Venezuela

Those who equate democratic action with tyrannical abuse in the name of international law will not be remembered as cautious but as complicit.

The United States’ decision to act decisively against Nicolás Maduro has already triggered a familiar chorus of condemnation. Once again, the language of “international law” is being weaponized not to defend human dignity but to protect tyranny.

This moment is not unprecedented. In 1989, the United States intervened militarily in Panama to remove Manuel Noriega, a narco-dictator who had turned a sovereign state into a criminal enterprise. Then, as now, critics warned of catastrophic precedents. Then, as now, they were wrong.

History judged that intervention not as an act of imperialism, but as the overdue enforcement of accountability when all other mechanisms had failed. President George H. W. Bush understood what many of today’s Western leaders appear to have forgotten: that law divorced from justice degenerates into farce.

The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the Islamic Republic of Iran may seem an unlikely pairing in the effort to make sense of the world at the moment, but the dramatic events unfolding in these two decrepit kleptocracies aren’t just coinciding in an inconvenient competition for front-page headlines.

It’s all part of the same story. If you get it wrong you’ll end up badly misreading U.S. President Donald Trump’s theatrically brilliant exfiltration of the Venezuelan caudillo Nicolás Maduro over the weekend. You might even conclude that the United States is truly “locked and loaded and ready to go,” as Trump himself put it last Friday, to defend Iran’s protesters against the Khomeinist regime’s guns.

Failing to intervene would have allowed a narco-terrorist state to wreak havoc at our doorstep.

On Saturday, President Trump ordered the capture and arrest of Nicolas Maduro. The American military successfully extradited the Venezuelan leader to New York, where he awaits trial in federal court.

While skeptics charge that Trump is simply making an oil grab, the facts paint a different picture. America’s intervention in Venezuela could enhance U.S. security, liberate an oppressed nation, and expand freedom in our hemisphere.

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— Vince Langman (@LangmanVince) January 6, 2026

The online wager platform Polymarket has angered some gamblers by declaring it will not pay out yet on millions of dollars’ worth of bets on a US invasion of Venezuela, arguing that the capture of the then president, Nicolás Maduro, does not qualify.

Before Donald Trump’s forces captured Maduro on Saturday morning, some traders appeared to have anticipated the shock move by placing bets on “prediction markets”.

These are gambling platforms that allow individuals to wager on a range of markets that have been created by the host website. They are typically binary bets, punting on yes/no or higher/lower outcomes.

Within hours of President Trump’s announcement of the dramatic weekend capture of Nicolás Maduro, social media was flooded with AI-generated deepfakes showing the captured Venezuelan dictator in handcuffs and even sitting alongside Sean “Diddy” Combs, who was previously locked up in the same jail where Maduro now is in real life.

The seizure and removal of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their official residence in Caracas, to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, with no American casualties, has been an astonishing strategic and tactical success.

It eliminates one of the few anti-Western governments in the world, reinforces the general move to the democratic right in Latin America, and strikes a deadly blow against the narco-terrorists who have severely provoked the United States. It probably cuts the lifeline from Venezuela to the dismal Marxist regime in Nicaragua, and has already been cited as a warning to the erratic president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, whom Trump has named as head of the vast Colombian illegal narcotics producing and exporting operation. Trump also revoked Petro’s visa to enter the United States after he gave a speech in New York, urging American armed servicemen to ignore orders to engage with Hamas and other terrorists.