Nation First analyses regime change, sovereignty, and the dangerous precedent set in Venezuela.
You were told the spectacular capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro was an arrest.
That it was about drugs. That it was about justice. That it was precise, limited, and necessary.
What it actually was was a large-scale military attack against a sovereign nation, with the USA bombing targets in Venezuela, inserting special forces into the country, abducting its sitting president and his wife, and then announcing it would run the country until further notice.
That distinction matters.
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Maduro was a failed socialist tyrant, but removing him by bombing a sovereign capital and abducting its leader was an act of war, not an arrest.
Calling a military invasion “law enforcement” collapses the moment the US admits it will run another country and threaten further attacks.
Republicans, not the left, sounded the alarm that this violated the Constitution and bypassed Congress’s sole authority over war.
The drug-war justification doesn’t survive scrutiny, while oil, money, and elite interests moved immediately and openly.
Socialism deserved to be judged by Venezuela’s collapse, but sovereignty and constitutional restraint were the real casualties.
Nicolás Maduro was a socialist autocrat who presided over the destruction of Venezuela’s economy. Under his rule, poverty exploded, corruption flourished, and millions fled. Socialism failed in Venezuela, as it has everywhere it has been tried.
But the moral judgment of a man is not the same thing as the legality of an invasion. And that is where the unease begins.
The Trump administration justified the operation as a law-enforcement action, not a war. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that Maduro and his wife had been indicted on charges including narco-terrorism, cocaine importation, and weapons offences, some under US statutes dating back to 1934. Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly framed the raid as the execution of an arrest warrant, likening it to the 1989 capture of Manuel Noriega.
Yet almost immediately, that framing collided with reality.
A military attack on another nation is an act of war, which triggers Geneva Convention protocols and measures under International Humanitarian Law. The US bombed the Venezuelan capital of Caracas repeatedly before its military forces invaded the nation to capture Maduro. And yet the claim is somehow there’s no war?
President Donald J. Trump publicly declared that the United States would “run Venezuela” until a “safe, proper and judicious transition” could be arranged, warned that a second and larger attack was possible, and announced that major US oil companies would be moving in to “fix” Venezuela’s energy infrastructure.
That is not an arrest. That is not simply war. That is regime change. And the USA has a very bad track record when it comes to regime change.
That conclusion does not come from hostile media spin but from past public statements by President Trump, such as:
“The current strategy of nation building and regime change is a proven, absolute failure.”
“We must abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change.”
“We’re getting out of the nation building business.”
Those words were not ambiguous. They were categorical.
And so it is without surprise that the warning, explicit and unmistakable, emerged from Republicans who are decidedly “America First”.
Congressman Thomas Massie, speaking on the floor of Congress following the assault on Venezuela, invoked Founding Father James Madison directly:
“James Madison warned us that in no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war and peace to the legislature and not the executive. Madison called it the crown jewel of Congress. The framers understood a simple truth: to the extent that war-making power devolves to one person, liberty dissolves.”
Massie did not defend Maduro. He defended process.
“If the President believes military action against Venezuela is justified and needed, he should make the case and Congress should vote before American lives and treasure are spent on regime change in South America.”
Then came the historical warning:
“Do we truly believe that Nicolás Maduro will be replaced by a modern-day George Washington? How did that work out in Cuba, Libya, Iraq, or Syria?”
And the central contradiction:
“If it were about drugs, we’d bomb Mexico or China or Colombia. This is about oil and regime change.”
Massie went further, pointing to the downstream consequences Washington refuses to acknowledge:
“Are we prepared to receive swarms of refugees and spend billions of American dollars to destroy and inevitably rebuild that nation? Do we want a miniature Afghanistan in the Western Hemisphere?”
Senator Rand Paul, also a Republican, made a parallel argument. While condemning socialism and Maduro’s record, Paul warned that removing a foreign leader by executive action without congressional authorisation was not a footnote; it was the very behaviour America’s founders sought to prevent.
Then came a detailed and damning critique from Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who asked the questions many Americans were already asking:
“If U.S. military action and regime change in Venezuela was really about saving American lives from deadly drugs then why hasn’t the Trump admin taken action against Mexican cartels?”
She followed with a second, sharper contradiction:
“And if prosecuting narco terrorists is a high priority then why did President Trump pardon the former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández who was convicted and sentenced for 45 years for trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine into America?”
Greene then cut to the core issue:
“The next obvious observation is that by removing Maduro this is a clear move for control over Venezuelan oil supplies.”
And finally, the comparison Washington prefers not to answer:
“Why is it ok for America to militarily invade, bomb, and arrest a foreign leader but Russia is evil for invading Ukraine and China is bad for aggression against Taiwan? Is it only ok if we do it?”
She concluded with a statement that should give any constitutionalist pause:
“Regime change, funding foreign wars, and Americans’ tax dollars being consistently funneled to foreign causes while Americans struggle at home is what has most Americans enraged. This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end. Boy were we wrong.”
Long before she was handpicked to be President Trump’s Director of US National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard had issued a warning that now reads like prophecy:
“The United States needs to stay out of Venezuela. Let the Venezuelan people determine their future. We don’t want other countries to choose our leaders — so we have to stop trying to choose theirs.”
The administration insists the operation was about drugs. Yet fentanyl, the substance devastating American communities, does not originate in Venezuela. It is produced using chemical precursors from China, manufactured and trafficked by Mexican cartels, and moved across the US-Mexico border.
And then there is the part no one bothered to hide.
Within hours of Maduro’s capture, Wall Street began organising exploratory trips. The Wall Street Journal reported that hedge funds, asset managers, energy executives, and defence interests have been openly discussing setting up meetings with the new Venezuelan leadership. Venezuela holds over 300 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the largest in the world. Trump himself has confirmed that US companies would be invited in to extract that wealth.
So is it really about the drugs? Congressman Massie pointed out, in a post on X, that the word “fentanyl” did not appear anywhere in the 25-page indictment against Maduro, although there was mention that he and his wife (both foreign citizens) were in possession of guns in violation of a 1934 U.S. firearm law. Quite bizarre.
None of this is to defend Maduro; rather, it is to defend a principle.
A world where powerful nations decide that sovereignty applies only to governments they approve of is not a stable world. It is a lawless one. If the standard becomes “he deserved it,” then no nation outside the circle of power is truly safe, and no constitutional restraint is truly real.
Venezuela’s story should have ended as a warning about socialism. Instead, it risks becoming another chapter in the long, familiar story of power unconstrained.
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