When Americans awoke on Saturday to learn the United States had invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president, they likely expected their nation’s elected officials to offer an explanation about why we had done this.
After months of military buildup and activity in the Caribbean, it wasn’t a surprise that the U.S. had finally decided to embark on a crusade to bring down Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. What was stupefying was that America’s latest regime-change operation was apparently designed to leave the regime intact.
Helpfully, President Donald Trump duly appeared with his top Cabinet officials on Saturday to clarify everything. Among the range of casus belli he offered were the drug war (“those drugs mostly come from a place called Venezuela”); immigration (“they sent everybody bad into the United States”); terrorism (“a ceaseless campaign of violence, terror, and subversion”); even the altruistic promotion of American ideals (“we want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela”).
Oh… and oil. “As everyone knows the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time. They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping,” Trump said, vowing that U.S. businesses would go to Venezuela and “start making money for the country.”
Well, pick your poison as to which of these you believe to be the real reason for the military intervention — or make up another. There are several that seem equally as plausible as anything offered: a need to counter Chinese influence in the Americas; a strategy to undermine Cuba; a balm to Trump’s ego in the face of Nicolás Maduro’s dancing defiance… Maybe just an uncontrollable urge to demonstrate unadulterated badassery, ’Murica-style, after decades of frustration and failure in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s in light of those failures that the most surprising thing to come out of Saturday’s press conference was the outright declaration that America was taking over in Caracas.
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” Trump said, later adding: “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground if we have to have them.”
Many onlookers could not have been more stunned if a ’roid-raging Uncle Sam had kicked in the door and poleaxed them between the eyes with the Stars and Stripes. Here was an American president openly ordering regime change and admitting to installing a puppet — and it wasn’t even being couched in diplomatic words or shrouded in high ideals. It was in the open. America is taking over Venezuela. Why? To make money from its oil. How? Well, through Delta Force and then… a shrug and a wave of the hand vaguely in the direction of the State Department.
“[Secretary of State] Marco [Rubio]’s working on that directly,” Trump said, noting that Venezuela’s deputy president — a regime loyalist — appeared to have taken over after Maduro disappeared into the night sky with several new American acquaintances. “He just had a conversation with her, and she’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.”
It was unfortunate that mere hours later, the woman in question — Venezuela’s Interim President Delcy Rodríguez — denied in a televised speech that she would cooperate with the gringos. “There is only one president in Venezuela, and his name is Nicolás Maduro.”
Many anti-regime Venezuelans were initially thrilled that Maduro had been ousted, but were far gloomier about the fact that Rodríguez was now in charge — and that Washington’s decapitation strike seems not to have taken the head off the snake, but removed a single head from a hydra. Maduro is gone, his regime is still in power.
“This is the first time that I find myself wondering if I am on the opposite side of U.S. policy,” one Venezuela opposition activist tells Rolling Stone. “The U.S. now backs the regime, instead of opposing it,” the activist says.
They were certain that the situation was in flux, however, saying they believed the Trump administration would deal with “whoever is easiest to manipulate, corrupt, and make deals with.”
“What is the strategy? Who do they want to actually be in charge?” asks a former American special operations soldier with expertise in South America, who formerly worked in the region.
He says that mistrust inside Maduro’s regime will now begin to peak, with top officials convinced that at least one of their compatriots is secretly working with the Americans to take charge of the country. With Maduro gone, a shakeup is inevitable and could lead to internal conflict — possibly even civil war.
“We’re in for a roller-coaster ride of pretenders to the throne. But anyone who gets in with Washington’s blessing will lack legitimacy,” the special operations soldier observes, saying he believes the one thing that could really unite Venezuelans is opposition to U.S. control. “After destabilizing the country, what does Washington want?”
What, indeed.
One couldn’t have scripted a scenario more perfectly tailored to showcase American military might than the raid to abduct Maduro. All of the elite elements of the U.S. military and national security apparatus were brought to bear. It was an eloquent testament to the trillions of dollars America has spent on advanced weaponry, coupled with decades of hands-on experience conducting special operations.
