In my last post a few days ago, wrapping up the first calendar year of the 2nd Trump Administration, early on in the post I wrote: “We are not yet at war with Venezuela, although events still seem to be trending in that direction.”

Yesterday morning the world woke up to the news that, overnight, the U.S. military had successfully executed a mission to forcibly extract Venezuelan President Maduro and his wife from their home in Caracas, and extradite them to New York City to await trial on various federal charges, mainly around narco-terrorism. In essence, an attempt at regime change via decapitation, wrapped in the guise of facilitating a criminal prosecution.

Thirty-six hours later, there is still a great deal of uncertainty around what this means for the future of Venezuela. I watched Trump’s news conference from Mar-A-Lago, which was uncharacteristic of me as I have a great deal of difficulty listening to the man speak. On this occasion, it was fascinating. He had no teleprompter, but there was clearly a written text that he was supposed to be reading, and hence much of the time he had his head down as he was reading verbatim from the prepared text. But then every couple of sentences he would get bored, and his head would go up and he would start riffing, before eventually putting his head down again and returning to the text. I would love to see a transcript of his speech that is aligned with his head movements, so that we can deduce which of his words were carefully planned and which weren’t. I strongly suspect that the unplanned words included the following quote, which quickly became the biggest piece of news from the press conference: “We will run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”

It is also unclear what this foreshadows for the future of American foreign policy. In his speech Trump talked about the “Donroe Doctrine”, a term that I hadn’t heard before but was mentioned in a November 2025 NYTimes article as having originated in a January 2025 NYPost headline. Trump reiterated in a phone interview today that “we do need Greenland, absolutely.” He has also made comments over the past day that could foreshadow military action in Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia. It does, however, seem fairly clear that a U.S. who is willing to take this type of action against Venezuela is uninterested in taking a hard line against Chinese aggression towards Taiwan or Russian aggression towards Ukraine.