Trump promised Maga the US wouldn't police the world - now it's running Venezuela

The world now watches on with astonishment, fear and horror - what's next?

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America was supposed to be done with being “the world’s policeman”. Donald Trump said so repeatedly during his first term, and during his campaign in 2024.

Maga was sick of seeing US troops deployed around the world, of spending billions on conflicts thousands of miles away, of hearing about places they’d never heard of. Donald Trump would put America first.

Today, he announced the United States will be running Venezuela for the foreseeable future – at least until a “safe, proper and judicious” transition, presumably as defined by Trump himself, is possible.

America’s track record of administering foreign countries – always supposedly in their best interests – is hardly a spotless one, nor one that Trump or his supporters have defended. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan is a shining example of how American administration can fix the problems of a nation. Displacing the dictator has, traditionally, been the easy part.

Trump presumably believes this time will be different, presumably because he is in charge. But he had little in the way of details as to why it would be different, or how it might work – he offered no explanation of how the US will be running Venezuela, let alone any description of why his extraordinary military and diplomatic action was legal under either US or international law.

About the only thing he did feel able to explain was that American oil companies would be moving in to Venezuela, “paying billions of dollars” to “get the oil flowing” and that they would be compensated for that.

Trump’s Maga movement ran as an explicit rejection of the neoconservative project led by George W Bush, Dick Cheney and the Republican Party. Maga was supposedly against foreign wars, against policing the world, and against foreign projects.

At one stroke, Trump has U-turned on this entirely. Trump will now run Venezuela, with US troops on the ground if need be.

Trump speaks to the press following US military actions in Venezuela (Photo: Jim Watson/AFP)

“We’re not afraid of boots on the ground… we don’t mind saying it,” he said, adding that “the people standing right behind me” – Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio – would be running Venezuela.

The actual neoconservative project spent years denying that its invasion of Iraq was anything to do with oil, and became so sensitive to that accusation that it minimised the use of oil funds in Iraq’s reconstruction. By contrast, Trump is openly declaring plans for US companies to monetise Venezuelan oil.

The gravity of this moment cannot be overstated. The US President has turned America into the caricature its adversaries imagined. Trump has launched unilateral regime change overnight, without any legal authorities or notifications, and with absolutely no plan set out to the public for what comes next. He seems to believe everything will be different just because he’s doing it. He seems to have no comprehension of the risks and the backlash that are inevitably heading America’s way. He has learned nothing from decades of American foreign policy failings.

World leaders will surely be looking on in horror, because the world now appears to be at the mercy of a 79-year-old egomaniac. Trump has in recent weeks launched air strikes on Nigeria, and threatened to replace the administration of Iran, while claiming the seizure of Greenland is vital to American national security.

There is no doctrine, no philosophy, no sense to what America will do next. Foreign policy relies on predictability and stability, and Trump is allergic to both – and with no one around him either able or willing to rein him in.

Trump has ripped apart the platform upon which he was elected. Maga voters could not have been clearer that they wanted an end to foreign adventures – and now find themselves with a whole new one, without allies, explanation or any clear plan.

He has also ripped apart any sense of a predictable or rules-based international order, or any sense of international law. He has dragged Nicolás Maduro from his bed to face “justice” in a US courtroom for his role in narco-terrorism, just weeks after he pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez for narco-terrorism.

Trump’s White House now insists that American courts are the proper forum to hold a Venezuelan president to account, but holds that US courts cannot prosecute a US president. The world is now subject to the whims of Donald. The law, it seems, is what he says it is.

Looking at the Mar-a-Lago press conference, it is clear that Trump, despite his domestic unpopularity and ongoing scandals, has never felt more powerful. History has a habit of punishing American presidents for these moments of hubris. The world will be watching – whether it wants to or not.