Nicolás Maduro (second from right), the president of Venezuela ousted from power by the United States, and his wife, Cilia Flores, are escorted in custody at a heliport in New York City.Kyle Mazza/CNP/Zuma

Last week, US forces entered Venezuela, capturing President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in a nighttime raid. On Monday, they were arraigned in US federal court, pleading not guilty to narcoterrorism charges.

The military action followed a monthslong pressure campaign that included a number of deadly strikes on boats off the Venezuelan coast that the Trump administration alleges were used for drug smuggling. Many legal experts, human rights groups, and lawmakers have called the strikes illegal.

The US has a long history of exerting power and influence in South America—sometimes violating international law in the process. The latest moves by the Trump administration appear to signal a new era of foreign policy for America meant to send a message to countries in the region and around the world.

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“I think this was as much about a display of force, whether that was to the Chinese or the Russians, or more likely to regional states,” says Emma Ashford, a Foreign Policy magazine columnist and senior fellow at the Stimson Center. “If the US can do this in Venezuela, the administration has been quite explicit that they can do it elsewhere in the region if they don’t receive cooperation from the Mexicans or the Colombians or others.”

On this week’s More To The Story, host Al Letson sits down with Ashford to examine the implications of Maduro’s ouster, how she defines what Trump is now calling the “Donroe Doctrine,” and what the US’s latest actions could mean for the region and the world.

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This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.

Al Letson: So the New Year brings us stories to talk about, namely Nicolás Maduro being removed from power by the Trump administration. When the news first came out, what went through your mind?

Emma Ashford: To be perfectly honest, it was a rough start to the new year. I think like a lot of people, I was incredibly surprised that the Trump administration had taken this step, which was frankly in many ways, unthinkable even a month or so back. The fact that the administration chose to effectively snatch Maduro and change the leadership in Venezuela, ostensibly, it’s a criminal case, but in practice, this is just not something that we do to foreign leaders.

Can you give me a brief summary of what happened this fall that eventually led to the capture of Maduro by US forces?

So there’s been pressure on Maduro and Venezuela going way back into the first Trump administration and before, but mostly, that’s taken the form of sanctions. What we see starting in the last year has been first, an attempt by the administration to actually negotiate with Caracas. So Rick Grenell, the president’s special envoy, went down there to see if they could get concessions from the major regime on drugs or migration, things like that. That didn’t work out. And so then, you see the administration dialing up the pressure quite substantially, starting with an indictment of Nicolás Maduro himself for various kinds of drug trafficking, and then a parallel military buildup where we start to see more and more US military assets, naval and air assets poured into the Caribbean around Venezuela in a very threatening way. And I think the administration clearly hoped that this would pressure Nicolás Maduro to give up power voluntarily, to go off into a comfortable exile somewhere.

That didn’t happen. And so the snatch and grab that we saw this weekend where Maduro was forcibly removed from power is clearly where the administration decided that they would go next.

I’m curious, when we talked last fall, did you think the US removing Maduro by force was even a possibility? Were you shocked when you first saw the news alerts coming into your phone?

I was rather surprised, yes. Donald Trump has had this pattern in his presidency of brinkmanship, of engaging in a lot of very coercive threats. If people don’t do what the US wants, we will add more tariffs or we will bomb your nuclear facilities. And often, he has backed away from those threats. Sometimes, as in the case of Iran, he has followed through. This is one where I thought that he would probably back down, but he appears to have decided that it would simply look too weak after all of these threats, this military buildup, to back down. And he went ahead with the snatch and grab. I do think it’s notable that this was an incredibly aggressive, assertive military operation. Right? I mean, very shocking in that regard, but actually, the political goals that are being sought here are pretty modest. Right? We’ve taken out Maduro. We’re continuing to work with the existing government that was under Maduro, and hopefully, they’ll be more palatable and more pliable now. That’s actually a pretty limited set of political objectives. So very shocking on the one hand, quite modest on the other.

So Trump was kind of laying the groundwork though for this to happen for a little while. We know that he designated drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, but it seems like he was positioning Maduro to say that this is a bad guy and we need to take action against him.

Yeah. There’s two things we can point to here in the run-up to this. One is that the Trump administration and the first Trump administration have both had this really conflictual relationship with Venezuela. Right? There was an attempted coup in some ways backed by the US during the first Trump term. There were a lot of sanctions. The US recognized Juan Guaido as the president of Venezuela at one point. So this has been on the radar for a long time. And then we also have this pattern, particularly in the second Trump administration. So this time around, engaging in this kind of brinkmanship with other states, whether it’s trade with China or whether it’s threatening Vladimir Putin over Ukraine. And so we see this military buildup in the Caribbean over the last few months saying, “Nicolás Maduro, you must go, you must give up power voluntarily.”

And what’s different, I think, in this case, or what was surprising........

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