Trump orders strikes in Venezuela, announces Maduro capture, as U.S. flexes muscle in multiple theaters
Donald Trump returned to office vowing to be a peace president. Nearly a year later, he is leaning hard on military force. The U.S. president on Tuesday ordered large-scale strikes in Venezuela and announced that Nicolás Maduro had been captured and flown out of the country — a stunning escalation that follows a Christmas Day operation in Nigeria and fresh warnings aimed at Iran.
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Trump said U.S. forces were “locked and loaded” if Iran’s clerical state kills protesters who have taken to the streets, underscoring a posture he and his aides describe as “peace through strength.” At a rally last month in Pennsylvania, Trump said, “We’re making peace through strength. That’s what we’re doing,” reprising a line popularized by Ronald Reagan.
The Venezuela action is the most dramatic step yet. The administration argues that Maduro faced a U.S. warrant on drug charges, while most Western democracies have considered his rule illegitimate following elections widely described as riddled with irregularities. Venezuela remains a member of the United Nations, a point likely to fuel debate over the legal basis for the operation and any transfer of custody.
In Nigeria, the U.S. military struck on Dec. 25 in what Trump described as an operation targeting jihadists who had attacked Christians. Hours before the Venezuela strikes, he warned Iran against a crackdown on demonstrators, saying the U.S. would respond if protesters were killed.
The flurry of operations marks a striking turn for a president who, in his second inaugural address on Jan. 20 last year, declared: “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.” Soon after taking office, Trump rebranded the Pentagon — in his telling — as the “Department of War,” a symbolic flourish that underscored his embrace of hard power as the primary instrument of policy.
Trump has long cast himself as an opponent of open-ended U.S. interventions. Embracing “America First,” he set himself apart from George W. Bush and the Iraq War, saying in a speech in Riyadh that “so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built” and failed to understand the countries where they intervened. But while he makes no pretense of long-term occupation, he has shown willingness to order high-impact strikes, including last year’s bombing of Iranian nuclear sites in support of an Israeli attack and retaliatory strikes in Syria after the killings of U.S. forces.
Critics say the new operations risk dragging the United States into sprawling conflicts without congressional or international sanction. “Venezuela [is] the second unjustified war in my lifetime,” said Sen. Ruben Gallego, a Democrat and Iraq War veteran, even as he called Maduro a dictator. “It’s embarrassing that we went from the world cop to the world bully in less than one year. There is no reason for us to be at war with Venezuela,” he wrote on X.
The United States’ legal rationale for targeting Maduro — premised on U.S. criminal charges — is likely to face scrutiny given Venezuela’s standing as a U.N. member state. Trump has repeatedly signaled he has little patience for U.N. or other international conventions on the use of force when he sees U.S. interests at stake.
The White House frames the stepped-up military posture as the surest route to stability. Trump’s allies argue that decisive action deters adversaries and shortens conflicts. His critics counter that firepower without a sustained strategy can widen wars and undercut U.S. credibility, especially when invoked alongside promises of peacemaking.
The contrast has not been lost internationally. The most recent Nobel Peace Prize went to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado — a figure Trump did not appear initially to recognize — even as he last month accepted a prize from FIFA. Gianni Infantino, football’s governing chief, praised Trump’s “exceptional and extraordinary actions to promote peace and unity around the world,” a line likely to sit uneasily beside the week’s drumbeat of deployments and strikes.
With the Pentagon operating in at least two theaters and signaling readiness in a third, the central question now is whether Trump’s “peace through strength” yields deterrence — or opens a cascade of open-ended commitments. For now, the administration is betting that force will do what diplomacy has not.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
