Opinion: Maduro’s Illegitimacy, AndWhy the United States Was Right to Act

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

The Left is in meltdown status.

The Trump administration did what it needed to do, collecting the Venezuelan dictator in the early hours of a Saturday morn, and bringing him back to the United States, starting the process for a long-awaited regime change in Venezuela at last.

The Left screams that the operation was illegal under international law, as if there really were any such thing.

Newsflash: International law is a concept that must go both ways, or it’s meaningless. Nicholas Maduro’s entire career as a communist dictator and narco-terrorist proves that he doesn’t obey international law. If his government doesn’t believe international law applies to them when they don’t like it, then they can’t claim its protection on the rare occasion when they would find international law helpful.

We can use the Geneva Convention as a frame of reference:

The Geneva Convention ensures that prisoners of war will be treated well, by being reciprocally endorsed. It doesn’t cover terrorists and other violators of international law, because they are not themselves signers of the Geneva Convention. The whole point of the Geneva Convention is that you are only treated well if you are already treating others well.

Require that your troops wear a uniform, avoid causing civilian casualties, and don’t torture people, and when your guys are caught by the other side, they will be treated well. But dress a bunch of terrorists in civilian clothes, intentionally target civilians in your attacks, and torture the prisoners you take, and the Geneva Convention doesn’t protect your guys at all.

Reciprocity is the foundation of this concept. And so it is with international law.

In this light, let’s look at Venezuela. What has the government of Nicolas Maduro done; in what programs and policies has it engaged?

Maduro’s government has collaborated with China, Russia, Cuba and Iran, in particular, to spread dangerous drugs, especially cocaine, both into the United States and across the Atlantic into Africa and Europe.

Maduro’s government has engineered the specific entry into the United States of countless thousands of criminals, both regular street thugs and members of organized crime mobs such as Tren de Aragua.

Our press – and even our politicians – describe this program as “emptying the jails and the asylums,” so that we Americans have to deal with them instead of Venezuela funding the problem. But it’s really much more than that. These huge criminal enterprises, both the organized and the unorganized, are a form of invasion, breaking down American society both financially and culturally.

Maduro’s government has collaborated with a shadow fleet of unflagged cargo vessels, shipping everything from crude oil to weapons, in violation of international sanctions. This process endangers foreign ports, adds cost and uncertainty to marine insurance programs, violates the International Maritime Dangerous Goods code, and so much more.

Maduro’s government has exported revolution into numerous countries, especially in Latin America and Africa, funding and running insurgencies much as Brezhnev’s USSR used to do during the Cold War.

Maduro’s government supported China’s efforts to take subtle control of a broad array of infrastructure all over the world – a seaport here, an airport there, a logistics park here, a research lab there. From mines to refineries, from manufacturing plants to consolidated sourcing agencies, China has expanded its footprint into dozens and dozens of countries, and Venezuela has served as one of its key hubs for under-the-radar Latin American expansion (a Chinese delegation was just in town meeting with Maduro, in fact, the very night that he was arrested).

And on top of these extensive violations of the international system, remember what the Maduro regime did at home, inside Venezuela itself.

Venezuela was once among the most successful developing nations in Latin America, with a growing middle class and a diversified economy. But earlier governments flirted with power grabs long before Maduro came along, nationalizing oil fields and businesses in the 1970s – including millions of dollars’ worth of American property – making it harder and harder for the private sector to survive. Then when Hugo Chavez took over at the end of the 20th century, he took Venezuela all the way to a communist dictatorship, with everything from Stalinist secret police to the midnight disappearances of dissidents for which communism is best known.

By the time Maduro consolidated power after his mentor left the scene, it was not uncommon for Venezuelans, once proud workers identified as middle class, to resort to eating pets and zoo animals out of hunger.

Under Maduro’s rule, Marxism produced in Venezuela exactly what it always produces, everywhere it’s tried: poverty, starvation, oppression and despair.

