Miguel Afonso Caetano"Two decades ago, Richard N. Haass, a senior foreign-policy official in the George W. Bush administration, confessed that he would go to his grave not knowing why the United States had invaded Iraq. “A decision was not made,” Haass told me. “A decision happened, and you can’t say when or how.” I thought of this astonishing remark after Saturday’s military action in Caracas. President Donald Trump and his advisers have thrown out numerous justifications for seizing the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife and bringing them to New York for trial. None of them makes sense.
Maduro ruled Venezuela viciously and illegitimately, but Trump has no qualms about doing business with the vicious and illegitimate—he prefers them to democratically elected leaders. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told skeptics in Congress that the operation wasn’t an act of war at all, but a simple arrest based on Maduro’s indictment for drug trafficking. Then why, at the end of last year, did Trump pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the ex-president of Honduras who had been convicted of the same crime by an American court and sentenced to 45 years in prison?
If narco-terrorism is a threat to U.S. security, Venezuela is a relatively small player in the global narcotics trade; the chief drug it exports, cocaine, is not a mass killer of Americans like fentanyl is, and the probable destination of the alleged drug boats that U.S. forces have been bombing off the Venezuelan coast was Europe."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/venezuela-iraq-hypocrisy/685547/
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