In the early hours of January 3, more than 150 US aircraft entered Venezuelan airspace, disabled regime air defenses, and extracted President Nicolás Maduro from his heavily guarded compound in Caracas. It was an audacious operation with an unmistakable message: American military power remains unmatched, and President Trump will exercise it as he chooses.
For European leaders, the Venezuela raid raises urgent questions about what comes next in their own neighborhood.
The newly minted “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, announced at the time of the new National Security Strategy (NSS) in December, is more than mere words. It states the US will “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”
So if Trump views the Western Hemisphere as America’s exclusive sphere of influence where foreign “incursions” justify military action, does he similarly recognize Central and Eastern Europe or Ukraine as a Russian sphere where Moscow’s security concerns take precedence?
Russia took no meaningful action after the Maduro raid. The muted response — Putin has not spoken on the issue — is in contrast to the 2019 presidential crisis, when Moscow deployed military specialists, special forces, and cybersecurity personnel to maintain Maduro. That may simply be a revelation of Russian impotence (see also the December 2024 collapse of the Assad regime in Syria) as its energies are sapped by a grinding war of imperial aggrandizement in Ukraine, but it is also possible that the Kremlin anticipates a quid pro quo from the US. That may become clearer as the Ukraine peace negotiations continue.
A concomitant question is equally important. Trump’s history of lurid statements has led some Europeans to conclude that he shouldn’t be taken seriously. The President’s opponents like to say that Trump always chickens out (the so-called TACO approach to tariffs). It is now clear, if it wasn’t already, that discounting US rhetoric is a path to disaster. Administration threats to Maduro were earnestly meant and were followed through.
This lesson at least may have been learned, thus the battery of responses from the first Nordic leaders, and then on January 6 from the biggest European nations, in support of Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland. Denmark stated that any US military move would mark the end of the NATO alliance.
Any such intervention, military or otherwise, would clearly cause mayhem in the eight-decade-old North Atlantic alliance. But there are other concerns that would flow from an implicit US acceptance of spheres of influence.
The US NSS says the country will now focus on regions “central to our core interests” while expecting allies to “assume primary responsibility for their regions.” It was already plain that the US is less engaged in European security than previously — it has shifted from a funder of Ukraine to an arms supplier in the past 12 months.
But how extensive is this shift? Can Ukraine rely on a steady supply of US equipment, or might it be shut off, either because Washington has been angered by Kyiv (as in March) or because the administration feels US stockpiles are too low?
More broadly, can the US be expected to aid Europe if Russia steps up its shadow war campaign?
That Europeans feel so exposed is, of course, largely their own fault. While some, including Germany and Poland, have rapidly, if belatedly, begun to raise defense spending, others like the UK and France are lagging. Spain makes no effort at all to raise security spending, and even boasts of its refusal to join NATO’s hard defense target of 3.5% of GDP.
The continent is very visibly in distress over its security. And there is some reason for this. Russia is openly hostile and expansionist, Ukraine is struggling, and Europe is under-armed and under-prepared. In addition, the NSS states that the US will cultivate “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” It criticizes European governments for holding “unrealistic expectations for the war” while “perched in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition.”
It is wise (and there are still many wise heads in Europe) to question to what extent US policy is really driven by the NSS, and whether it predicts future action. The Trump administration, much like its predecessors, is very much driven by events; many senior figures have differing priorities on key security issues.
But what Europe cannot do is pretend that the US is the same old country, likely to follow the same old policies.
It will not. The consequences of that shift have been plain for many months, but are dramatically underlined by events in Venezuela.
If Europe wants to shape events, it needs hard power and new forms of cooperation. Want to aid Ukraine? Fine, get on with it. Want to hold onto Greenland and answer US concerns about the High North? Get on with it. This is not the time to vacillate.
Maksym Beznosiuk is a strategy and security analyst and writer whose work focuses on Russia, Ukraine, and international security.
William Dixon is a Senior Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute, specializing in cyber and international security issues.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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