The paper trail to Caracas

How the US spent months building the legal and military case for attacking Venezuela

In the early hours of Saturday 3^rd January 2026, the United States attacked Venezuela’s capital, invaded the president’s residence and captured President Maduro and his wife. Both are now awaiting trial in New York on new indictments lodged by Attorney General Pam Bondi. President Trump has said the US will ‘run’ Venezuela for now and has taken control of its oil industry.

While the final military operation might have been under cover of darkness, the build-up to it was out in the open for all to see. In this piece I have used the TrumpActionTracker to pull together the key events since the summer of 2025 that led to where we are now.

I will show the detailed timeline of not just the military strikes, but also the actions that supported them – from moving materiel to the Caribbean to issuing new Executive Orders to laying down the (shaky) legal justification for what the US wanted to do.

For the broader geopolitical and political ramifications, there are many commentators far better placed than I to discuss all the ways in which the US action has upended (yet again) the international order (e.g. Lawrence Freedman, Arthur Snell, Phillips OBrien and Hannah Ritchie to name just a few).

Military Strikes

The military strikes themselves show a clear escalation. Since the first one in September 2025, the US had carried out 35 by the end of 2025, killing more than 115 people. The last 5 strikes alone came on the 30 and 31 December. As well as boat strikes, the US started seizing oil tankers in December, marking a clear shift in US interest to Venezuela’s oil industry rather than its alleged involvement in drug trafficking. The attacks culminated with a CIA drone strike on a Venezuelan port just before New Year and finally the attack on the capital and capture of Maduro and his wife on 3 January.

Build-up to the January attack

Even more instructive than the military strikes themselves is the build up that supported them, shown below. While November and early December were relatively quiet in terms of actual strikes (see above), those months saw a clear escalation in in both of materiel, threats, and legal ‘justifications’.

In terms of preparing for the attacks (military build-up), we can see a steady increase in the armed forces assembled in the Caribbean, including the arrival of aircraft used for supporting special operations missions on Christmas Eve. Trump himself both threatened Maduro directly at the end of November and at the start of December signalled to reporters that a ground operation was imminent.

The summer and autumn saw a spate of memos and executive orders designed to underpin future attacks on Venezuela (legal build-up). These actions amount to a deliberate legal construction designed to normalise an overseas war without congressional authorisation by re-badging criminal drug-smuggling activity as armed conflict and terrorism. This blurred, or even collapsed, the boundaries between law enforcement, counterterrorism, and war.

In August, the administration first asserted unilateral executive power to use the military against non-state actors, then retrofitted an armed-conflict framework (“unlawful combatants”, “non-international conflict”) to justify lethal force, secrecy, and immunity, while sidelining internal legal dissent and blocking congressional war-powers constraints. In November and December, sanctions, threats of terrorist designations, and the reclassification of fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction further militarised drug policy and expanded the set of lawful military targets to states allegedly enabling narcotics flows. By the time Maduro was indicted and seized this weekend, the groundwork had been laid for regime-change operations to be presented not as invasion or war, but as self-defence and counter-narco-terrorism.

Combined timeline

The combined timeline of military attacks and build-up events is shown below. The full list of events in the chart, along with the date of each and a news source for each, is available in this Googlesheet.

What next?

Leaving aside the highly uncertain future for Venezuela, what does this mean for American muscle-flexing elsewhere?

Since the Venezuela military operation, most Republicans have supported Trump. This effectively rubber stamps Trump’s bypass of Congressional Authority and will only embolden further actions. Since Saturday, Rubio and Trump have already threatened Cuba, Colombia and Mexico with military action on the basis of ‘narco-terrorism’. Trump has also reiterated his desire to annex Greenland.

Trump has been pretty clear all year that he views military and economic might as the only important geopolitical factor. If he can, and he wants to, he will. So we need to take his threats seriously. This autumn, the US has already taken out Colombian boats, has sanctioned the Colombian president, threatened to send troops to Mexico, and appointed a new, Trump-aligned, special envoy to Greenland, saying America “had to have it”. This is all happening in plain sight, and if we refuse to believe our eyes we only have ourselves to blame.