WASHINGTON—The U.S. raid that snatched Venezuela’s president capped a month of aggressive military action by President Trump that also included targeting alleged extremists in northern Nigeria, attacking Islamic State militants in Syria and threatening to restrike Iran.
The flurry of military moves underscored Trump’s reliance on the surprise use of force during his second term—an emerging doctrine to strike and then coerce that is likely to be sorely tested as the White House seeks to press Venezuela and other countries he targets to comply with his demands.
In returning to a form of “gunboat diplomacy” in Venezuela, Trump has largely spurned the usual veneer of armed interventions—acting without an Oval Office speech justifying the attack, congressional authorization, a promise of elections in a foreign land or even a detailed plan for its future.
The operation in Caracas, which involved inserting U.S. Army Delta Force commandos and use of more than 150 warplanes, shared some of the features of Trump’s other operations this year, such as the B-2 bomber attack on Iran’s nuclear sites and its nearly two-month-long operation against the Houthis in Yemen.
It disrupted the status quo but stopped short of a major commitment of ground forces that might give the White House more influence over Venezuela’s future while risking deeper involvement and more American lives.
Trump has boasted that it was a model for future military action, telling Fox News on Saturday it was “an incredible thing” and insisting “we can do it again, too. Nobody can stop us.”
Yet it is also a strategy that risks overstretching the Pentagon if Trump continues the intense pace of armed interventions abroad or gets bogged down in open-ended conflicts if his limited military moves don’t achieve his goals.
“Despite Trump’s reputation as an isolationist, his record to date is taking an overtaxed military and finding new ways to spread it even thinner,” said Stephen Wertheim of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The other major risk is it could leave the White House increasingly isolated internationally by alienating allies unwilling to support unilateral action.
Trump has been careful to avoid many of the pitfalls of past U.S. military interventions by limiting operations, as he did with a one-day attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June. He has abruptly halted military operations and declared victory, as he did when he ceased strikes on Houthi militants in Yemen last year after they agreed to stop attacks on U.S. ships in the Red Sea. The Houthis continued their missile and drone attacks on Israel.
In Venezuela, however, the administration has far-reaching goals and a strategy for achieving them that appears in flux.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio signaled Sunday that the Trump administration was counting on a naval blockade of oil exports to pressure the country’s authorities to yield to U.S. demands that Venezuela allow Western companies access to oil fields that were nationalized years ago and halt cooperation with Iran, Cuba, China and Russia.
A second wave of attacks that Trump warned Saturday might be ordered if Venezuela’s remaining leaders don’t bend to U.S. demands is in abeyance for now. Backing away from talk that the U.S. would run the country, American officials aren’t urging early elections or a major role for María Corina Machado, the Nobel Prize-winning opposition leader.
Trump officials say they are carrying out their new national-security strategy, which calls for American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere. “We want to surround ourselves with good neighbors. We want to surround ourselves with stability. We want to surround ourselves with energy,” Trump said Saturday.
He has threatened Venezuela’s new de facto leader, Delcy Rodríguez, with similar treatment as Nicolás Maduro if she defies U.S. demands.
Trump’s argument has drawn sharp criticism from Democrats. “For 70 years we’ve tried to move away from the idea that America was going to be a colonial power in the Americas,” Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.), the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee said. “That all went out the window.”
The operation has also alarmed some conservative critics who recall Trump’s denunciations of using force to carry out regime change and nation-building on the campaign trail and his vow in his 2025 inauguration speech to avoid unnecessary wars.
Whether the impact has a longer-term effect on the U.S. global military posture will likely depend on whether the American military maintains a major offshore presence near Venezuela for many months to come or employs ground forces as the Trump administration strives to shape the political transition in the country.
“Ousting Maduro can help the U.S. by removing a Chinese and Russian foothold in the Western Hemisphere,” said Matthew Kroenig of the Atlantic Council, who was a former national-security adviser on Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. “The Pentagon is capable of carrying out operations across multiple theaters as long as it doesn’t get bogged down in a military quagmire inside Venezuela.”
In Trump’s first term, he was more restrained about using military force. He accused Maduro of leading a drug-smuggling organization but pursued a much different policy.
Elliott Abrams, who served as the U.S. special representative for Venezuela during Trump’s first term, said that American policy at the time was to encourage the establishment of a transitional government, which would call for new elections and a transition to democracy.
But it was never envisioned that Washington would move militarily to apprehend Maduro, take control of the country or come to an arrangement that would defer talk of restoring democracy while leaving much of Maduro’s regime in place, Abrams said.
“We have to make a distinction here between this crazy notion that we are going to ‘run the country’ and plans for helping with a transition,” Abrams said in an interview Sunday. “We have helped with democratic transitions all over, particularly in South America.”
Trump launched air and missile strikes in 2017 and 2018 against Syria after then-President Bashar al-Assad was accused of using chemical weapons, but he didn’t intervene in the civil war. He later called off a plan to strike Iran after it shot down a U.S. drone, saying he did so because he was concerned it would result in too many casualties.
In 2020, he ordered a drone strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force, claiming it was to stop imminent attacks on U.S. personnel. When Iran responded by firing ballistic missiles at U.S. bases in Iraq that caused no deaths, Trump took no further action.
Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and David S. Cloud at david.cloud@wsj.com