It’s hard to imagine anybody woke up on January 3 expecting the United States to have launched another illegal military incursion into a sovereign state. But that’s just the kind of world we live in today under the second Trump administration, and former Vice President Kamala Harris has just about had enough of it.
Yesterday, the U.S. military conducted a large-scale operation in Venezuela, which resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. President Trump announced the operation in the early hours of the morning on his Truth Social page — because apparently that’s where we announce acts of war now.
Venezuela has announced that the death toll from the U.S. attack has already reached 80, and will likely go up in the following days. Many nations, including China, Cuba, France, Mexico, and South Africa, have condemned the attack, with some going so far as to call it “hegemonic acts” and “state terrorism.”
As for Kamala, she didn’t exactly mince words this time, opening her lengthy post with the kind of haymaker that suggests she’s really getting concerned over Trump’s unhinged foreign policy. “Donald Trump’s actions in Venezuela do not make America safer, stronger, or more affordable,” she wrote. “That Maduro is a brutal, illegitimate dictator does not change the fact that this action was both unlawful and unwise. We’ve seen this movie before. Wars for regime change or oil that are sold as strength but turn into chaos, and American families pay the price.”
Kamala continued her offensive by spelling out what everybody and their mothers already know about U.S. foreign policy: it’s never actually about deposing a dictator and spreading democracy. We’ve seen this script play out dozens of times before, in Iraq, in Libya, in Panama, and in every other country that happened to be sitting on something Washington wanted. “This is not about drugs or democracy. It is about oil and Donald Trump’s desire to play the regional strongman,” she added. “The President is putting troops at risk, spending billions, destabilizing a region, and offering no legal authority, no exit plan, and no benefit at home.”
The only problem being, what Washington wants often eclipses what any president, red or blue, actually intends. That’s not to say Trump’s antics are defensible — they’re not — but let’s not pretend the interventionist playbook was gathering dust before he came along.
For now, Maduro is in a New York holding cell, Venezuela is in chaos, and the rest of Latin America is sleeping with one eye open. Harris wanted it on the record that this was a bad idea. History suggests she’s probably right. But when did that ever stop Washington?
Published: Jan 4, 2026 06:01 pm