But this is still about Russia.
Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro in 2015. (Photo: Eneas De Troya)
The shorthand is easy, and that’s why it might be tempting: Venezuela is the new Cuba, Nicholas Maduro is nothing more than a latter-day Fidel Castro. So why would President Donald Trump just do what no president ever tried to do to Castro over the latter’s decades of cruel rule over Cuba?
Easy: Fidel Castro wanted to repress Cubans in Cuba and never posed much of a direct threat to the United States. Castro allowed Russia a brief foothold, which almost led to disaster during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But, sensing a red line, Castro kept Russian presence in Cuba to the barest minimum.
The same isn’t true of Venezuelan dictator and strongman Nicholas Maduro.
Venezuela isn’t Cuba. Nicholas Maduro isn’t Fidel Castro. And Donald Trump is not JFK.
Castro’s Cuba became a Soviet client at a moment when the global order — dangerous as it was — still had rules. The Cold War was rigid, but it was legible. There were red lines, back channels, and a shared understanding that total annihilation was bad for everyone. Even during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Washington and Moscow ultimately stepped back from the edge.
Maduro’s Venezuela exists in a much uglier world.
Russia today isn’t a declining superpower trying to manage equilibrium. It’s a revanchist state tearing up borders by force. Its invasion of Ukraine blew apart the comforting fiction that wars of conquest were relics of the 20th century. Moscow is openly hostile to the Western security order and increasingly comfortable projecting power in indirect, destabilizing ways — cyber operations, energy blackmail, mercenaries, criminal networks, and pliable client states.
Once you see that, Venezuela stops looking like a tragic human-rights case and starts looking like a strategic liability.
Maduro didn’t just take polite diplomatic support from Moscow. He invited it in. Russian military advisers. Weapons systems. Intelligence cooperation. Financial lifelines designed to evade sanctions. Russian bombers landing on Venezuelan runways. Joint military exercises. A permissive environment for Iranian and Hezbollah-linked networks. That isn’t symbolic alignment. That’s operational partnership.
From Moscow’s perspective, this all makes sense. Russian strategic thinking — shaped by decades of Soviet doctrine — is obsessed with encirclement by Western institutions, especially NATO and the broader liberal order it dismisses as “U.N.-backed.” Whether that fear is grounded in reality almost doesn’t matter. It drives behavior. Russia’s war on Ukraine was fueled, in part, by the belief that time was running out to stop Western influence from hardening on its borders.
The United States would be reckless to ignore the mirror image of that problem closer to home.
If Castro had pursued this level of military integration with Moscow the U.S. response would not have been as restrained as history remembers.
Trump’s hard line on Maduro reflects that reality. Extradition efforts aren’t just about holding an accused criminal legally liable in a U.S. court of law. They signal that Washington sees Venezuela not merely as a collapsed petro-state or humanitarian disaster, but as part of a larger contest over power and proximity.
Venezuela isn’t Cuba. It’s potentially more dangerous than that — a modern platform for hostile power projection in the Western Hemisphere.
While Trump is getting plenty of criticism over his Venezuela gambit, history may remember this as one of the boldest, most decisive moments in modern western civilization.
It might have been the moment Russian influence in South and Central America, to say nothing of Iran and Hezbollah, received a mighty check.
(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)