Welcome to the Cato podcast. I'm Clark Neely, senior vice president for legal studies.

And I'm Brandon Paul Buck, a foreign policy research fellow here at the Cato Institute.

Well, the first weekend of 2026 was an eventful one and featured the United States

staging a military operation to effect the arrest and rendition

of Venezuela's Nicholas Maduro, who appeared with his wife in federal court earlier this week

to enter a not-guilty plea to an indictment charging both Maduro and his wife

with various counts of conspiracy to distribute drugs and conspire with narco-traffickers and

weapons charges. So we've really kicked over an ant-hill, Brandon. Yes, and the weekend is interesting because on a number of levels, but one, it was both the climax of many, so several months of increasing tensions between the United States and Venezuela over a litany of issues, a very choose your own adventure, if you will, from drugs to human trafficking,

migrant issues, also geopolitical stuff, good old fashion, resource extraction. But yet the

crescendo was also ambiguous because on the one hand, during the buildup, during the rhetoric

from the administration, and those the buildup, during the rhetoric from the, from the administration,

and those also, with another segments of the government, I was talk of regime change, and

installing a more democratically aligned, but also pro-Western administration, particularly

that of Ms Miss Machado.

But subsequent to the, I don't know if you call it an arrest or abduction or rendition of

Nicholas Maduro, the administration has quickly backtracked on those loftier goals.

And now there is talk of maintaining some

kind of continuity with the regime in Caracas, albeit with, you know, various levels of

diplomatic coercion also happening at the same time. So it's a very confusing, confusing thing

to characterize and talk about, because in the one hand, it's sort of regime-changing, but not quite, much like the administration's other uses of force throughout the globe.

It's been hard to characterize and therefore try to make some sense of and also to try to predict what might come next.

Yeah, and it raises a host of legal questions as well, and you can look at those across at least three different axes.

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