The leader of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, is now in U.S. custody and appeared in federal court in New York on Monday, two days after the U.S. military captured him. The operation that ousted him will have deep and lasting implications not only for Venezuela, but also nations that aligned themselves with Maduro’s regime, according to policy experts.

Maduro’s arrest is a “disaster” for the “Axis of Evil, these kinds of hostile, anti-American countries,” according to Victoria Coates, a former deputy national security advisor to President Donald Trump, and the vice president of the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

Cuba, China, Iran, and Russia stand to lose the most from Maduro’s capture, Coates and other foreign policy experts said.

The capture of Maduro has shattered “China’s dream” of dominating the “purchase of Venezuelan oil over the next 10 to 20 years,” explains Michael Pillsbury, author of “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.”

China had offered to further develop and update Venezuela’s oil infrastructure to “then pump most of it … for themselves,” Pillsbury........

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