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American airstrikes pounded military and other installations in Caracas while Delta Force operators stormed presidential compounds, kidnapping Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. By sunrise, the couple were airborne, bound for US soil to face “narco-terrorism” indictments. President Donald Trump proclaimed victory on Truth Social: a “large-scale strike” executed with precision, minimal US casualties, and decisive results.

This is the most overt US military intervention in Latin America since the 1989 invasion of Panama – a deliberate echo of history in Washington’s perennial backyard.

The operation is inseparable from the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), released just weeks ago. For the first time in decades, the document explicitly elevates the Western Hemisphere to America’s highest strategic priority. It vows to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence” and introduces the “Trump Corollary” – a formal update to Roosevelt’s 1904 expansion that justified US policing of the region.

This new corollary commits Washington to denying “non-Hemispheric competitors”, principally China and Russia, any military positioning, strategic asset ownership or undue influence in the Americas.

Venezuela, with its deep oil ties to Beijing, military cooperation with Moscow and supposed drug-trafficking networks, embodies the very threat matrix the NSS constructs: migration surges, narcotics flows and extra-regional penetration. Today’s strike transforms doctrine into deed, fusing the alibi of “counter-narcotics enforcement” with great-power exclusion – precisely the methodological shift toward proactive hemispheric containment that I analysed in recent columns on Trump 2.0’s emerging grand strategy.

Latin America’s response has been predictably fractured along ideological lines. Progressive governments have condemned the action as a grave violation of sovereignty and international........

© The Wire