The military raid ordered by President Donald Trump to capture and extract Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro represents the starkest expression yet of his administration’s intent to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. Whether Trump thinks that Russia and China can apply the same spheres-of-influence principle to parts of Europe and the Asia Pacific remains unclear.

The big risk as things stand is that an adversary misreads his mixed signals, oversteps, and triggers an escalation nobody wants. But a world in which great powers dictate affairs in their respective backyards, if Trump does move that way, is more likely to descend into chaos or conflict than to achieve stable equilibrium.

Maduro’s capture masks big questions about Venezuela’s near-term future. Delcy Rodriguez, a stalwart of the Chavista regime, which has run the country for more than two decades, has been sworn in as president. Chavismo, the regime’s ideology, gets its name from the late socialist leader Hugo Chavez, and defines itself by anti-imperialist rhetoric, confrontation with Washington, and close ties with American adversaries from Cuba to China to Russia to Iran.

For now, Trump appears disinclined to oust the Chavista regime, which has a stranglehold on the Venezuelan state. He shows little sympathy for Venezuela’s opposition, whose leader Maria Corina Machado had lobbied for a U.S. intervention aimed at more profound change, and seems to have scant interest in a genuine democratic transition. In any case, any attempt at regime change could provoke violent resistance from the army and a plethora of militias invested in the status quo.

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Instead, the immediate goal appears to be grabbing the country’s vast oil reserves, though even there, challenges are formidable. Getting more Venezuelan crude flowing will require billions of dollars and years of work. American companies won’t invest without a better sense of what Venezuela’s future holds. At the same time, it remains to be seen how much Trump can work with Rodriguez and what oil concessions she can offer while keeping the fiercely nationalist Chavista movement and the military in line. Other American demands might be less complicated: Venezuela cutting subsidies to and severing ties with Cuba, for example, or distancing itself from Russia and China.

While Venezuelans live with a deeply uncertain future, the seizure of Maduro caps a year of Trump demonstrating ever more brazenly his belief that Washington must have free rein in the Western Hemisphere.

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Greenland, a sparsely populated, mineral-rich, icebound island, is an autonomous Danish territory located between the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans. Early in 2025, President Trump appeared fixated on taking control of the territory, insisting on its vital importance for American security.

Such expansionist rhetoric had receded as Trump’s attention turned elsewhere, but, emboldened by the audacious raid in Caracas, the president and his top lieutenants have again indicated the intent to bring Greenland under U.S. control. Trump has even appointed an envoy to that end. Seizing the island militarily would be an extraordinary step, an open confrontation with a NATO ally. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has reportedly told U.S. senators that is not the plan.

Political pressure and subterfuge to extend American influence, perhaps combined with a bid to buy the island, seem more plausible but are unlikely to work. Others in the administration decline to rule out using force. After what happened in Venezuela, it is hard not to take them seriously.

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The past year has also seen Trump threaten to reannex the Panama Canal, menace Canada, and interfere openly in Latin American politics. He has leveraged tariffs to punish enemies and bailouts to reward friends, albeit with mixed success. (Trump aided Javier Milei’s re-election bid in Argentina but failed to stop the sentencing of the former Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro for an attempted coup.) He has threatened Cuba and Colombia, despite Washington’s longstanding ties to Bogota. He has blown up small boats allegedly running drugs off the Caribbean and Pacific coastlines, and he has floated the idea of unilateral strikes on cartels and fentanyl labs in Mexico.  

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The message is clear: Washington will throw its weight around in the Western Hemisphere and it wants rivals located elsewhere, China and Russia especially, out—or at least out of critical sectors. It’s a doctrine

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