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On Saturday morning, in what the Trump administration dubbed Operation Absolute Resolve, Delta Force commandos entered the compound of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and extracted him from his own country. They took his wife too, and killed dozens of Venezuelans in their path.

Members of the administration say this was about accountability. Attorney General Pam Bondi says Maduro is about to face the “full wrath of American justice.” She alleges he’s been running Venezuela as a narco-state.

Shane Harris, a staff writer covering national security and intelligence at the Atlantic, says the administration’s actions are not surprising. Since September, the United States has been obliterating fishing boats off Venezuela’s coast and calling it a drug war.

The logic behind Maduro’s extradition is equally hard to explain. And Harris doesn’t want to call it a regime change. The regime remains in place: The vice president is now the interim president.

“That’s still the regime,” he says. “And now I think the United States is not running Venezuela, as President Trump said they were going to do. I think that the United States is essentially holding Venezuela at gunpoint and saying to the new interim president, You’re going to do what we want and govern the country according to these demands, or you’re going to face consequences.”

On a recent episode of What Next, host Mary Harris tries to answer a few of the bigger questions about what just went down in Venezuela. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: I think some people would look at what’s happened over the weekend and say, “Oh, are we at war with Venezuela?” So are we? 

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Shane Harris: No. Look, we’ve taken hostile action against Venezuela. Could Venezuela say we’re at war with them? Sure. Yes. We invaded their country. I mean, we violated their territorial sovereignty. But Congress has not declared war.

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Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, says this is primarily a law-enforcement action because........

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