Last weekend, the United States unleashed one of the most intense overseas military operations it has seen in decades. In a meticulously planned strike involving dozens of aircraft, helicopters breaching Caracas airspace, and elite special forces, U.S. troops struck multiple sites across Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, flying them to New York to face conspiracy and drug trafficking charges. The raid, executed early in the morning with what the U.S. described as precision strikes and disabled air defenses, stunned the region and drew international condemnation for violating Venezuelan sovereignty.

The American public’s response to the capture of Nicolás Maduro has been stark and muted, marked more by concern than triumph.

The Senate handed President Donald Trump a rare institutional rebuke on Thursday, advancing a war powers resolution aimed at restricting his authority to launch further military action against Venezuela without Congress. In a narrow 52-47 vote, five Republican senators joined every Democrat to move forward with an attempt to reclaim the constitutional role of Congress in declarations of war — a dramatic crack in GOP unity. That fracture didn’t come because of partisanship, but because lawmakers from both sides are growing uneasy with open-ended military adventurism that has dragged the country closer to another pointless conflict.

In the fevered rhetoric around Venezuela, even skeptics of Trump’s saber-rattling have been smeared as pro-Maduro sympathizers among GOP and conservative bastions.

From a purely tactical standpoint, the operation was a textbook display of American might: fast, overwhelming, and successful, with U.S. forces in and out of Venezuela before most of the world had even processed what was happening. But almost immediately, that show of force collided with a harder reality at home: Only 1 in 3 Americans say they support it, an unusually low level of approval at the very outset of a U.S. military operation.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken January 4 to 5 found that just 33 percent approved of the U.S. removing Maduro, while 72 percent reported their concerns about the U.S. getting too involved in Venezuela. Support breaks sharply along party lines, with Republicans backing the operation at far higher rates than Democrats and independents.

Historically, Americans have given new conflicts much more leeway. For example, Gallup found that just after George W. Bush launched the 2003 invasion of Iraq, about 75 percent of Americans backed it — support that only eroded years later. Even larger majorities backed the

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