World / January 7, 2026
How Trump’s unlawful assassination of Qassem Soleimani in 2020 – and the West’s indifferent response – laid the groundwork for the brazen kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro.
A billboard depicting symbolic images of former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force commander Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani and Iranian athletes hangs on a state building in downtown Tehran, Iran, January 6, 2026.
(Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images) The American kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is undoubtedly a major and significant historical moment. Yet despite the headlines it has generated and the victories touted by the US government, it is at the same time being treated as something of a mundane event – an expected move by the US government.
The news of the seizure by American law enforcement of the head of a sovereign state has caused some concern among the leaders of many European countries. But most of their statements were tinged with a certain relief, despite the obvious chasm that had just opened beneath the world.
Even though Greenland was threatened by Trump at the same time as the announcement of Maduro’s kidnapping, there seemed to be no understanding that things could get worse. “We are not in a situation where we think that a takeover of the country could happen overnight,” Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said. said Monday. “You can’t compare Greenland to Venezuela. We are a democratic country.” However, for America, democracy or dictatorship, or being a state or non-state actor, does not matter. All that matters today is the “terrorist” and the “non-terrorist”.
The most obvious comparison for this action would be the to spill of Panamanian General Manuel Noriega, the country’s de facto military leader in the 1980s, captured by his former allies in the US military 36 years to the day before Maduro’s kidnapping. Like Noriega, Maduro’s administration had been deemed completely illegitimate by Western countries years earlier, and there were numerous attempts, both inside and outside Venezuela, to overthrow his government, led by U.S. allies like Juan Guaidó and Maria Corina Machado. But Noriega’s arrest, while also contrary to international law, was preceded by an invasion of the country, with Panama declaring a state of war with the United States and Noriega evading American troops for days after they landed on Panamanian territory.
A better point of comparison – and much more in line with the White House’s current justifications and priorities – is arguably another Trump administration operation that took place on January 3, six years ago: 2020 assassination of Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani.
Trump himself linked the two events during his press conference on Saturday. “And if you think about it, we’ve had other good ones, like the attack on Soleimani, the attack on [ISIS leader Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi, and the obliteration and decimation of Iran’s nuclear sites most recently in an operation known as Midnight Hammer, all perfectly executed and achieved,” he said. said.
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Soleimani’s assassination is certainly in line with the raids on Baghdadi, as well as the assassination of Osama bin Laden in 2011, but it has far more in common with Maduro’s kidnapping than the actions that preceded it. Bin Laden and al-Baghdadi were non-state and quasi-state actors, respectively. Soleimani, by contrast, was a sovereign actor, heading a special operations branch of a UN member state’s armed forces. His assassination, and the collective shrug with which it was greeted by the rest of the world, helped pave the way for the even more egregious violation of international law that Trump committed with the kidnapping of Maduro.
Iran was not at war with the United States at the time of the assassination. Congress had not authorized any military action against him. But none of that mattered. An attack on a lieutenant general of a national army could now be undertaken as if it were a drone strike in Somalia or Pakistan, normalized and routine despite the trampling of sovereignty it represents. The murder of Soleimani was the first volley of this new world order, and from there everything could be justified.
The assassination of Soleimani was justified by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on the grounds that he posed an imminent threat to U.S. troops in Iraq, although no evidence of what Soleimani planned for the future was ever provided. Post-hoc explanations I rather trusted on actions taken by Iran’s allies in Iraq at the U.S. Embassy last December, where, in response to U.S. airstrikes on an Iraqi militia opposed to the ongoing U.S. occupation, protesters broke down doors, lit fires, and planted militia flags. No one was killed or seriously injured, but the humiliation was obviously enough to warrant a response, and Soleimani, despite having no proven involvement in the attack, was singled out as the main conspirator who should be killed for defying American power in such a public way.
While many countries in the Global South, such as China, India, and South Africa, reacted with concern to Soleimani’s assassination and called for restraint, responses from Western nations – those who created the institutions of international law that have been so openly challenged – ranged from relatively indifferent to accepting US justifications to expressing satisfaction that a Western adversary had been killed. The British Prime Minister at the time, Boris Johnson, summed up the general attitude by a speech delivered later the same week. He called Soleimani “a threat to all our interests” and warned that “calls for reprisals or reprisals will simply lead to more violence in the region and are in no one’s interest.”
