When Moment’s special “Strongman” issue came out in Fall 2024, Joe Biden was still president, and U.S. interventionism continued in full retreat following the disastrous 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. Among those we interviewed for the “Big Question” (“What Is the Allure of the Strongman?”) was Cynthia Arnson, a Latin America expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, who cited Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as a leading strongman along with El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele.
“Maduro has been intent on maintaining power through massive fraud and repression and (so far) has the support of the armed forces,” Arnson said at the time. “Other dictatorships—Russia, China, Iran, North Korea—support Maduro, but he is isolated regionally [apart from Cuba] and in the West.”
Fast forward to winter 2026. Maduro sits in a jail cell in Brooklyn, facing drug-trafficking charges courtesy of President Donald Trump’s military “extraction” of the strongman and his wife Cilia Flores. At a press conference after U.S. military forces captured the pair and put them on a plane to New York, Trump said the U.S. would “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition…We want peace, liberty and justice for the great people of Venezuela.”
But it didn’t take long to segue to Venezuelan oil and what he termed the “Donroe” doctrine (riffing on the 19th-century Monroe doctrine).
Asked about whether the Maduro capture (or “kidnapping” as Maduro himself called it) shuffles the strongman deck in Latin America, Arnson, who departed the Wilson Center last year amid the Trump cutbacks and is now teaching at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, says, yes, the deck has been shuffled. But so far not much has changed.
Equally concerning to Arnson is the lack of any U.S. plan aimed at improving the lives of average Venezuelans.
“The U.S. military operation succeeded in extracting and indicting a repressive leader deeply involved in various forms of corruption, including drug trafficking,” says Arnson. “But it has left the [Maduro] security and military forces in complete control.”
The key ministries of defense and interior are run by the same crowd of Maduro acolytes. If anything, the repression that was Maduro’s hallmark has increased. People rejoicing Maduro’s departure and journalists trying to cover it are all ripe targets for arrest.
“What is crystal clear in the aftermath is this was not about regime change at all,” Arnson says.
So then what is it about?
As with numerous other critics of Trump foreign policy, Arnson believes it’s mostly about oil and the decades-old American oil industry grievance that Venezuela seized its oil infrastructure without full compensation. Venezuela nationalized its oil industry in 1976. Since then, U.S. firms have a mixed record of involvement in Venezuelan oil production as minority partners. Only Chevron remains in projects producing heavy or extra heavy crude, good for diesel and jet fuel, as well as asphalt. The oil infrastructure has significantly deteriorated, leaving some American oil giants loath to accept Trump’s invitation to invest heavily in Venezuela.
Decrying the covert operation to nab her boss, acting President Delcy Rodriguez described it as having “Zionist undertones.” What was that about? For decades, Venezuela has maintained close ties to Iran, Hezbollah and other enemies of Israel, Arnson says. But more likely, Rodriguez “was tapping into a crude form of antisemitism that attributes setbacks to Jewish money and an international Jewish conspiracy,” she says.
Having earned her doctorate from Hopkins SAIS and working as a congressional staffer focused on human rights in Latin America, Arnson has continued that focus and says concern over human rights has not abated in Venezuela. If anything, the seizing of Maduro and his wife has ushered in a heightened round of repression.
But equally concerning to Arnson is the lack of any U.S. plan aimed at improving the lives of average Venezuelans. Such an effort would involve “massive amounts of humanitarian assistance to address the poverty, hunger and medical needs,” Arnson says. “But in taking over Venezuela’s oil industry, the Trump administration has not been clear on exactly how revenues will be administered and who will benefit first.”
It is hard to say how this all plays out. “If this ends up being all about giving U.S. companies preferential access to oil wealth, the intervention will go down in history as a massive failure,” Arnson says.
Top image: Delcy Rodriguez presiding over her first Council of Ministers meeting at Miraflores Palace on January 4, 2026.