Maduro held elections, then ensured the results were fixed. The world knows, for example, that the Edmundo Gonzalez ticket defeated the Maduro ticket by a wide margin in 2024; even such generally left-wing international organizations as the OAS denounced the fraud and declared Gonzalez the winner. But Maduro’s government simply made up numbers and claimed victory anyway.

(and there are strong suspicions, and at least some evidence, that the election software customizations used for Venezuelan election-rigging were also used in other countries, to steal other elections, such as in the United States).

Under any standard, the Maduro government is illegitimate.

The only question – the question in fact for any country that hopes to be a free republic – is, who can overthrow an illegitimate government, when the military, law enforcement, and judiciary are all under the control of that illegitimate government?

It can only be done by an outside nation with power and discipline to act, and to do it right. It could only be done by the United States.

So President Trump and his team – from the State and War departments to the DoJ and beyond – put together the case and the plan, then acted to free Venezuela from its tyrannical leadership, just after midnight on January 3, 2025.

All over the world, individual Venezuelan expats by the millions cheered the potential liberation of their homeland, even as the global Left organized astroturf demonstrations in support of the narcoterrorist Maduro regime. The difference between them is telling; supporters of the overthrow are able to speak coherently and proudly into a microphone, as the rent-a-mob leftists are taught quick slogans to shout, unable to enunciate any actual positives in defense of the tyranny of the Chavez-Maduro years.

So why did the United States decide to act, now? Why after so many years did the United States decide it was worth doing, worth the cost, worth the risk?

First, of course, because we finally have an administration with the ability to do it.

The United States have a President and cabinet in place, and the right chain of command in the relevant units, to do it right.

Second, because the breakdown of the Venezuelan drug trade’s influence in the United States will go a long way toward accomplishing much of our domestic agenda.

A marked reduction in new gangland figures, a significant reduction in the illicit drugs available on the streets, an end to the Venezuelan gang takeovers of neighborhoods that have been growing in recent years. We’ll still have plenty of other crime in the United States to concentrate on, but this will make a good dent in it, at a single blow.

And Third, because Maduro’s organization has been a lynchpin in so many of our other distant foreign policy challenges – challenges that look utterly unrelated at first glance.

As described above, this single takedown will significantly cut into the funding networks of Latin American illegal immigration and African terrorism, it will end the Venezuelan destabilization of other Latin American countries, and it will seriously disrupt the energy and financial network that has been propping up Iran and China. One of our biggest concerns for years has been the question of when China will make a move on Taiwan; this action in Venezuela has made that long-feared attack infinitely harder for China to dare.

An unexpected bonus – at least, unexpected by many onlookers, though perhaps the Trump administration foresaw it – was the opportunity to test what was allegedly a state-of-the-art air defense system in Caracas, built from the latest and greatest of both Russia’s and China’s materiel. All that weaponry was rendered impotent immediately, an undeniable verdict that had to strike terror into the hearts and minds of politburos in both Beijing and Moscow.

It is therefore instructive, in light of all this, to note how the voices of the Left are reacting to the operation.

The Left disregards – or perhaps doesn’t even notice – the stolen Venezuelan election and Maduro’s illegitimacy, the years of unforgivable poverty and oppression, the collaboration with China and Russia, the alliances with lethal drugs and international terrorists.

The Left disregards it all.

The Left just screams at the top of their lungs, “It’s all about oil !!!”

And that tells us so much more about the Left, doesn’t it?

As the administration, along with the rest of us onlookers, study the big picture – economics and society, foreign relations and criminal justice – the Left immediately thinks of grabbing another country’s resources, not only because they can’t see the big picture well enough to appreciate all these other issues, but especially because, in the end, grabbing another country’s resources is the thing that THEY would think of to do, if given the chance.

There’s the fundamental difference between the two sides.

Thank Heaven that, for the moment at least, the United States are governed by people who look at the big picture, who think strategically about the good of our nation and our world, and not by the ones whose every thought is obsessed with dreams of confiscation, and exerting dominance over their fellow man.

Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo