The fallout from the US capture and extradition of Nicolás Maduro is radiating around the world.
In a speech at Venezuela’s legislative palace, Maduro’s son,Venezuelan congressman Nicolás Maduro Guerra, condemned the capture.
“If we normalize the kidnapping of a head of state, no country is safe,” Maduro Guerra said. “Today, it’s Venezuela. Tomorrow, it could be any nation that refuses to submit.”
At the request of Colombia, the UN Security Council met to discuss whether President Donald Trump’s actions were legal.
Colombia’s leader was also threatened by Trump: “Colombia is very sick too,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One. “Run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States. And he’s not going to be doing it very long, let me tell you.”
In the time since Maduro’s capture early Saturday morning, Trump has also threatened Cuba, Greenland, Iran, and Mexico.
Greg Grandin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Yale University and the author of the 2025 book America, America, told Today, Explained host Noel King this fits into a long pattern of US behavior.
“There is no country in which the United States hasn’t intervened in South America, in Central America,” Grandin told King. “By some counts between 1898 and 1992, the United States successfully was involved in over 40 regime changes.”
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
As you watch this news unfold over the weekend, which of those examples from the past felt the most analogous? Where did you say, we’re just doing this again?
You see elements of different interventions. Certainly the invasion of Panama is one that comes up immediately: The United States sent Marines into Panama to capture Manuel Noriega who, in the 1980s during the late Cold War, was a CIA asset. Problem was also that he was deeply involved with a lot of drug running, as are a number of US allies during this period.
It was important for a number of reasons. One, it was a showcase of Colin Powell’s exit strategy doctrine that you had to have a clear idea of what you were going in for and what you were getting out for. And also it was the first that eventually was understood as an intervention to install democracy, to defend democracy, as opposed to national security or anti-communism.
And it was a unilateral intervention. Everybody, every country in the OAS, the Organization of American States, was opposed to it. The United Nations was opposed to it. And so many observers see this as a kind of turning point leading to Iraq in 2003, in the sense that it was the beginning of the United States acting unilaterally or outside the channels of the United Nations or the Organization of American States.
You know, I’m old enough to remember Iraq. What I don’t remember is the United States, its leadership being so explicit about the oil. This [past] weekend, President Trump came out and he said, we want the oil. That’s why we did this. Did that surprise you?
No. And I don’t think — I’m not one of these scholars who think that it’s all about the oil. Obviously oil is important. Oil plays a factor. But there’s lots of ways of getting oil, right?
And the Trump administration could have negotiated with Maduro, as elements within the administration wanted to do. I think Trump’s talking about oil was kind of a way of providing [a] fig leaf for his America First base.
A lot of those nationalists, they don’t want to do regime change. They don’t want to rebuild world economies and have the United States superintend the global economy. But when you put it in tough guy terms, and when you put it in the terms of plunder and “we’re going to take the oil,” tou know, it resonates with certain sectors of America First nationalism and aggrieved nationalism.
“You do not have to carry water for Nicolás Maduro; you do not have to support or defend Nicolás Maduro in any way to hold on to the ideal of national sovereignty.”
So I’m not saying oil wasn’t important, but I’m saying Trump’s move from immigration to drugs and then to oil was really just a kind of trying out different ways of justifying what they wanted to do. And it goes back to this idea of the Monroe Doctrine — that the United States will police the hemisphere.
Let me ask you about an argument that I saw circulating this weekend. Nicolás Maduro was in power in Venezuela for more than 10 years. During this time, as you know, the economy craters. Eight million people flee. They flee repression. They flee censorship, fake elections, people being disappeared into prisons and tortured. What do you say to the argument that this was just the right thing for the United States of America to do?
You do not have to carry water for Nicolás Maduro; you do not have to support or defend Nicolás Maduro in any way to hold on to the ideal of national sovereignty. There is a system of international law which recognizes the sovereignty of nations — the absolute sovereignty of nations. It shouldn’t be left to the judgment of one nation.
International law is something that is always being destroyed. It’s a phrase that people use: “It weakens international law.” International law is always being weakened. But this certainly is a major step in that direction.
The idea that the United States can claim for itself the sole jurisdiction and power to decide what country’s sovereignty is legitimate, then to go a step further and then to kind of cosplay colonial plundering and say we’re doing it because of the oil. We’re not doing it because of democracy. We’re not doing it because we care about human rights. We’re doing it because we want to get the oil. I mean, I think that’s what Trump brings to the table. He pulls out some of the implicit or repressed premises of the power dynamics of the international order and just says them out loud.
A couple hours after this news broke on Saturday, I got a text from a Cuban American friend and the text just said, “Cuba next.” And I watched the president’s press conference and heard Marco Rubio speak, and a lot of people started saying that day, “Cuba next.” What do you think is coming next?
I do think the long game ultimately goes beyond Cuba, I think Cuba may be next. But what we see in the Trump administration is an attempt to bring Latin America to heel, not just Cuba, not just Venezuela, not just Nicaragua. but also what we might call these social democratic regimes: The Workers’ Party governed by Lula in Brazil and Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico.
These represent not so much confrontational challenges to the United States, but a kind of intolerable independence and autonomy. A country like Brazil is insisting on doing business with China, for instance, and finding ways to weaken US economic influence so it could diversify its trading partners. These are totally legitimate actions, but if we envision Latin America, as a place that Trump wants to show dominance, then they’re intolerable.
What it really is is about demonstrations of power and will. You know, Hegseth said the other day that nothing can prevent us from doing what we want in Latin America. And Trump said, effectively, the same thing. This is really about bringing Latin America — all of Latin America — to heel and bringing Trump allies to power. Latin America really is on a knife’s edge.
