I am a security expert – Trump’s just made the world look bleaker for Putin and Xi Jinping | World | News
Donald Trump’s military operation to topple Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro has sent shockwaves around the world and left Moscow and Beijing “wondering what comes next”, a leading security expert has warned. Writing exclusively for the Daily Express, Dr Alan Mendoza, executive director of the Henry Jackson Society think tank, said President Trump had sent a clear message to the world’s tyrants: “You don’t mess with the US on his watch.”
The dramatic intervention came after elite US special forces launched a daring dawn raid on the South American leader’s fortified compound in Caracas, seizing him and bundling him onto waiting helicopters bound for America. Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were captured by American troops in the lightning operation, which was personally overseen by President Trump from his Mar-a-Lago residence. The deposed leader now faces narco-terrorism and drug trafficking charges in a Manhattan federal court and is being held at the notorious Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
Maduro’s brutal regime has been condemned for years for horrific human rights abuses, including systematic torture, extrajudicial killings and sexual violence against women. Dr Mendoza said “Western leaders will shed no tears for Maduro”, adding that the former despot had rigged repeated elections and “ran a country with remarkable natural resource reserves into the ground”.
Dr Mendoza said the Maduro regime “had been at the centre of opposition to US power in the Americas for decades”, before ramping up its criminality by “engaging in drug trafficking operations that directly affected the health of numerous Americans”. The deposed leader is now languishing in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center – a jail described as “hell on earth” – as he awaits trial.
The security expert warned that the surgical precision of Maduro’s removal will “have alarmed Presidents Putin and Xi”, who had grown used to facing a “predictable and sluggish US, whose every action could be anticipated”. Dr Mendoza added that Russia and China have “grown comfortable in a world where they believed that they possessed the power of disruption, and that others would therefore need to dance to any tune they chose to play”.
But President Trump, Dr Mendoza said, had “upended that equation” in one devastating blow. “Instead of being the disruptors, the Russia-China axis has been disrupted with the loss of a key partner in Venezuela,” he wrote. “Coming on top of the recent collapse of the Assad regime in Syria and the weakening of Iran and its terrorist proxies, the world looks bleaker for authoritarians than it has for some time.”
Both Russia and China were quick to condemn the US military strike, with Moscow’s Foreign Ministry vowing to “continue to support the course pursued by its Bolivarian leadership to defend the country’s national interests and sovereignty”.
Dr Mendoza warned the US now faces a critical challenge to “maintain this momentum” and “not get bogged down in a Venezuelan governance disaster”. He cautioned that China and Russia will be hoping America stumbles, allowing them to “reverse this setback”. President Trump has said the US will “run” Venezuela until a stable transition of power can be secured.
