The Trump administration’s repeated justification for capturing Venezuela's president has been that he was facing criminal charges from the United States, but one political commentator noted that by that same logic, President Donald Trump had just given countries the world over the “green light” to launch their own military invasions.
“If [Chinese President] Xi Jinping invaded Taiwan right now, and toppled the president there, on what grounds would the United States object?” wrote former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan in a social media post on X. “Or have any credibility to say anything?”
Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro was captured Saturday as part of a large-scale military operation greenlit by Trump, and transferred to New York to face trial on charges of narco-terrorism and possession of machine guns.
The operation saw the administration struggle to reconcile the aggressive maneuver with Trump’s purported commitment to non-interventionism, with Vice President JD Vance in particular scrambling to legally justify the attack on social media.
By its own implicit admission, however, the Trump administration had just offered “the green light Xi needed” to invade Taiwan, according to political commentator Jo Carducci, or the green light for Russian President Vladimir Putin to “kidnap [Ukrainian President Volodmir] Zelenskyy,” according to academic Nader Heshemi.
The United States has officially maintained a position of strategic ambiguity as it relates to Taiwan’s sovereignty, though has an immense economic interest in seeing Taiwan maintain a semblance of independence from mainland China. The People’s Republic of China maintains that Taiwan is part of China, and has not ruled out the use of force to achieve reunification.
And, according to the political commentators, the Trump administration’s unprecedented attack on Venezuela may have permanently eroded Washington’s moral and legal authority to credibly deter comparable military action by China.
This was the green light Xi needed.
— Jo (@JoJoFromJerz) January 3, 2026
