On September 28, 2024, I published an ad hoc Monthly Letter to account for “the historic significance,” as I put it, of the events which unfolded the previous day in Beirut.

Hezbollah had just confirmed the death of Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s longtime leader and the highest-profile casualty from Iran’s “Axis Of Resistance” since Donald Trump assassinated Quds commander Qassem Soleimani early in 2020.

Nasrallah was killed in a massive Israeli airstrike on a suburb in the Lebanese capital. I called his death a “turning point,” a characterization that was borne out by subsequent events, including the fall of the Assad regime in Syria less than three months later and the short-lived war between Israel and Iran which culminated in the US bombing the latter’s nuclear sites.

I doubt the US operation to depose Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela will be as consequential for the world as Nasrallah’s assassination, but however you want to describe the January 3, 2026, raid in Caracas, it’s History with a capital “H.” As such it deserves its own, dedicated Monthly.

There are any number of ways to frame Maduro’s capture, not all of which are mutually exclusive. You could call it, as one reader did, an intolerable violation of the same rules-based international order Russia spurned by invading Ukraine in 2022.

Or you could describe it as the most significant American military intervention since Operation Iraqi Freedom which toppled Saddam Hussein, presaging nearly nine years of chaotic nation-building with dire consequences including, but by no means limited to, the birth of ISIS and the subjugation of Iraq’s political processes to Iranian influence.

You may also mention Libya, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Abbottabad and so on. Or you could argue the more relevant parallel is America’s history of interventions in Latin America, where the US worked ceaselessly during the Cold War to undermine left-wing governments often to disastrous effect, exposing locals to cruel military juntas and brutal right-wing dictatorships.

Or, more narrowly, you might suggest the best analogue for Maduro’s ouster was Operation Just Cause, the brief US invasion of Panama that led to the arrest of Manuel Noriega on drug trafficking charges in 1990. That’s very likely how the Trump administration will seek to frame the operation — as a law enforcement action which, in order to be successful, needed to be carried out by the military.

Although Joint Chiefs chairman Dan Caine suggested the timing of the raid in Caracas was entirely dictated by the weather and conditions on the ground, it’s surely not a coincidence that Maduro’s capture coincided exactly with Noriega’s surrender from the Vatican embassy in Panama City on January 3, 1990. (And for that matter, with the assassination of Soleimani on January 3, 2020.)

In 2019, Marco Rubio stirred controversy when he cited the US capture of Noriega while obliquely suggesting Maduro’s days were numbered. And the Trump administration’s belabored efforts to paint Maduro as a major smuggler of Colombian cocaine look a lot like an attempt to recreate the rationale for apprehending Noriega, whose ties to Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel were well established.

When Noriega was charged by a judge in Miami with turning Panama into a logistics center for the transit of Colombian cocaine, it “marked the first time a US court had ever indicted a head of state,” as The Miami Herald noted, in a 2020 piece called “US indictment of Venezuela’s Maduro carries echoes of Noriega. Will it end the same way?”

The answer, as it turns out, is “yes.” Yes, it did end the same way for Maduro, and indeed on the same day. And like Noriega, he’ll be charged by a US court.

The original in-absentia indictment of Maduro centered around the contention that his mentor Hugo Chávez, working through Venezuela’s military, commandeered drug trafficking in the country in the process setting up an alliance with FARC in Colombia, thereby aiding and abetting one of the longest-running guerrilla insurgencies in the world. Maduro supposedly inherited the alliance, and thereby the cocaine trafficking, when Chávez died in 2013.

The new indictment charges Maduro with “massive-scale” cocaine trafficking, alleging, among a lot of other things, that Maduro “provided Venezuelan diplomatic passports to drug traffickers and facilitated diplomatic cover for planes used by money launderers to repatriate drug proceeds from Mexico to Venezuela” while he was Minister of Foreign Affairs under Chávez.

Then, “as Venezuela’s President and de facto ruler, Maduro [allowed] cocaine-fueled corruption to flourish for his own benefit, for the benefit of members of his ruling regime and for the benefit of his family members.” By 2020, the new indictment says, “between 200 and 250 tons of cocaine were trafficked through Venezuela.”

Maduro will surely be convicted, just as Noriega ultimately was. Just as surely, he’ll be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison. Unlike Noriega, though, Maduro wasn’t “the man who knew too much,” as The Guardian put it, documenting the life and times of the CIA’s most famous asset upon his death in 2017. There isn’t a lot of nuance in Maduro’s backstory, and at no time did he serve America’s strategic interests in Latin America. Rather, he was a hapless, oppressive antagonist who sat atop an ocean of oil.