In other words, the assassination of another country’s military leaders was just a bump in the road, perhaps even a reckless excess, but in no way a wake-up call about future actions, and certainly not a sign of the collapse of the liberal order. The world could sleep peacefully on this one.
The fallacious designation of Qassem Soleimani as a global terrorist, long demanded by Benjamin Netanyahugave the green light to extending the designation to other entities long kept away from the nickname for fear of its implications. The Houthi movement, despite its control of the Yemeni capital and its oversight of humanitarian aid channels to alleviate the famine, was designated as a terrorist organization by the Trump administration in its final days in 2021. (The Biden administration quickly revoked this designation, but Trump restored (He did so when he took office a second time.) Then the Israeli genocide in Gaza, aided and abetted by the United States, added fuel to what was, however, a small flame. Apparently, anyone and anything could be a terrorist, linked to terrorism, or useful to terrorism. This meant that the leaders of the world, those who happened to be opposed to the maw of the Western war machine, were now ripe for the taking.
The dangers of failing to denounce Soleimani’s assassination became increasingly evident during the war between Israel and Iran, when Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was directly threatened with assassination. National leaders, when killed by foreign adversaries, were usually dealt with through coups and through mandated militias. Israel has promised to do without any intercessors, Defense Minister Israel Katz says make a wish that the “long arm” of Israel “will reach you personally.” Few condemnations of such a public threat emerged, and despite the U.S. veto of an assassination, Israel continued to escalate its goals of killing not just a national leader, but an entire government.
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On August 28, amid Israeli attacks on Yemen, the Israeli Air Force launched a strike targeting what the Houthi movement-led government would later describe as a routine government workshop. Almost the entire office of the Sanaa government was killed, alongside the chief of staff of the Yemeni armed forces. Official IDF communication called the assassination of the prime minister, foreign minister, culture minister and a host of other cabinet officials a terrorist neutralization operation:
ELIMINATED — Houthi Prime Minister Ahmed Al-Rahawi and other senior officials of the Houthi terrorist regime were eliminated in an IDF strike in Sanaa, Yemen. At the affected facilities were senior officials responsible for the use of force, the military buildup of the Houthi terrorist regime and the progression of terrorist actions against Israel.
Despite the massacre of an entire civilian government, there was only one condemnation from the government of another state: Iran, whose leadership had already been threatened by Israel. The true complexities of the Yemeni state under the leadership of the Houthi movement have been sidelined. Everyone was considered an armed terrorist, on par with depictions of Al-Qaeda operatives in Afghan caves, and so the face of a Minister of Youth and Sports could be displayed with a red X on official Israeli government channels, like that of Osama bin Laden.
In the United States, those who recognized the strike often did so with enthusiastic praise; Lindsey Graham, Senator from South Carolina radius “deserved” deaths of “religious Nazis” and said he hoped “more action would follow.” Graham had also been a key supporter of the escalation closer to home, in Venezuela, whose government was also being reduced by the White House to the form of a singular terrorist network.
Today in Venezuela, we see all of these threads coming together – dubious allegations of terrorism, trumped-up justifications for extra-legal violence, blatant disregard for international law, and massive indifference from the political class. The United States invented a narcoterrorist group, the “Cartel of the Suns”, to attack Maduro and his government. (Read ndi, it was reported that the Department of Justice had quietly abandoned this false claim.) Despite the non-existence of this organization – and the broader situation lack of evidence linking him to drug trafficking networks – Maduro has been retroactively transformed into the mastermind of terrorism and therefore the expected recipient of American justice. Based on the reaction to the arrest of him and his wife, European and Canadian officials see no threat in this escalation, despite new threats against Greenland immediately after the strikes on the Venezuelan capital.
It is clear from Trump’s statements after Maduro’s arrest that he is not finished imposing his will on Venezuela. Already, threats are pouring in that Colombian President Gustavo Petro must be dealt with and that Mexico and its president, Claudia Sheinbaum, are controlled by cartels. Petro and Sheinbaum are nowhere near as demonized in the Western world as Maduro, but they will nevertheless inevitably become targets.
It’s easy to point the finger at America’s adversaries who are emboldened by such moves (the vice chairman of Russia’s National Security Council has already suggested kidnapping the German chancellor), but arguably the most dangerous threat comes from America itself. If Europe does not draw a line in the sand now, who knows where the American line of sight will end? They could get closer to the Arctic Circle than the Europeans would like.
She was a Malekafli. James M. Alekafzali is a journalist and writer primarily interested in Middle East politics.