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Some reflections on the U.S. operation in Venezuela

Some reflections on the U.S. operation in Venezuela

Last updated on: January 7, 2026 at 12:15 pm by Dan Peterson

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Some reflections on the U.S. operation in Venezuela 2026-01-07T12:15:00-07:00 Dan Peterson

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The Caracas Venezuela Temple (LDS.org). Another temple has been announced for Maracaibo.

I’ve made it a practice not to post about or discuss politics on this blog, and I’ve kept to that resolution quite faithfully. And I’ve made it absolutely rigid rule not to post about or discuss politics on the Sabbath. However, I perceive an inaudible but insistent clamor for a comment from me about the U.S. operation in Venezuela, and the time for doing so is passing: “O sagacious swami,” I imagine the multitude begging me, “enlighten us, please, with regard to the U.S. operation in Venezuela.” And, anyway, the Sabbath day is almost past. It’s nearly Monday.

So here are some brief observations for your contemplation (or for your condemnation and opposition):

The departure of Nicolás Maduro from the leadership of Venezuela is a very good thing, for multiple reasons. If he had any redeeming political or economic or moral virtues, I’m unaware of them.
Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro didn’t inherit poverty and economic dysfunction in Venezuela. They achieved it.
Nicolás Maduro’s departure is a potentially important setback for Cuba, China, and Russia, which, if it turns out that way, won’t bother me in the slightest.
The American military operation was audacious, to say the least of it. It seems to have been brilliantly planned and, if accounts are accurate, superbly executed.
I have concerns about the constitutionality and legality of the operation – as, yes, I also did with regard to the somewhat analogous extraction of Manuel Noriega from Panama in 1989. (I’m old enough to remember it.)
Of course, Manuel Noriega wasn’t the legitimate leader of Panama, nor was Nicolás Maduro the legitimate leader of Venezuela, so there’s that.
I worry about the precedent that this operation might set for future undertakings of the same kind.
If, say, China or Russia or Iran could pull off a similar operation, having determined that the American president was an impediment to Good Things, how would we react if they were to abduct Mr. Donald J. Trump (or any other president whom you might prefer) and put him on trial back on their own turf?
I’m trying but, frankly, failing to understand the consistency of deposing and abducting Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro, on, among other things, charges of narco-trafficking, while formally granting a pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras — who is a convicted narco-trafficker.
I’m puzzled by the Trump administration’s apparent lack of interest, thus far at least, in attempting to work with and through the legitimate political opposition in Venezuela. Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, for example, recently won the Nobel Peace Prize. She has called for Edmundo González to be recognized as the rightful leader of the nation. He was widely seen as the legitimate winner of the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election.
I’m uneasy — to put it mildly — at talk of American management of Venezuelan oil reserves and of “great wealth” to be taken out of the country by American oil companies. This savors far, far, far too much, for me, of classic nineteenth-century imperialism and colonialism, whereby Great Powers invade less powerful nations and then exploit those colonies for their own economic benefit – in particular, extracting their natural resources and raw materials.
I’m not at all happy with Mr. Trump’s comment, in an interview with The Atlantic about the operation in Venezuela and its potential future implications that, by the way, “We really do need Greenland, absolutely.” I’ll bet them dictators in Copenhagen and Nuuk ain’t sleepin’ so well this week! From the BBC: “Danish PM tells Trump to stop ‘threats’ against Greenland.”
The Monroe Doctrine, declared by President James Monroe in 1823, was a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy well into my lifetime, and I’m happy to see it again receiving some emphasis. It warned European powers against further colonization or interference in the Americas — there were no Asian powers in a position to do so at that time — established separate spheres of influence, and asserted that any such actions would be viewed by the government of the United States as hostile. It protected newly independent Latin American nations, asserted U.S. regional dominance, and kept European conflicts out of the Western Hemisphere. It closed the American continents to European colonization. It did not do so, I think, in order to reserve other American states for colonization and economic exploitation by the United States.

An image from the Botanical Garden in Talinn, Estonia
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

However, I don’t want to close this Sabbath entry out with mere politics. This was never a primarily political blog and, for several years now, it has scarcely ever so much as mentioned political matters.

So I close with a passage from Ross Douthat’s commendable recent book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, which I recently commended in Meridian Magazine. See ““Believe”: A Thoughtful Defense of Religion in a Secular Age.” In this passage, Douthat describes the intuition that most of us feel, at some point or another, that the world seems to have been designed, with a purpose in mind:

Start with the physical world, the material universe that human beings inhabit and experience and study. What your naive religious self observes, at every level of visible existence, are regular-seeming, complex, and predictable systems: the progress of the seasons, the stars in their courses, the everyday workings of the human body. In your own embodied existence, you find yourself surrounded by complex machines of flesh and bone, filament and fiber—animals and insects, trees and flowers, their individual operations woven together in still-more-complicated ecosystems. And these systems don’t just manifest a crude functionality; they often seem beautiful, graceful, and sublime, offering visions that even on an ordinary day can stir extraordinary awe, that both inspire and exceed the human capacity for art. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” the Bible says, 2 and when the biblical God wants to answer a suffering mortal’s questions in the book of Job, He goes straight to this initial human intuition. The intuition that the world seems like a workshop and a cathedral and a theater and a machinist’s shop and more. That nothing so vast and complex and beautiful could exist by simple accident. That either some Mind or Power must have made or organized all this matter for a reason, or else the Mind or Power is somehow inherent to the system, and the cosmos is itself divine. (14)

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