The argument against the White House’s actions in Venezuela has been aired out extensively in these pages. Critics contend that the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro broke international law and that U.S. President Donald Trump snubbed Venezuela’s democratic opposition in favor of a regime crony, among several other arguments.

On the latest episode of FP Live, I turned to a commentator who has been defending Trump’s actions. FP columnist Matthew Kroenig, who served in the Department of Defense in Trump’s first term and who advised presidential candidate Marco Rubio in 2016, has written that the White House “is clearly prioritizing hard national security and economic interests and is reluctant to over-promise on democracy promotion.” Kroenig is the vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

The argument against the White House’s actions in Venezuela has been aired out extensively in these pages. Critics contend that the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro broke international law and that U.S. President Donald Trump snubbed Venezuela’s democratic opposition in favor of a regime crony, among several other arguments.

On the latest episode of FP Live, I turned to a commentator who has been defending Trump’s actions. FP columnist Matthew Kroenig, who served in the Department of Defense in Trump’s first term and who advised presidential candidate Marco Rubio in 2016, has written that the White House “is clearly prioritizing hard national security and economic interests and is reluctant to over-promise on democracy promotion.” Kroenig is the vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.

RA: Let’s start with Venezuela. You have argued that U.S. President Donald Trump was right to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Why?

MK: Yes. Maduro was a bad guy, and it’s good that he’s gone. He provided an outpost to the axis of aggressors—Russia, China, and Iran—in the Western Hemisphere. He’s a narco-trafficker, and he so badly mismanaged his country that roughly one-quarter of the population fled, contributing to a refugee crisis and pressure on the U.S. southern border. It’s good that he’s gone, for U.S. security and also for the welfare of the Venezuelan people. There are a lot of questions about what comes next, but it’s hard to imagine that whoever comes next will be worse than Maduro.

RA: I want to push back on a few things you’ve just said there. First, there are many bad leaders around the world, and it’s not like the United States should be deposing all of them. Second, most people are not seeing anything changing in Caracas so far, other than the fact that Maduro is gone. Delcy Rodríguez was his longtime deputy, not an opposition leader, and by all accounts, government repression and the silencing of journalists have grown after Maduro’s fall in the last few days.

Third, there’s the question of international law. While the White House has been framing this move as righteous, any leader of any country in the future can run a similar operation and frame it as such. How do you address these critiques?

MK: First, I think Maduro is a special case. He was not recognized by either of the Trump administrations, the Biden administration, or the European Union. By all accounts, he stole an election in 2024. So this isn’t a legitimate leader. As I pointed out, he posed a direct national security threat to the United States in the access he provided to U.S. adversaries. Hezbollah’s Western Hemisphere headquarters was in Venezuela. And there was a viable military option. Those conditions are not all in place with other bad leaders around the world.

Second, we’re about a week in, so it’s too early to assess the effectiveness. But I do see signs that Rodríguez is willing to play ball. She’s released a bunch of political prisoners, for example, and it seems like she’s willing to cooperate in terms of releasing barrels of oil to the United States. I don’t think she wants what happened to Maduro to happen to her, and she realizes that cooperating with Washington is the only way to avoid that.

Rubio has laid out this three-part plan, and the final part is a transition to a new democratic government. I suspect you’d see wholesale changes there in terms of foreign-policy orientation.

On the legal aspect, in a way, international law doesn’t really exist. It’s up to nation-states to negotiate, interpret, and adjudicate the law. We don’t have a world government, and leaders find justifications for the use of force all the time. Russian President Vladimir Putin has already invaded Ukraine. Chinese President Xi Jinping already has his excuse for invading Taiwan by saying that Taiwan is already part of China. So I don’t see them needing this precedent to justify their own use of force abroad.

RA: On the question of international law, a few days ago on CNN, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said, look, these are “international niceties,” not quite law. You were just making a similar point, but the fear is that other countries will just have more ballast with which to justify involvement in other terrains and territories. It gets harder and harder to stop countries from doing as they please, especially bigger, stronger countries.

You’re right in saying that these things have always happened—law didn’t stop Putin from invading Ukraine. But inasmuch as the United States has always spoken about rules and laws and democracy, doesn’t this make it harder to do so in the future?

MK: I’ll half agree and half disagree. I do think the United States should continue to uphold........

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