upgrade Venezuela’s run-down oil infrastructure, in the long run this would make these oil companies even richer than they already are but would also greatly benefit the US federal budget through tax revenues and other imposed fees.

3. Trump seems to be in the process of agreeing to a vague division of labor in the world with China, but perhaps also with Russia, while at the same time asserting and further expanding the dominant position of the US. It is difficult to know exactly what this will look like. It is certainly more complicated than the rather simple three-way division of the world that some analysts have mentioned with China responsible for Southeast Asia, Russia for Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, and the US for the Western Hemisphere, the Middle East, but also parts of the Indo-Pacific and some other European areas, such as Greenland. But this is still speculation and it is difficult to explore this further as the relevant information is lacking.

What is clear is that Europe plays no role whatsoever in any of these scenarios and is merely a passive bystander rather than a truly active and independent global player in its own right. Nor does Washington care much about the protests of the EU and many European heads of government regarding the intervention in Venezuela and the highly controversial forceful capture of Maduro, which is entirely contrary to international law.

Somehow, it seems, we have returned to the selfish and nationalistic but also extremely dangerous politics of the great powers of the 19th century when might was always right.