The most revealing response to Nicolás Maduro’s removal did not come from diplomats, NGOs, or international legal bodies. It came from Venezuelans themselves. Across the Diaspora–in Miami, Madrid, Bogotá, Toronto–the reaction was not confusion or fear, but relief. Celebration. A stunned disbelief that the nightmare might finally be ending.
Inside Venezuela, where dissent has long been punished and speech tightly policed, the regime’s legitimacy collapsed years before American helicopters ever appeared. Maduro was not governing a nation; he was occupying one. That reality matters because it exposes the central lie repeated in the aftermath of his removal: that this was a foreign imposition against the will of the people. It was not. It was an intervention that aligned with consent long extinguished by repression, corruption, and criminal capture.
Understanding why this moment matters requires understanding what Venezuela became. Under Hugo Chávez, oil wealth funded ideology. That ideology hollowed out institutions: criminal networks captured them, and those networks fused with the state itself.
Over time, the regime aligned with hostile foreign powers, and Venezuela ceased to function as a sovereign country in any meaningful sense. It became something more dangerous: a platform. What ultimately forced the issue was not ideology alone but convergence – when corruption, crime, and geopolitics merged into a single operating system.
Venezuela did not merely tolerate narco-trafficking; it fused it with state power. Drug routes became state assets. Cartels became partners. Cocaine was no longer merely a criminal product – it became a geopolitical currency. Proceeds were laundered through shell companies, gold smuggling, and shadow banking networks that bypassed sanctions and funded aligned causes.
This is what distinguishes narco-states from corrupt states: they do not merely steal–they scale. Drugs moved north. Money moved sideways. Influence moved everywhere. Once a regime reaches that point, it ceases to be a domestic political problem and becomes a transnational security node.
This is where Iran and Hezbollah enter the picture–not as slogans, but as logistics. For Iran, Venezuela offered something rare: a friendly regime with weak oversight, access to ports and airstrips, financial opacity, and ideological alignment against the United States and its allies. It was a permissive environment in the Western Hemisphere – far from Middle Eastern scrutiny and uncomfortably close to American shores. For Hezbollah, Latin America has long served as a fundraising and facilitation zone. Illicit trade corridors, shell companies, and criminal schemes that exploit diaspora networks were not incidental. They were infrastructure, and Venezuela provided state cover. When narcotics money intersects with terror finance, the threat is no longer theoretical. It is operational. What was dismantled was not merely a government, but an ecosystem.
This is why the moment belongs as much to Marco Rubio as to Donald Trump. Trump is the decider. Rubio is the architect. Rubio has spent years warning that Latin America is not a humanitarian abstraction but a security theater. His worldview is not democracy-promotion romanticism; it is hard realism–regimes as systems, states as nodes, sovereignty as functional rather than sacred. This operation did not resemble the NGO-driven interventions of the past. It was not about exporting values. It was about dismantling infrastructure.
Power within an administration is revealed not by titles but by trust. When the operation was announced, the screen told its own story. This was not delegated to the Vice President. It was not treated as a domestic political exercise. It was placed squarely in the hands of the Secretary of State. That absence is not an insult; it is a signal. This was the most consequential hemispheric action of the Trump presidency, requiring diplomatic sequencing, intelligence coordination, alliance management, and post-operation statecraft. Those responsibilities were not distributed broadly. They were concentrated. In American politics, succession is not declared. It is demonstrated.
Venezuelans haven't lost their sovereignty
If this were truly an act of imperial domination, it would not have been greeted by the people who suffered most under the regime. Venezuelans did not lose sovereignty when Maduro fell; they lost a jailer. For years, the regime survived not through consent but through coercion–manipulated elections, crushed opposition, weaponized hunger. The moral calculus here is simple, even if unfashionable: sovereignty without legitimacy is not sovereignty. It is coercion with paperwork. That is why the loudest outrage has come not from Venezuelans but from those farthest removed from the cost of failure.
This is not imperialism, and it is not colonialism. Imperialism subjugates functioning societies for extraction and control. What occurred in Venezuela was the removal of a criminal regime that had already stripped its people of agency, sovereignty, and a future. Colonialism imposes rule without consent; this intervention aligned with the will of a population long ruled by force.
The coalition condemning Maduro’s removal is neither accidental nor diverse in motive. Authoritarian powers such as China, Russia, and Iran object because the operation threatens a system that shields criminalized regimes through legal paralysis. Revolutionary socialist states and their allies object because the United Nations has long served as a sanctuary for ideological failure. Western commentators on both the far left and the post-national right object because, in their worldview, American agency itself has become illegitimate–whether framed as imperialism, globalism, or “Zionist control.” The rhetoric differs, but the structure is the same: all depend on a world in which captured states remain untouchable and accountability is endlessly deferred.
Within hours, Maduro’s allies fell back on a familiar reflex: they blamed the Jews. The claim that the operation had a “Zionist tint” was not mere rhetoric. It was ideological muscle memory. When reality collapses, conspiracy fills the vacuum. When regimes fail, antisemitism offers an all-purpose solvent–dissolving responsibility and replacing it with myth. This accusation is not evidence of Israeli involvement. It is evidence that the operation struck a nerve. When Iranian-aligned ecosystems lose permissive environments, Israel benefits. So do Jews globally. That is not control. It is a consequence.
The backlash also reveals deeper confusion about power. Some invoke international law as though it were a magic shield that could transform criminal platforms into legitimate states. Others argue that restraint is cost-free. It is not. Removing a sitting head of state by force is a rupture. It carries risk. It invites blowback. Pretending otherwise would be unserious. But inaction is also a decision–and Venezuela had already been billing the world for it through drugs, migration, terror finance, and hostile alignment.
America First does not mean America Alone. It means recognizing that a world rife with criminalized regimes is inherently unsafe–for Americans, for allies, and for democracies everywhere. Stabilizing a strategic failure point is not charity. It is self-defense.
History does not shift because the world agrees. It shifts because reality finally overwhelms the stories we tell to avoid responsibility. Venezuela fell not because of ideology or oil, but because a criminal regime became indistinguishable from the threats it enabled. The operation that removed Maduro did not break the international system; it exposed how long that system had been used to protect failure. That is why antisemitic conspiracies appeared immediately. That is why legal abstractions were invoked so urgently. And that is why the people most affected welcomed it while those most insulated condemned it.
This was not imperialism. It was the day the excuses ran out.
Venezuela was never just Venezuela–it was the moment when narco-terrorism, revolutionary socialism, antisemitic scapegoating, and global paralysis finally collided, and the world was forced to choose between preserving a broken system and confronting what it had spent years refusing to name.