Articles

How the Far-Right is Reacting to Trump’s Assault on Venezuela, by Shane Burley – 14 January 2026

From Maiseh Review

2026 began with several shocking moments of violence, including the devastating killing of legal observer Renee Goode in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which led to an escalation of protests and confrontations with ICE agents moving into communities. Just as defining of the year’s first fortnight, however, was Trump’s covert military operation in Venezuela, in which U.S. forces captured President Nicolás Maduro and transported him to the United States to face, bizarrely, charges related to drug trafficking.

For months, Trump has taken unilateral military action against Venezuelan ships, suggesting, without evidence, that they were involved in drug smuggling before bombing the vessels and killing their crews. Now, Trump has opened the year with his first major act of foreign war, even as he and his supporters insist it is merely a legal action and claim it will benefit the people of Venezuela.

While an assault like the one on Venezuela, essentially the kind of foreign war Trump campaigned against and what the national conservative and isolationist wing of the party is supposed to decry, would normally unite this element of the far right against those in power, this time the response has been far less uniform than expected. For those who were stalwart hawks on these issues, often the same figures who have maintained a consistent pro-Israel position, this moment offered a chance for their logic to return to prominence, however briefly, within the party.

The loudest among these voices was Ben Shapiro, whose primary enemy throughout his career has been socialism and who has long used Venezuela’s crippling economy and authoritarian leadership as a weapon against the left. “This is shocking in its magnitude and competence,” said Ben Shapiro in a celebratory January 6th video. “Maduro is in fact guilty… responsible for the deaths of probably hundreds of thousands of people and the exile of millions.”

Shapiro was historically not as uniformly supportive of blanket foreign wars as the neoconservatives, but he has remained far more aligned with interventionism than the MAGA and NatCon wings that have since taken over the party. He provides a justification that has been echoed across much of the far right: this was not exactly the kind of occupation the right had recently become critical of.

“This is exactly how American power should be used—decisively, clearly, and without a long-term occupation,” said Shapiro, suggesting that the targeted extraction of a president was categorically different from all-out warfare. Given that Trump has now stated clearly that the U.S. military will be active in Venezuela for years—and that even five Republicans, including Senator Rand Paul, have defected in an attempt to stop unilateral military action—Shapiro’s argument reads more as rhetoric than reality. As he elaborates further, his underlying motivations begin to resemble those that drove the invasion of Iraq in 2004. “Reopening the Venezuelan oil industry and directing it back toward the West cuts out the legs from underneath Iran and China,” said Shapiro, attempting to merge his faith in unregulated capitalism with a mercantile foreign policy.

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