That Washington has tools of military power that outclass any competitor is unquestionable. The problem is that tactical victories do not guarantee strategic success. The idea that a country can simply swoop out of the blue and change another government to its liking through force of arms without complication is an illusion — see America in Iraq or Afghanistan, or Russia in Chechnya or Ukraine.
Many commentators and critics are focused on the wider implications of the raid on Venezuela, its legality, or the idea that it will usher in a new era of realpolitik as described by Thucydides, where the “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
What, such commentators ask, is to stop Russia or China from doing the same, in Ukraine or in Taiwan?
You needn’t be a cynic to think the answer to that question has less to do with the norms of international law than it does with pure military capability. Indeed, Russia tried several times to capture President Volodymyr Zelensky in the early days of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February and March 2022. It failed, at great cost to its special forces units.
Trump’s foray into Venezuela was unquestionably a military success. Its wider implications remain to be seen. But it is another step toward an unrestrained imperial presidency, actively working to dismantle a global system America itself created, as it sows chaos at home and abroad.
Paper shields alone have never kept the powerful from preying upon weaker neighbors, and most world leaders cast aside legality and morality when it suits their interests to do so. Trump is not the first. The international order America has long championed is a system of double standards, hypocritically applied or cast aside to suit Washington’s whims.
That it was a system that benefited the United States is rejected by MAGA true believers. They argue that, as most nations follow their self-interest, the era of America First is at least a more honest system of international relations.
You can also call this system the law of the jungle.
But of course, none of the animals in the jungle have nukes.
Colombia's Environmental Minister Irene Vélez Torres, left, embraces Stientje van Veldhoven, minister of climate policy and green growth of the Netherlands, at the end of a conference aimed at transitioning away from fossil fuels, on April 29, 2026, in Santa Marta, Colombia.
Don’t Overlook This Surprising Climate Victory
This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
Good news about climate change? Hard to believe, but yes. It happened last week in the coal-exporting city of Santa Marta, Colombia, and it ranks as the most promising climate news since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015.
For the first time, a critical mass of the world economy is working together to phase out fossil fuels, a step that scientists have long said is imperative to limit global temperature rise to an amount civilization can survive. This counts as good news not least because it shows that meaningful change is possible, a belief that has been hard to sustain over the past decade. Equally important is what made the Santa Marta breakthrough possible: the advocates of phasing out fossil fuels stopped waiting for the producers of fossil fuels to agree to stop. Instead, advocates will simply stop buying their products.
From April 24 to 29, 57 countries representing most of the biggest economies on Earth gathered in Santa Marta for the First Conference on Transitioning Away From Fossil Fuels, where they pledged to phase out burning oil, gas, and coal, the main driver of global warming. The phase-out will not take place overnight but over the years immediately ahead. France, for example, says it will eliminate coal by 2027, oil by 2045, and gas by 2050. Each country will devise a voluntary national plan to “disentangle their economies and societies” from fossil fuels, said Stientje van Veldhoven, the minister of the environment and housing for The Netherlands, which co-sponsored the conference with Colombia.
Calling themselves “a coalition of the willing,” these 57 countries — including Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Brazil, Canada, and Spain, and joined by California, the world’s fifth biggest economy — make up the largest economic bloc on Earth. Their combined gross domestic product of $38.5 trillion (according to April 2026 data from the International Monetary Fund) is larger than the GDP of the US ($32.4 trillion) and almost twice as large as that of China ($20.9 trillion).
These countries also account for roughly 30 percent of current global consumption of fossil fuels. If they make good on their pledges to phase out fossil fuels, it will slash demand for those fuels. A basic law of economics is that lower demand leads to lower prices. (At the moment, the world is experiencing the flip side of this law, as oil and gas prices soar due to the supply restrictions in the Strait of Hormuz.) Lower prices for fossil fuels mean lower revenues for fossil fuel producers, which could prove fatal for the profitability of many current and planned projects and infrastructure.
The Santa Marta conference benefitted from an unanticipated coincidence of timing: the Iran war has triggered a historic energy crisis that is causing countries to lose faith in the reliability and affordability of oil and gas. On the second day of the conference, the head of the International Energy Agency declared that the war had broken global energy markets beyond repair. “The damage is done,” Fatih Birol said in an interview with The Guardian. Predicting “permanent consequences” for the fossil fuel industry, Birol said countries will increasingly turn to more secure and less costly renewable energy sources, including by switching to electricity to run transportation and other sectors that historically relied on fossil fuels.
