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Trump, Venezuela, and the New Era of American Strategy

January 19, 2026

On Jan. 3, 2026, the United States of America successfully completed Operation Absolute Resolve, captured Venezuela’s longtime dictator, Nicolás Maduro, and emphatically crippled the brutal socialist regime that has oppressed the Venezuelan people for over a decade.

In response, countless political actors and pundits have immediately leapt to condemn the Trump administration and criticize its bold campaign against Maduro’s despotic regime. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani criticized President Trump for “unilaterally attacking a sovereign nation.” Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez immediately denounced President Trump and declared that Spain “will not recognize a U.S. intervention that violates international law.”

Despite the plaintive bleatings of the American left and “progressive” neo-socialists across the world, it is evident that President Trump’s gambit against socialism and tyranny in Venezuela represents one of America’s first steps towards resurrecting the so-called “liberal world order” and free international society that leftists and Democratic governments have let collapse so spectacularly throughout the modern era.

Firstly, Nicolás Maduro was a savage dictator and guilty of countless human rights violations. Since the advent of his regime in 2013, Maduro relentlessly oppressed any political dissent in Venezuela and violently eradicated fundamental human rights, such as the right to free speech, the right to private property, the right of political assembly, and the right to life itself. In fact, according to the United Nations, “Nicolás Maduro and his representatives [have] engaged in serious human rights abuses, reaching a new milestone in the degradation of the rule of law.”

In addition, Maduro routinely murdered his political opponents and law enforcement officers, as well as innumerable innocent men, women, and children. Amnesty International reports that in 2024 alone, “at least 24 people died as a result of the [Maduro] government’s repression of protests [and] extrajudicial executions” and that “Opposition parties … faced numerous obstacles to participating in the election, including … arbitrary detention of their members and torture.”

Moreover, throughout the Maduro era, Venezuela has remained a constant source of insecurity throughout the international political system and within the United States of America itself. Venezuela is currently one of the primary sources of narco-terrorism in the U.S. as well as various other nations, such as Canada. Venezuelan criminal syndicates, such as Tren de Aragua, have flooded countless communities throughout North America with murder and human trafficking, as well as unfathomable quantities of debased narcotics that are immediately life-altering and deadly.

The Maduro regime has openly allied itself with a cohort of depraved cartels and actively participated in their attack on American society. In fact, although he has only recently been captured and forced to face justice by President Trump and the United States, Maduro has actually been charged with “narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devicessince 2020 and, ostensibly, aggressively pursued by the U.S. and the Biden administration for half a decade.

Finally, for over a decade, Maduro’s Venezuela has remained a hardline socialist state and, consequently, a bitter enemy to all democracy, as well as to the international society of free peoples and human dignity that America has historically championed. The Venezuelan people have long been explicitly divorced from any modicum of personal autonomy or political agency. And during the Maduro era, the economy crumbled and unbridled poverty has become endemic throughout Venezuelan society. For over a decade, the country has cried out for freedom from Maduro’s socialist dictatorship and clamored desperately to escape the nation’s looming collapse.

In truth, Maduro’s Venezuela is itself a living testament to the fact that any socialist state or communist economy is not merely grossly inefficient and utterly unproductive, but also quintessentially immoral and constantly in conflict with the fundamental human rights of its populace. Any earnest attempt to pursue socialism’s dogma or erect a communist society inevitably results in the gestalt of a hierarchical, stratified, and deeply oppressive society.

Despite the fact that a horde of political actors and pundits have condemned President Trump’s effort to eliminate Maduro’s regime, it is evident that America’s recent gambit against socialism and tyranny in Venezuela represents a crucial step towards resurrecting the so-called liberal world order and re-establishing the free international society that leftists and Democrats, such as Biden and Obama, have let collapse throughout the modern era.

In fact, it is clear that President Trump’s recent campaign to depose Maduro and liberate the Venezuelan people is a fundamental aspect of America’s attempt to re-establish its own national integrity and return to its historic role as the champion of democracy.

More importantly, it is apparent that Maduro’s rapid dispatch has forced a bevy of corrupt leaders and nations to scurry into the limelight of the new American epoch.

Even mainstream globalists and neo-socialists such as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and French President Emmanuel Macron must now begin to dismantle their own hyper-left-wing political structures in order to escape the ire of Trump’s America and survive the U.S.’ modern renaissance as democracy’s champion.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
William Barclay is a political theorist and private consultant. His work has been published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Palgrave-Macmillan, The Hill Times, and the Journal of Liberty and International Affairs, among others. Follow him on Twitter/X @WillBarclayBBC.
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