President Trump’s authorization of the brazen U.S. military raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas has sent questions swirling around what comes next for the South American nation and what the Trump administration’s strategy is for preventing a total economic and security meltdown in Venezuela.
My name is Guy Taylor, National Security Editor for Threat Status at The Washington Times. I’m joined by National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang.
We’re going to break down how it was executed and what we can expect to happen next.
[TAYLOR] With regard to the surprise U.S. military raid, capture and extraction of Venezuela’s president, how did it unfold exactly?
[WOLFGANG] Surprise, I think, is one of the operative words here. I know I’ve been talking to colleagues over the past couple of days who have said there are a few things that really shock us at this point in our careers with respect to national security and foreign policy and military matters. But this was one of them, when I woke up, whatever time it was, 4:45 or 5 a.m. on Saturday morning, to see that there had been a U.S. operation that captured Maduro.
In terms of military planning, it really is one of the more impressive feats, I think we’ve seen lately in recent years or recent decades. 150 aircraft involved here, fighter jets, bombers, helicopters, drones, Delta Force commandos, a replica built of the Maduro compound so that the Special Forces could actually spend days or weeks training. So they knew the layout of this inside and out before they actually went in to conduct the mission in the early hours of that Saturday.
The aircraft launched from 20 different locations, according to General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I think when you talk about how this unfolded from just sort of military professionalism and effectiveness standpoint, it’s really quite impressive. But there is the matter of how the U.S. got the information that led up to the raid itself.
But I think more broadly speaking, one of the things we’ve been trying to pin down is why Trump did this. Why did he give the order to actually go forward with this mission? What is it about Venezuela that seems to have fixated the White House on it, made it almost the epicenter of the administration’s foreign policy? Why is that, in your view?
[TAYLOR] There are a few ways to answer that, Ben. I think the first is by looking at Trump’s new foreign policy doctrine writ large. It’s being described as a “spheres of influence” doctrine, where he sees the Western Hemisphere and really Latin America as a sphere where the U.S. should be the most dominant player. Trump’s official National Security Strategy, published in November 2025 indicated that the region is now viewed squarely as America’s backyard. And it is now official U.S. policy to actively push geopolitical rivals, namely China, but also Russia and Iran, from having influence in Latin America.
This matters if we’re trying to understand the administration’s fixation on Nicolas Maduro because the Venezuelan leader had been actively courting close security and economic relations with China, Iran, and Russia, specifically, all while defiantly opposing the United States in the region. U.S. intelligence has been warning about the potential dangers of, say, a Chinese or Russian military base suddenly being established in Venezuela or of China, or Chinese state-backed, Chinese Communist Party-backed companies controlling Venezuela’s vast oil reserves and rare earth mineral deposits. And so that was a motivating factor for Trump.
A separate factor has to do with Trump’s America First mantra, this view that Nicolas Maduro was facilitating criminal and drug smuggling activities that directly threatened the U.S. homeland, all while overseeing a chaotic country that produced millions of Venezuelan migrants to other countries, including the U.S., over the past decade. Trump has publicly claimed that Maduro deliberately backed criminal activity of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang inside the United States.
If you look at the convergence of all these things, illegal immigration, the drug war, drug smuggling, this is all just bullseye stuff for MAGA, foreign policy. It also just clearly intersects with Trump’s rhetoric on putting the protection of the U.S. homeland as his top foreign policy priority. So it’s a combination of factors that led up to the decision to launch this raid and capture the president of a foreign country.
Finally, Ben, remember that during Trump’s first term in office, his administration pushed very hard against Nicolas Maduro. In 2019, Trump actually publicly pleaded with Venezuela’s military to stop supporting Maduro and instead support then Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó in replacing Maduro after what was viewed by most international observers to have been a sham election in Venezuela that had been stolen by Maduro.
And ultimately, that push in 2019 didn’t work. So some believe that Trump has a kind of vendetta or he had a revenge desire tied to his efforts back in 2019 that led to this decision to do this brazen military operation.
Watch the video for the full conversation
Maduro captured: U.S. military operation targets Venezuela after months of tensions — Get full coverage from The Washington Times
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