The explosions that rocked the capital of Venezuela on January 3 were not an isolated episode. They marked the climax of a carefully staged campaign. America is no longer threatening Venezuela; it’s acting.
Strikes on military bases, airports, and power grids targeted a regime, not gangs, yet even this dramatic escalation does not preclude political bargaining.
With Nicolas Maduro now removed, it would be unsurprising if the junta currently running Venezuela, under the leadership of Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, were to seek, and possibly secure, a deal with Washington.
The subsequent capture of Maduro and his transfer to New York showed both the force and the leverage Trump now holds.
President Donald Trump framed the operation as a war on drugs: narco-terrorism, cartels, and cross-border crime.
It is a convenient narrative, easily sold to American voters and courts alike. But it collapses under scrutiny.
Nearly eight million Venezuelans have fled
The opioid crisis devastating the US does not originate in Venezuela, but largely in Colombia and Mexico. Nor does migration provide a convincing justification. Nearly eight million Venezuelans have fled their country over the past decade, but this humanitarian disaster hardly constitutes a strategic threat to US national security.
The real issue lies elsewhere. Venezuela has become a geopolitical node for the China-Russia-Iran axis in the Western Hemisphere.
Oil shipments to China, military cooperation with Moscow, and ties with Tehran explain far more than the rhetoric of narcotics or migration. January 3 was meant to demonstrate that when Washington draws red lines, it is now willing to enforce them.
Yet this was not only foreign policy. It was also domestic politics. Trump’s Venezuela strategy speaks directly to his Hispanic base, particularly Cuban and Venezuelan-American voters in Florida.
That message has long been articulated by figures such as Marco Rubio, who built his career on opposition to leftist regimes in Havana and Caracas. The spectacle of Maduro’s arrest plays powerfully with this electorate – and Trump knows it.
The consequences across Latin America have been immediate and polarizing. Colombia, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico condemned the attack, warning that it undermines sovereignty and regional stability. Brazil’s president emphasized non-intervention, while Colombia reinforced its borders in anticipation of spillover.
These reactions reflect more than short-term political positioning or partisan ideology. Anti-American and anti-imperialist sentiment in Latin America cuts across both the left and right and long predates Trump.
It is rooted in a collective historical memory shaped by centuries of intervention and exploitation – an experience that continues to frame how US power is perceived across the region.
On the other side stand governments moving sharply to the right. Argentina’s President Javier Milei celebrated Maduro’s capture as a victory for “freedom.” In Chile, the newly elected president campaigned on building a wall along the borders with Peru and Bolivia, elevating personal security to the central political issue.
This rhetoric resonates in a country long proud of its stability and public safety, yet now deeply divided over its constitutional future.
Liberal and conservative camps clash over the very identity of the state - particularly over how to balance security, authority, and individual rights - divisions that echo debates familiar to Israelis.
Across the region, the model increasingly admired by many voters is no longer a liberal democracy but iron-fisted control.
The mega-prison built by El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele has become a powerful symbol of order for societies exhausted by crime and insecurity.
Trump himself made this worldview explicit. Asked whether the Venezuela operation was a warning to Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, he replied that she was “a good woman,” but that the cartels, not her, run Mexico.
Trump has repeatedly expressed admiration for strongmen like Recep Tayyip Erdogan, preferring decisiveness to democratic restraint.
Many in Israel argue that this is “good for the Jews.” I am not convinced. Riding on the internal fractures of polarized societies is a dangerous strategy. Latin America’s Jewish communities have historically thrived in pluralistic and stable environments.
Deepening polarization, militarization, and external intervention risk turning those fractures into fault lines, ones in which minorities are often the first to suffer.
What is unfolding is also doctrinal. A policy once framed as defensive - “America for Americans,” rooted in the Monroe Doctrine - has morphed into an assertive, even bullying doctrine, exercised most aggressively in Latin America, Washington’s own “backyard”.
The contradictions between Donald Trump’s slogans and his coercive regional policy are stark.
January 3 may mark not only the end of Maduro’s rule, but the beginning of a far more unstable order – one whose repercussions may reach well beyond Latin America, and eventually, back to us.
The writer is a historian specializing in Latin American Jewry and Jewish migration at the University of Haifa.