Ottawa:
Happy New Year, Maduro.
It was a surreal moment as President Trump stepped up to the microphone at Mar-a-Lago last Saturday morning flanked by senior officials and advisers, the room already humming with the awareness that something irreversible had occurred. This was not a victory lap, nor a campaign rally. It was a notice.
Moments earlier, news had already begun circulating across capitals: Nicolás Maduro was no longer in Venezuela. The longtime strongman, indicted years earlier by U.S. prosecutors and treated by much of the democratic world as an illegitimate ruler, had been taken into custody. What followed was not celebration, but explanation—and warning.
From the outset, Trump framed what had happened not as regime change, but as law enforcement. “This was not an act of war,” he said. “This was an arrest.” That distinction would become the spine of the press conference—and the fault line running through it.
Trump returned to the same language again and again. The operation, he said, had been carried out at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice, pursuant to a standing federal indictment. “The Department of Justice asked for the arrest,” Trump stated. “Our military carried out that request.” In Trump’s telling, Maduro was not a head of state protected by sovereignty, but a fugitive protected by geography and inertia. “He was indicted. He was charged. He was running a criminal enterprise,” Trump said, invoking narcotics trafficking, money laundering, and terror facilitation as the core of the case.
This framing was deliberate. By emphasizing DOJ authority first and military execution second, Trump placed the operation squarely within a post-9/11 enforcement model—one in which the boundary between law enforcement and national security has long since eroded. The goal, Trump insisted, was accountability. “No one is above the law,” he said. “And geography doesn’t change that.”
The press, unsurprisingly, was unconvinced.
One reporter asked directly whether removing the leader of a sovereign country constituted regime change. Trump bristled at the framing. “We didn’t change a regime,” he replied. “We arrested a criminal.” Another pressed him on who now governed Venezuela. Trump declined to name successors or timelines. “That’s up to the Venezuelan people,” he said, before adding pointedly, “It always should have been.”
The exchange exposed the tension at the heart of the moment. De jure, the United States was executing an arrest warrant. De facto, the removal of Maduro created a vacuum that no legal distinction could fully obscure. Trump seemed aware of the contradiction—and unwilling to resolve it for his critics. “When you run a criminal state,” he said, “you don’t get to hide behind process forever.”
One of the most consequential moments of the press conference came not in Trump’s prepared remarks, but in his answers to repeated questions about the military’s role. Asked whether it was appropriate for U.S. forces to carry out an arrest abroad, Trump responded bluntly: “They did what the Justice Department asked them to do.”
This was not an offhand comment. It was a statement of doctrine.
Since 9/11, the United States has increasingly relied on military capabilities to execute law-enforcement objectives beyond its borders—first against terrorist leaders, now against criminalized state actors. The Maduro operation represented the clearest extension yet of that model into the Western Hemisphere. Trump did not shy away from the implication. “This is how you deal with these people,” he said. “You indict them. You find them. And you bring them in.”
When Trump turned to history, it was not to soften the message. “All of these actions were in gross violation of the core principles of American foreign policy dating back more than two centuries,” he said. “All the way back, it dated to the Monroe Doctrine… We sort of forgot about it. We don’t forget about it anymore.”
The invocation was neither nostalgic nor academic. Trump tied the doctrine directly to contemporary threats. Under what he described as a newly articulated national security framework, “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.” He made clear that Venezuela was not unique. “What happened to Maduro can happen to them,” Trump warned, when asked whether other leaders in the region should be concerned.
The message was unmistakable: criminalized sovereignty would no longer be tolerated as a cost of doing business.
Reporters pressed hard on international law. Was this legal? Did it violate the UN Charter? Would allies accept it? Trump’s answers were blunt. “He was indicted,” he said again. “That’s the law.” When asked about China and Russia—both deeply invested in Venezuela—Trump dismissed the notion that great-power sensitivities should override enforcement. “They knew who he was,” he said. “Everyone knew.”
One question cut closer to home: whether this operation set a precedent that could be turned against the United States. Trump paused. “We don’t run narco-states,” he replied.
The most underreported portion of the press conference came when Trump broadened the frame beyond Venezuela. Asked about narcotics flows, he linked the arrest directly to North American security. “This is about drugs coming into our country,” he said. “This is about cartels, corruption, and governments that look the other way.” Colombia was not named casually, but it was unmistakably present in Trump’s remarks. “Some countries have been partners,” he said. “Some have not done enough.”
The implication was clear: cooperation would be rewarded, tolerance would not.
The question, then, is whether the warning delivered at Mar-a-Lago was narrowly regional or hemispheric in the fullest sense. If the logic articulated that day holds—that criminalized permissiveness constitutes a security threat—Canada cannot assume immunity based on alliance or geography alone. Ottawa has, after all, now named its own fentanyl czar, tasked with coordinating a national response to the crisis, even as Washington presses allies to demonstrate measurable enforcement outcomes. Whether Canada’s response will be viewed in Washington as partnership or insufficiency remains an open question—one that may yet demand a column of its own.
Taken as a whole, the January 3 press conference marked a doctrinal shift that democratic and autocratic nations alike must absorb from an economic, defence, and law-enforcement policy perspective. This was not the language of sanctions or diplomatic isolation. It was the language of enforcement—grounded in indictment, executed by force, and justified through a reassertion of hemispheric responsibility. The arrest of Maduro was presented not as an end in itself, but as an example: a demonstration that the era of treating transnational criminal states as manageable irritants had ended.
The mechanics of the operation underscored the point. After being taken into custody, Nicolás Maduro and his wife were extracted by helicopter under U.S. military protection and transferred offshore to a U.S. naval vessel operating in the region. From there, Maduro was flown to New York and later that evening processed in the Southern District of New York—the same court that filed the original 2020 indictment and now, with an expanded charging document, prepared to test the full reach of American law.
This was not disappearance. It was jurisdiction.
Press conferences are often forgotten. This one will not be. January 3 will be studied not for its theatrics, but for its clarity. In plain language, the president of the United States announced that criminalized sovereignty in the Western Hemisphere would no longer be managed, tolerated, or deferred.
Maduro learned that lesson in the dark.
