U.S. Special Forces Capture Nicolás Maduro, Trump Declares America Will "Run" Venezuela

The snatch echoes Operation Just Cause (Panama, 1989) when U.S. troops seized Manuel Noriega for drug charges, and earlier hemispheric interventions from the 1954 CIA-backed Guatemala coup to the 1898 seizure of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Yet unlike those Cold-War episodes, today’s backlash is led by another great power: Beijing, whose $100 bn stake entwines Chinese capital with Latin oil, turning what once was a U.S. “backyard” into a contested front in the post-unipolar order. The raid spotlights two long-running arcs—Washington’s episodic resort to force when legal avenues stall, and the erosion of the post-1945 multilateral security framework when the Security Council is bypassed. On a 100-year horizon, the operation may mark either a last gasp of U.S. hemispheric primacy or the moment that accelerates a new norm where rival powers openly challenge interventions, fracturing what remains of the rules-based system forged in 1945.