When US forces kidnapped Nicolás Maduro in Caracas last week they acted illegally. They broke multiple international laws. The President of the United States publicly declared that he cannot be held to account. He is not constrained by the law, he said, he is (un)constrained by his personal (im)morality.
There is no doubt that Maduro was a brutal and repressive dictator, and a majority of the people of Venezuela wanted democratic change. They had voted for it in 2024. Did Donald Trump and the United States act morally in removing this man from power?
Consider three scenarios:
Scenario 1: An honest passerby sees a thug beating an elderly person. She tackles the thug and saves the victim.
Scenario 2: A Mafia Boss sees the same assault. He notices the thug’s expensive gold bracelet, tackles him, steals the bracelet, and the elderly person is saved.
Scenario 3: An honest passerby witnesses the assault but is too frightened to intervene. She calls a known Mafia Boss for help. He tackles the thug, steals the bracelet, and the elderly person is saved.
Only Scenario 1 deserves praise. The passerby acts from virtuous motives and achieves a good outcome. But what of the Mafia Boss?
In Scenario 2, he performs a superficially right action (stopping an assault) but for entirely immoral purpose (theft). The victim benefits, but this is incidental to the Mafia Boss’s criminal purpose. Most moral traditions recognise this distinction. We praise people for their character and intentions, not merely for producing beneficial side effects. A surgeon who saves a patient primarily to steal their jewellery hasn’t acted virtuously, even though the patient survives.
The Mafia Boss might deserve some credit for not making things worse—he could have ignored the victim or joined the assault. But “not being as bad as possible” isn’t praiseworthy. At most, we might say: “How fortunate his greed led him to intervene”—but this concerns lucky consequences, not moral worth.
Scenario 3 adds complexity. The passerby achieves a good outcome she couldn’t manage alone, but she’s complicit in the theft by knowingly involving a criminal. This is the classic “dirty hands” dilemma: when achieving good outcomes requires morally tainted means.
Now apply this to Venezuela.
We are in Scenario 2 (possibly Scenario 3) territory. Trump’s own words reveal his motives with startling clarity. “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil”, he told the New York Times. “We will rebuild it in a very profitable way”. He repeatedly emphasised making money for the United States, settling old scores over nationalisation (“they took the oil from us years ago”), and has already begun negotiating with American oil executives.
The pattern of decisions confirms this. Rather than recognising María Corina Machado—the Nobel Peace Prize-winning opposition leader whose party won Venezuela’s 2024 election—Trump works with Maduro’s former vice president, a regime loyalist. Why? Because “she’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Trump said, meaning granting American companies renewed access to Venezuela’s oil industry. There’s no timeline for elections, no commitment to Venezuelan self-governance. “Only time will tell”, Trump said when asked how long US control would last. “I would say much longer” than a year.
The stated justifications—drugs, migration, terrorism—don’t withstand scrutiny. Venezuela accounts for minimal drug trafficking to the US. The intervention followed months of pressure focused squarely on oil: sanctions, blockades, and seizing tankers.
This is Scenario 2. An authoritarian leader is removed—arguably beneficial for many Venezuelans—but primarily to facilitate resource extraction. The relief for Venezuelans is incidental to the core objective.
The Mafia Boss deserves no praise for saving the elderly person whilst stealing their bracelet. He should be prosecuted for the crime he committed. Donald Trump should be prosecuted for his crimes—Congress has the power.