Opinion | Trump was right to oust Maduro

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President Donald Trump’s military raid on Jan. 3 to remove President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela from power has been widely criticized. Former Vice President Kamala Harris blasted the decision as “unlawful and unwise.” U.S. Rep. Gregory Meeks, the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called it “a violation of international law” that “risks entangling the United States in an open-ended conflict in Venezuela.” And Secretary General António Guterres of the United Nations said the attack set a “dangerous precedent.”

In fact, Trump was right to do it.

Some of the key justifications are well known: Maduro was charged with trafficking narcotics into the U.S. (he pleaded not guilty at his arraignment in New York on Monday). His governance drove millions of Venezuelans out of the country, fueling a migration crisis at America’s southern border. He gave American rivals — China, Russia and Iran — a foothold in our backyard. The security of the U.S., Latin America and the world stand to benefit now that Maduro is out of power.

But the potential benefits of Maduro’s removal run much deeper, particularly in Venezuela itself. Maduro was an odious and incompetent leader who engaged in human rights violations and badly mismanaged his country’s economy. While he was in office, Venezuela’s gross domestic product contracted by 80%, the poverty rate rose to 90% and hyperinflation peaked at 130,000%.

To be sure, many unanswered questions about the future of governance in Caracas remain, but it is hard to imagine that the next or future leaders will be worse than Maduro. His vice president and the country’s new acting leader, Delcy Rodríguez, has a reputation as a technocrat intent on reforming Venezuela’s oil industry. María Corina Machado, the exiled opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner, is beloved by the Venezuelan people, despite Trump’s comment that she lacks popular support; tallies gathered by volunteers showed her party won 70% of the popular vote in the 2024 presidential election. Maduro held on to power anyway. The promise of a better future is already prompting exiled Venezuelans to imagine a return home.

We face a similar situation today. Many Americans’ perception of the military has become more negative since the failed interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Though most Americans did not support military intervention in Venezuela, it’s hard to imagine any other power pulling off such a challenging military operation.

There is still the risk, of course, that America’s military becomes bogged down in a quagmire in Venezuela, as many have warned. But Venezuela is not Afghanistan. It is a middle-income country with high levels of social cohesion and a history of democracy, and the political opposition is unarmed. The Trump administration has said that troops and warships will remain at the ready off the Venezuelan coast, but it does not appear to harbor any immediate ambitions for a large-scale invasion of Venezuela.

The chief criticism that the raid has faced is its dubious legal footing. As far as domestic law is concerned, presidents of both parties have routinely employed American military power without explicit congressional authorization. As the Harvard law professor and former assistant attorney general Jack Goldsmith has pointed out, “there are few if any effective legal constraints on unilateral presidential uses of force.”

It’s true that the raid is in tension with the U.N. Charter’s prohibitions against one state’s use of force against another. But getting a U.N. Security Council resolution passed to authorize the military action would have meant winning the approval of dictators like Vladimir Putin. This is impossible‚ and indeed, undesirable.

Imagine a different scenario, in which Trump warned that Maduro’s days were numbered and deployed the largest U.S. military armada to the Caribbean in recent history. If Trump had decided instead to simply back down and go home, the Venezuelan people would be left with a dangerous and incompetent leader, the U.S. military and the American government may have lost credibility and the opening for our adversaries to entrench themselves in our hemisphere could have widened.

For the good of the country, let us hope it is not the last.