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The Trump administration’s justifications for bombing Venezuela and arresting its president shifted in real time this weekend. Was this a national security–related counternarcotics operation, an oil heist, or a regime-change play to topple a dictator?

That lack of clarity—combined with the administration’s propensity to, well, tell a lot of lies—only added to the mass confusion over what’s really going on. After all, Donald Trump’s Venezuela adventure isn’t an isolated incident, and it’s best understood in proper historical context: the long tail of U.S. intervention in Latin America.

To help make sense of what just happened, and to get answers on what might happen next, I turned to Tiziano Breda. He’s a senior analyst covering Latin America and the Caribbean at ACLED, the independent conflict-monitoring organization that tracks political violence and protests worldwide. Breda has spent more than a decade studying Latin American politics and security.

In our conversation, he unpacks how this operation fits into the long arc of U.S. intervention in the region, the internal dynamics of Venezuela’s ruling “Chavista” coalition, the role of oil, and why the most dangerous consequence of this moment may not be what happens next in Caracas, but what it signals across the world. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Aymann Ismail: There’s so much in flux right now. What are the most important things we still don’t know about what’s happening between the United States and Venezuela?

Tiziano Breda: There are at least three variables that remain unclear. The first is how this will play out inside Venezuela now that Maduro has been removed. What has this generated within the Chavista power structure—in the government, the military, and across different sectors of society? What comes next depends on factors like whether Delcy Rodríguez [Venezuela’s acting president] can ensure continuity for the Chavistas while at the same time becoming somewhat more lenient toward U.S. interests.

The second is how this strike is being received in the United States. There has been backlash from Congress. The Trump administration has framed it as a law enforcement operation, but lawmakers say they were bypassed and are questioning the legality of the operation. The key question is how this lands with a Trump support base that is, in principle, uninterested in foreign interventions.

And third, at the international level, it’s still unclear how other major powers are interpreting this—whether they oppose it or see an opportunity. For countries like Russia and China, the question is whether this represents the loss of an ally, a precedent that could be applied in their own spheres of influence. For China in particular, it would mean not recovering the billions of dollars it still has as credit with Venezuela.

This didn’t come out of nowhere. There were months of escalating tensions. How does this moment fit into the longer U.S.–Venezuela standoff? Were you surprised when Trump announced the U.S. captured Maduro?

When Trump took office, his administration was mostly focused on immigration. Marco Rubio struggled with Richard Grenell over whose voice would be more influential in the White House on Venezuela. For the first few months Grenell seemed to have the upper hand: There were prisoner exchanges, deportation flights, Chevron’s license was renewed. But in 2025, Rubio established himself as a key strategic adviser on Venezuela. There was a noticeable shift: military buildup in the Caribbean, harsher rhetoric and labeling organized crime groups as terrorist organizations, allegations tying Maduro to some of them.

That framing was used to justify strikes against suspected drug-trafficking vessels—at least 34 so far with over 110 confirmed fatalities—not only in the Caribbean, but also in the Pacific. When that didn’t produce cracks within Maduro’s administration, we saw an escalation: oil tankers seized or chased, and a blockade on Venezuelan oil. That caused much more damage to the Maduro government’s ability to keep revenues afloat, yet there were still no cracks in Maduro’s network of alliances. So Trump was left with two options: either back down and strike some kind of deal or escalate. There had already been a CIA strike in late December, but I did not expect an operation of this kind.

The U.N. has........

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