From Venezuela to Iran: Trump’s New Year shock and a world on edge
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The New Year started with a bang. Three days into 2026 came the extraordinary news that the US had captured Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores.
Actually, not sure captured is the right word here – kidnapped or abducted fits better? Arrested or detained? Or is it an example of extraordinary rendition? Take your pick. This search for the right word to describe Maduro’s fate comes from the astounding and incredible circumstances surrounding his detention. To give US President Donald Trump his due, he’d been warning the world and Maduro that “his days are numbered." It’s those who naively believed that the US would uphold international law who are to blame for feeling shocked.
But then, wasn’t it the US that advocated the primacy of international law? Of freedom/sovereignty of countries, etc? American economist and public policy analyst Professor Jeffrey Sachs says regime change has been an “addiction" of the US security state, with some 100 such operations since 1945. Not all have been overt operations – wars, coups, deliberate instigated unrest to overthrow governments (recall Bangladesh in July-August 2024 here), stringent economic sanctions, assassinations – have all been part of the US regime change arsenal, according to Sachs. The images of a handcuffed Maduro, sometimes with a blindfold, do recall the capture of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in 2003.
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