You could argue, as the US will, that Maduro presided over a “narco-kleptocracy,” as a Senate subcommittee headed by John Kerry famously described Noriega’s Panama in 1988. But the “narco” part’s almost superfluous here. Notwithstanding the new indictment’s grandiose claims about Maduro’s cocaine trafficking exploits, his regime’s involvement in the drug trade was, I’d suggest, incidental even if it was heavy, just like its forays into gun-running and collaboration with regional guerrilla groups.

That’s not to play down those activities, it’s just to say there isn’t a lot that’s especially interesting about them in the context of Maduro, who was concerned first and foremost with regime survival in the face of self-inflicted economic calamity and useful antagonism vis-à-vis the US which, like the Kim dynasty in Pyongyang and the theocracy in Tehran, Caracas scapegoated as the source of Venezuela’s problems. In other words, Chavismo gave way under Maduro to the generic self-preservation tactics of down and out dictators. (Nothing to see here, just a moron who threw it all away.)

By contrast, Noriega’s unseemly dealings were in many cases carried out in pursuit of the US’s own agenda in Latin America. His is a lively, and at times absurdist, tale of double-dealing, subterfuge and spycraft co-authored by Langley. By the late-1980s, he was a liability, which is why you should think twice before becoming a CIA asset: In the event you’re not needed anymore or worse, it comes to light that your service to America involved all sorts of unsavory activities that no US president, particularly one who served as CIA director during your tenure as a collaborator, would want to be associated with, you’ll be cut loose. Or arrested and jailed.

Suffice to say there really is no Noriega analogue vis-à-vis what happened to Maduro on January 3, 2026. My guess is that the Trump administration and its defenders will point to three ostensible parallels to make the case: Cocaine trafficking/money laundering, coordination with leftist guerrillas in Colombia (with Noriega it was M-19) and the idea that the operation itself is best conceived as a law enforcement action to “arrest two indicted fugitives of the United States,” as Rubio described Maduro and his wife on Saturday.

Indeed, quite a bit of the rhetoric coming out of the Trump administration echoes the 1988 Senate testimony of one-time Noriega deputy Jose Blandon who, after turning on the strongman, regaled the US Senate with tales of a joint plot between Noriega and Fidel Castro to establish an “evil empire” in Latin America funded by cocaine proceeds.

On Saturday, shortly after the raid that captured Maduro, veteran reporter Bobby Ghosh warned that “Venezuela isn’t Panama, no matter how much Trump wishes it were.” Writing for Time, Ghosh reminded Americans that “when George H.W. Bush ordered the invasion of Panama, [t]he headquarters of US Southern Command sat on Panamanian soil.” The US military, he said, “didn’t need to project power across the Caribbean; they were already in place, ready to guarantee a transition of government.”

Panama, Ghosh went on, “was a small country that had been, since its founding, effectively under American tutelage,” whereas Venezuela “has its own complex political ecosystem” which shouldn’t be expected to “simply default to the opposition the moment the strongman is removed.”

If it is the administration’s intention to frame Maduro’s ouster as akin both in rationale and execution to the incursion that led to Noriega’s surrender 36 years ago, Trump didn’t do himself any favors by repeatedly referencing, during a press conference, Venezuela’s untapped oil riches and the extent to which American companies will now be free to reclaim what Chávez “stole” from them during the 2007 expropriation push. He also used the word “deposed” and other language not typically associated with “police” actions. The idea of deposing a dictator in an oil-rich nation invariably conjures Iraq.

Speaking of the Middle East, the events of January 3, 2026, raise the specter of additional US action against the regime in Tehran at a time when Iran’s experiencing the widest social unrest since hundreds were killed during a government crackdown on protesters in 2019. Unnervingly, just hours before US commandos descended on Caracas and absconded with Maduro and his wife, Trump said the US military’s “locked and loaded” in the event Iran’s security forces begin shooting demonstrators.

As far as Latin America goes, everyone’s on notice including and especially Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, who Trump threatened directly on Saturday. It’s worth noting that Trump’s also floated the possibility of military action in Panama to reassert control over the canal.

Finally, it’s impossible to ignore the glaring contradiction between Trump’s December pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president serving half a century in a US prison for facilitating the sale of hundreds of tons of cocaine into America, and the looming jail sentence for Maduro on the same charges.

When Dasha Burns asked Trump last month how pardoning Hernández was consistent with a zero tolerance policy on drug trafficking, Trump suggested Hernández was a victim of circumstance. Honduras “deals in drugs,” he told Burns. “Probably you could say that about every country, and because he was the president, they gave him like 45 years in prison.”

[Editor’s note: This impromptu Monthly was published in light of the gravity of events in Venezuela and in lieu of the normal Monthly Letter, which will be published later in January.]