As soon as European leaders began publicly issuing statements on the US attack on Venezuela and its “capture” of Nicolás Maduro in the middle of the night on 3 January, it was clear the response would be timid. Kaja Kallas, the hapless EU high representative, said that the bloc was “closely monitoring” the situation in Venezuela and called for a “peaceful transition”. “Under all circumstances, the principles of international law and the UN Charter must be respected,” she wrote. The European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen issued an almost identical statement shortly afterwards.
During the next 24 hours, other European leaders issued similarly meek statements that expressed concern but stopped short of criticising the US. They emphasised they had never recognised Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela but said that the question of the legality of Operation Absolute Resolve was complicated – and as the German chancellor Friedrich Merz put it, “requires careful consideration”. Some far-right politicians were clearer in their criticism of the Trump administration’s actions than centrists – for example, France’s Marine Le Pen called it “regime change” and insisted that the sovereignty of states is “never negotiable”.
The equivocal way that European leaders have responded to the US intervention is yet another example of their unwillingness to criticise Trump. They are aware that they depend on him for their own security and, almost exactly a year into his second term as president, are still desperately hoping that he might continue to support Ukraine to at least some extent. But the reactions of European leaders to the abduction of Maduro are an illustration not just of weakness but also of ambivalence: they are themselves quite conflicted about it.
On the one hand, the US intervention – a military strike against a sovereign state – would seem to violate international law and could have implications for Ukraine. As Wolfgang Ischinger, the former German ambassador and director of the Munich Security Conference, put it in a social media post immediately after news of the US attack broke: “If the US intervenes in Venezuela now – without a UN mandate – the argument that Russia should not have intervened in Ukraine without appealing to the UN Secretary Council loses its political and international legal value, right?”
Europeans also fear that the US might invade Greenland next – especially after Katie Miller, a political adviser and former press secretary who is married to Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, posted a map of the territory with the stars and stripes superimposed on it and a single-word caption: “Soon.” More generally, they see the intervention in Venezuela as another important step towards a world in which, in the famous words of Thucydides, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must – the opposite of the “rules-based order” to which European leaders claim they are committed.
On the other hand, those who see international politics as a struggle between democracies and authoritarian states – as many in the EU, including Kallas, now do – will be quite happy about the removal of Maduro, whom they saw as a dictator aligned, or even allied, with Russia. Some liberal hawks also want to believe that Trump was sending a message to China – not least because the US operation took place just hours after Maduro had met with Chinese officials in Caracas and reaffirmed his commitment to their “strategic relationship”.
Even though Trump has since made clear that the removal of Maduro was more about oil than democracy, the attack on Venezuela suggests that his administration is more neoconservative – that is, its foreign policy is less of a break with that of its predecessors – than some in the Maga movement had hoped it would be. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman from Georgia who was once one of Trump’s most vocal supporters but fell out with him last year over his refusal to release the Jeffrey Epstein files and his support for Israel, wrote: “This is what many in Maga thought they voted to end.”
However, there are neoconservatives in Europe, too. In fact, it sometimes seems as if neoconservatism is now more dominant in Europe than it is in the US, especially in the context of the debate about Ukraine – a reversal of the roles in the transatlantic relationship around the time of the Iraq War.
The figure in the Trump administration who European leaders see as the most sensible and aligned with them is the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, the leading neocon in the administration. The figure they most dislike, meanwhile, is the vice-president, JD Vance, who is sceptical about military interventions and opposed US involvement in the Israeli military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities in June. Ultimately, European leaders are horrified, not by neocons, but by those they see as “isolationists” – that is, those in favour of restraint in US foreign policy.
In an interview in June, Germany’s Merz described the Israeli air strikes on Iran as the “dirty work” that Israel was “doing for us all”. Even if they won’t say it publicly, some European leaders will look at the US removal of Maduro in much the same way.
[Further reading: The liberal dilemma on Venezuela]
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