You got to hand it to Donald Trump for having a genius
for grabbing attention. As the first full working week of 2026 begins, all of
us are focused on the capture of Nicolas Maduro, the President of Venezuela by
US Special forces over the weekend.
There’s no way of saying this but this was totally
illegal and yet totally brilliant. Whatever is said of Mr. Maduro (by no means
a candidate for sainthood), he was a sitting Head of State, who had not
threatened any of his neighbours in particular. His main mistake was sitting on
the world’s largest proven oil reserves and deciding to sell it to people he
wanted to sell oil to. He was effectively kidnapped because he got on the wrong
side of the USA and as far as I know, kidnapping is illegal in just about every
jurisdiction of the planet.
At the same time, the move was brilliant. The US has
now gotten rid of an ally of two of its largest rivals and now has its most
meaningful chance to reducing the trade surplus with oil-hungry China by
selling it Venezuela’s oil. From an operational perspective, Delta Force (which
is modeled on the British SAS) did a brilliant job by capturing Mr. Maduro
without a single casualty.
Questions remain. At the time of writing, Mr. Maduro’s
vice-president is telling everyone that she’s now in charge, thus contradicting
Mr. Trump’s claim that Venezuela is now run by the USA. Then there’s the point
that capturing Mr. Maduro is easy, keeping Venezuela steady and reliable less
so. If history is anything to go by, Mr. Trump may have opened up a can of
worms by taking military action against another country – who is to say that
Venezuela won’t end up like Iraq or Afghanistan, which costs the US treasury 20
trillion dollars (larger than the GDP of every country except the USA itself),
countless of US lives and only to see the return of the people the initial
invasion was supposed to remove.
Leaving aside all the possible outcomes, Mr. Trump could not resist “swinging his d***” around. Upon capturing Mr. Maduro, he went onto “threaten” and “warn” other world leaders like Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum to get their act together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNApC_O36AM
Leaving aside the legality or even the effectiveness of
such threats, there was something noticeable. All the countries mentioned are in
what the USA has traditionally felt was its own backyard and more importantly
none of them have any capacity to hurt the USA in any form. The USA remains
their main market and provider of military hardware and training.
As we talked about Mr. Maduro’s capture, there was
another country that did something that should have made itself noticeable but
thanks to Mr. Trump didn’t. This country is a “nasty” dictatorship that is now in
its third generation and more importantly, it actually has nukes and shown the
willingness to use those nukes. That country has happily sold weapons to
terrorist groups, attacked America and its allies in cyberspace and via
criminal activities like circulating forged currencies. This country has the
capability to hurt South Korea and Japan (two US allies that actually create
economic benefits for the USA) and whilst nobody doubts the USA could flatten
this country, this little country does have the capability to inflict serious damage
on parts of the USA before it gets destroyed.
Yet, despite the obvious threat to stability that this
country possesses to America and her allies, nobody was even thinking of
capturing its leader. If anything, Mr. Kim has been sitting comfortably in
North Korea ever since Mr. Trump returned to the White House. As a Singaporean,
it was fun to see how Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim went from “d*** swinging” to Mr.
Kim becoming the longed-for Asian son that Mr. Trump wished for – and all happened
in Singapore.
You could say that part of the reason why North Korea
stays around is because it has a big brother in the shape of China. Only time
China and the USA went to war was the Korean War – China simply didn’t want an
American satellite at its door. However, with China modernizing its economy and
filling up leadership vacuums, North Korea becomes something of an embarrassment.
So North Korea looks for an alternative emergency and
that is nukes. The Kim family that runs North Korea has seen what happens to
dictators that can’t fight back. Saddam got invaded because he “may have had
weapons of mass destruction.” Maduro doesn’t have an army that can challenge
the USA (nobody does). Noriega didn’t have weapons. Fidel Castro managed to
give American training forces a bop on the nose during the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion
and Castro ended up dying of ripe old age outlasting eight US presidents.
The lesson is not lost on the Kims of North Korea.
International Law is meaningless if the world’s enforcer of such laws decides
to go against you. The only way to prevent that is having the means of hurting
back. Ironically, this is the very point that American gun control activist has
used – small guys no matter how nasty need the means of fighting back should
the government go rogue and trample on individual liberties. That point is not
lost on the world’s nastiest dictators.
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