The US military operation to track down, capture and fly Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro back to the United States for prosecution on drug trafficking charges went flawlessly. It was well-coordinated, meticulously planned and executed to a tee. Nearly two days after Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were taken into US custody, details of the snatch-and-grab mission are beginning to percolate into the US media. It involved a cyberattack against Caracas’s electricity system, precision bombing against several Venezuelan airfields and ports, a low-flying helicopter assault on Maduro’s hideout and a CIA deployment that was operating in the country since August. By the time Americans woke up on Saturday morning, Maduro, a man the Trump administration slapped with a multi-count indictment back in 2020, was on a US warship headed to New York.

The Trump administration’s day-after plans for Venezuela are bumbling, confusing and hard to explain

Yet if the attempt to arrest Maduro was clean, short and sharp, the Trump administration’s day-after plans for Venezuela are bumbling, confusing and hard to explain. Despite President Trump’s bombastic proclamation that the United States will now run Venezuela’s affairs until a viable, US-accepted political transition is in place, US leverage to implement such a lofty ambition will remain limited in part because the Maduro government is still very much alive. Unlike Iraq during the George W. Bush........

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