By Garry Kasparov
Saturday, January 10, 2026
Venezuelans are celebrating—cautiously inside the
country, wildly in safer places such as Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Miami, where
hundreds of thousands made their homes as a brutal dictatorship impoverished
their country, once the second-richest in the Western Hemisphere.
The Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has been removed
from power—captured in the dead of night and arraigned before an American
judge. That’s the good news. But as is so often the case with the actions of
Donald Trump, it isn’t the only storyline. The United States president
immediately threw cold water on the idea that the raid could pave the way for a
rapid democratic transition under the leadership of last year’s Nobel Peace
Prize winner, María Corina Machado. At his first press conference, a few hours
after Maduro’s surgical removal, Trump said that he ordered it to get control
of Venezuela’s oil, and that Machado didn’t have the “respect” to lead
Venezuela.
If anyone expected more from Secretary of State Marco
Rubio, who had a long-standing personal passion for freedom in Cuba before he
sold his soul to Trump at a steep discount, they would have been disappointed.
During his TV appearances the day after the raid, Rubio, like Trump, emphasized
oil over democracy as the operation’s “No. 1” priority.
Trump’s stance in Venezuela is consistent with a
geopolitics based on raw power and spheres of influence—the very sort that
produced two world wars in the 20th century. In this scenario, the U.S. gets
Venezuela and the Western Hemisphere, Russia gets Ukraine and as much of Europe
as it can grab, and China gets Taiwan and an Asian sphere without U.S.
interference. Trump has already been working to deliver Ukraine into Vladimir
Putin’s open arms by cutting off aid and pushing a peace plan practically written
by the Kremlin as his own. Fortunately, the Ukrainians haven’t cooperated.
That assumes Trump has any vision at all, of course. His
supporters have a tendency to say that he’s playing five-dimensional chess,
only to discover too late that he has eaten half the pieces.
I am not here to condemn the U.S. for toppling Maduro on
the grounds of international law. Maduro was an illegitimate despot who had
violated every agreement, including one in 2023 with the Biden administration,
which proposed to lift sanctions in exchange for holding free and fair
elections. Maduro was never going to step down unless stepped on. In Russia,
Cuba, Iran, Belarus, and Uganda, dictatorships have carried on for
decades—oppressing and killing their people, attacking their neighbors, and
destabilizing their regions. Regime change isn’t a dirty word when the
regime is among the most vicious in the world. As in Syria, no one can predict
what will follow the fall of a tyrant, but now there is hope where before there
was none.
Many have expressed alarm over the possibility that this
rogue act could encourage Russia and China to act in kind. To do what, for
example? Attack Ukraine, and attempt to murder President Volodymyr Zelensky for
the tenth time? Crush democracy in Hong Kong? China already considers Taiwan to
be an internal matter, and the invasion it so often rehearses is deterred by
F-16s, not agreements that are only as strong as the leaders responsible for
backing up what they say. That the Trump administration may withhold U.S.
support from these beleaguered democracies as part of an unholy deal with Putin
and Xi Jinping is troubling, but let’s not pretend that Russia and China care
about international law. They allied with Maduro precisely because he shared
their disdain for it. Their official protests over the U.S. strike are risible
hypocrisy and show only their readiness to exploit the legal mechanisms and
institutional platforms that they never obey themselves.
The equivalences are also false because Ukraine and
Taiwan are sovereign democracies with freely elected heads of state. Maduro was
a usurper who stole an election, held power by force, and abused that power to
ruin the lives of Venezuelans and many others. Trump first pursued Maduro on a
flimsy narcotrafficking pretext that he has already replaced with a blunt
message about oil. But I’m happy to make the case that fighting
authoritarianism wherever it is found is a vital role for the world’s strongest
democracy. It was true under Truman and Reagan, and even if, unlike them, Trump
couldn’t care less about spreading freedom abroad (or even at home), it’s true
today.
Western apathy and cowardice are what embolden thugs and
authoritarians, not the United States giving them a taste of their own
medicine. The world’s dictators and terrorists commit acts of aggression not
because the United States does, but when the United States and its allies don’t
stop them. The complacency of the West has allowed Putin’s collapsing mafia
state to bombard Ukraine for years. The main exports of Iran and Cuba are
repression and terror. There is no rule of law if there aren’t any consequences
for breaking it.
No one likes the idea of the United States as a global
policeman, especially after the disastrous occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
But Barack Obama’s unilateral retrenchment and Trump’s chaotic “America First”
approach both show what happens when there’s no cop on the beat. In this
metaphor, Trump is like a corrupt cop who occasionally knocks heads while
always looking out for himself first. If you agree that Maduro got what he
deserved but don’t like how it was done or by whom, I say—memo to the Obama administration—that
sometimes it’s better to do the right thing with bad intentions than the wrong
thing with the best intentions.
This brings us back to Venezuela. Machado is the most
popular politician there. Her proxy, Edmundo González, won an overwhelming
victory in the 2024 presidential election—only for Maduro to ignore the result,
jail the opposition, murder protesters, and cling to power with the backing of
the dictatorships in Cuba, Iran, and Russia. Machado is not aligned with
regional leftists, such as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Colombia’s
Gustavo Petro; she made a judicious choice, from hiding, to praise Trump as he
was threatening Maduro in the fall, undoubtedly figuring that there was a
chance she might get American power on her side. She had to try.
Her return seemed like enough of a win-win scenario to be
plausible: A democratic Venezuela open to foreign investment could be
profitable for Trump and his associates, while also good for the people of
Venezuela and what used to be understood as the interests of the United States.
But Trump chose instead to discount Machado and the millions of votes her
pro-democracy party received. The opposition would be unable to control the
entrenched Venezuelan power structure, some of the administration’s defenders insisted.
A story in The Washington Post put Trump’s dismissal of Machado down to
pique that she’d won the Peace Prize he coveted—a reminder that just when you
think Trump can’t go any lower, there’s a knock on the floor.
Regardless, on Monday, Machado gave her first interview
since Maduro’s capture to Sean Hannity of Fox News. She lavished praise on
Trump, practically offering him her Nobel Prize. Every American should be
embarrassed that this is now how democratic leaders must attempt to sway the
U.S. president.
But Trump was not cajoled. His White House has made clear
that it wants Maduro’s former vice president, the hard-liner Delcy Rodríguez,
to be the country’s pliant new dictator, and for her to play American ball with
Venezuela’s oil reserves instead of shilling for Iran, Russia, and China, as
Maduro did.
Simply replacing an anti-American dictator with one who
will make a profit-sharing deal with Trump and his partners will be a disaster.
The United States hasn’t been a shining city on a hill in a long time; but how
far it has fallen, to become a pirate state plundering neighbors for the gain
of a ruling clan. Venezuelans have suffered for too long and deserve to decide
their own destiny regardless of Trump’s intentions.
As founder of the Renew Democracy Initiative, I had the
honor of presenting Machado and Gonzalez with our 2025 Heroes of Democracy
award last April in New York City (no, Donald, you will not be getting one of
these, either). As Machado said in her acceptance
speech, “We are all together in this common struggle against the enemies of
freedom, wherever they are.”
President Trump should take note that this includes the
White House.
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