Irene Velez Torres, the environment minister of Colombia, welcomed Birol’s remarks. “Our energy sovereignty as well as our climate survival require moving to other energy sources,” she said in an interview.
To be sure, the transition away from fossil fuels promised in Santa Marta has not happened yet, and there is plenty of room between the lip and the cup. But the economic heft of the Santa Marta coalition of the willing is undeniable, and its biggest members — Germany, California, the UK, France — have already made significant progress toward a non-fossil fueled future. Indeed, a core purpose of the Santa Marta conference was for participants to share lessons with one another about how best to leave fossil fuels behind. “This conference is not about [negotiating] documents,” said Rachel Kyte, the UK special representative for climate. “It’s about finding fellow travelers and learning from them — what’s working, what isn’t?”
The fact that the Santa Marta conference got little news coverage in the U.S. and that its greatest power lies in the realm of economics rather than politics may help explain why many observers have not yet recognized its game-changing potential. From the time climate change first emerged on the global agenda with the United Nations “Earth Summit” in 1992, the dominant narrative has measured progress through the lens of politics: how many governments sign legally binding agreements to limit global temperature rise, and by how much? This prioritizing of politics is no surprise: most of the people involved in these negotiations — the diplomats conducting them, the scientists and activists seeking to influence them, the journalists covering them — regard governments as the decisive actors in international affairs and have little or no training in economics.
This approach has yielded little progress. With the important exception of the Paris Agreement, where virtually all of the world’s countries agreed to limit temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and to aim for 1.5 degrees, the annual UN climate summits have been long on talk and short on action. Most of their elaborately negotiated agreements did not even mention the words “fossil fuels,” even though phasing them out is the core challenge.
The UN process has fallen short largely because a loophole gives fossil fuel-producing countries a de facto veto over final agreements. UN summits are conducted under UN rules, which require consensus decision making. “Consensus” does not mean “unanimous,” but it does mean that a handful of countries can block what a vast majority wants. That’s what happened at the COP30 summit last November, when Saudi Arabia led a group of petrostates in blocking a call by 85 countries to begin drawing up a global roadmap to phase out fossil fuels.
The Santa Marta conference organizers skirted these obstacles by operating separately from the UN process and inviting only participants that had shown a genuine commitment to moving beyond fossil fuels. That meant no U.S. and no China. The proceedings were not diverted into debating whether fossil fuels need to go but rather could focus on how to make that happen, and to do so while protecting workers, businesses, and communities that currently rely on fossil fuels for jobs, profits, and tax revenues.
Santa Marta is only a first step. In a world where fossil fuels account for roughly 80 percent of total energy use, leaving them behind is no small task, as The Netherlands itself illustrates. In the same week that it was co-sponsoring the Santa Marta conference, the Dutch government approved plans to increase offshore gas production. Asked about this contradiction, Minister van Veldhoven explained that the supply disruptions stemming from the Iran war meant that in the short term The Netherlands could obtain the gas its residents and businesses need only by producing its own or buying it from Russia, and the latter course was worse on both energy security and climate grounds. This conundrum, she added, “illustrates the very difficult issues facing us and all countries as we try to disentangle ourselves from reliance on fossil fuels.”
Very difficult, yes. But for the first time in a long time, Santa Marta offers plausible hope that humanity can phase out fossil fuels in time to avoid catastrophe. A critical mass of leaders is no longer waiting for the countries that make money and wield power by producing fossil fuels to agree to stop doing so, something they clearly have no intention of doing. Instead, those leaders are responding to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the world’s people — 80 to 89 percent of them, according to peer-reviewed scientific studies — want their governments to take stronger climate action. “This is not the end,” Velez said in the conference’s closing moments. “It is the beginning of a new global climate democracy.”
Author and journalist Mark Hertsgaard is the environment correspondent for The Nation and the executive director of Covering Climate Now.