Making sense of the attack on Iran through the prism of Venezuela

It’s difficult to imagine a crisis more dangerous than one that puts the survival of the United States at stake. Those are the kinds of crises we discover when we study the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, issued by the White House in November 2025. Before drilling down on the particulars, we should explain what this national strategy document is.

The National Security Strategy (NSS) is a document released periodically by the White House as required by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. It has generally been issued in the first year of an incoming administration, but there is no strict requirement as to timing.

Recent NSS reports have been released under George W. Bush (2002, 2006), Barack Obama (2010, 2015), Donald Trump (2017, first term), Joe Biden (2021, 2022) and now Donald Trump (2025, second term).

The purpose of the NSS is to convey the White House strategic vision for the United States to Congress. This vision as expressed in the NSS then becomes the basis for more specific requests for funding and new military and diplomatic programs. It’s a kind of high-level playbook for appropriations, research and development.

Private companies such as RTX and Palantir pay close attention because their prime government contracts can be affected by what’s in the NSS.

A second purpose is to communicate the White House strategic vision to specific constituencies including foreign governments, political supporters and the media.

The history of warfare is filled with examples of wars that began because one side misunderstood the intentions of the other. A clear explanation of policy goals in a document like the NSS does not necessarily prevent war, but it does lessen the odds of accidental war or a war due to a misreading of intentions.

Each NSS deals almost exclusively with international relations through the lenses of defence and diplomacy. It does not deal with purely domestic concerns such as taxes, education, and housing.

Having said that, today’s world does not allow neat lines to be drawn between the domestic and international spheres. To the extent that education relates to America’s progress in technology and the global race for dominance in AI, then education can indeed be discussed in the NSS. Likewise, tax policy may be impacted if the NSS calls for an ambitious new weapons program that cannot be funded without either more borrowing or tax increases.

Trump’s 2025 NSS is different from prior reports in several respects. It is relatively brief at 29 pages in total compared to much longer documents produced by prior administrations. (It does have much longer appendices that are classified.) It is also written in plain English and is readily accessible by everyday Americans.

Prior NSS reports have tended to rely on technical jargon, especially with regard to weapons systems and diplomatic terms of art. The new NSS avoids that trap.

This should not be taken to mean that the new NSS is dumbed-down or full of platitudes. It’s not. This is actually one of the most meaningful and profound directives of its kind. That fact that the report avoids jargon makes its main messages even more powerful.

Trump certainly approved of all the policies in the NSS, but it’s clear he did not write it word-for-word. Our best information is that the principal author was Michael Anton, a conservative writer and public intellectual.

Anton was Director of Policy Planning in the White House from January through September 2025. He retains close ties to Trump and the White House staff. While Anton may have been the principal author, there were clearly contributions by JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller, all top White House insiders.

Trump and the NSS in action

Trump moved the NSS debate from the theoretical to the real with his capture of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his wife in a flawlessly executed and lightning-fast attack on Maduro’s hiding place on 3 January, 2026.

Within hours of the attack, Maduro was taken aboard the assault vessel USS Iwo Jima and was soon on his way to New York City. Within days, Maduro and his wife were arraigned in federal court. They are now in a federal detention centre awaiting trial on charges of drug smuggling, money laundering, terrorism and an array of other offenses. Some of the charges may result in a death penalty.

The takedown of Maduro is fascinating in numerous respects. The operation was months in planning. There was nothing rushed about it except the capture itself, which took about two hours. The preparation was meticulous including a replica of Maduro’s residence built in Kentucky, which was used by US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to practice the raid. It is also the case that the NSS was being worked on by its principal authors and policymakers for months.

This means that the NSS and JSOC raid were developed in parallel. It was almost certainly the case that parts of the NSS were thinly veiled previews of what was about to happen to Maduro. Perhaps Maduro should have read it when it was released in November. There might still have been time to cut a deal.

Why Trump chose Venezuela

Another important aspect of the Maduro capture was that the White House insisted it was not a military operation. That claim seems hard to believe at first considering the US military deployed the largest armada in history off the coast of Venezuela and used helicopters, fighter jets, cyber-attacks, satellite surveillance, the Army’s Delta Force commandos and other military assets to pull it off.

But it was actually a law enforcement operation. Maduro and his wife were under indictment for a variety of federal crimes. When the doors to Maduro’s compound were blown open, he was confronted by FBI and DEA agents and DOJ lawyers, was read his Miranda warnings, served with an arrest warrant, placed in handcuffs and taken to a federal criminal detention centre. It actually was a law enforcement operation.

The White House said the military assets were used to protect the law enforcement officers, not to conduct a war. That was a brilliant strategy because it disarmed the Democrat critics who said Trump violated the War Powers Act. Trump’s answer was that there was no violation because there was no war. It was simply an arrest, albeit the most elaborate one ever.

The legal repercussions of the Venezuelan action will not stop with the arrests of Maduro and his wife. Venezuelan interests controlled the Smartmatic voting machine franchise that was suspected of being used to rig elections around the world including the 2020 US presidential election. The US may finally have access to the evidence it needs to show that election was rigged in favour of Joe Biden with possible Venezuelan election interference.

In addition to the roles of law enforcement and the military, the CIA played an important role. The agency had assets inside Maduro’s compound who could watch his whereabouts and even report when he took meals, what he was wearing and whether he had pets. That kind of human intelligence collection (HUMINT) is a nice change from the CIA intelligence failures going back to WMD, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Russian performance in the Ukraine war.

Maduro’s threat to US national security is far broader than the specific crimes with which he is charged. Venezuela was a financial supporter of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Maduro offered opportunities for Russians and Iranians to set up surveillance operations aimed at the US, especially our southern border and Florida. Iran has outsourced much of its drone production to facilities in Venezuela.

China was seeking port access for its navy in the Caribbean, an almost unthinkable proposition that harks back to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. As for Cuba, Venezuelan oil exports were almost its sole source of energy. These and many other threats arising in Venezuela are now over or are in the process of being terminated.

Trump will ensure that these threats do not rise again by controlling any new administration in that country.

To find out how all this links to the attack on Iran, tune in tomorrow…