In the wake of the United States’ capture of Venezuela’s then-President Nicolás Maduro, questions have arisen over the country’s democratic future. This brazen act of foreign intervention also raises further topics that are critical to Canada and the world order, including issues surrounding natural resource production, breaches of international law and principles of state sovereignty.
In a statement following the United States’ intervention, Prime Minister Mark Carney affirmed Canada’s support for a peaceful, Venezuelan-led transition while calling on all parties to respect international law. Yet the potential implications for Canada are significant. Venezuela possesses the world’s largest crude oil reserves, leading to concerns that Canadian crude may be threatened if Venezuelan production increases. Further, given President Donald Trump’s repeated ‘suggestion’ that Canada become the 51st state, the operation in Venezuela heightens concerns about the United States’ intentions for Canada and the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Trump’s remarks about “running” Venezuela post-Maduro further complicate the picture, and widespread confusion remains surrounding the fate of Venezuela and a world in which the United States is a dominant actor.
The Ubyssey spoke with Dr. Maxwell A. Cameron for his insights on the situation in Venezuela and its impact on Canada. Cameron specializes in comparative Latin American politics and is jointly appointed to the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and department of political science at UBC. He has been a touchstone for media sources in light of political unrest in Venezuela.
Here’s what he had to say — edited for length and clarity.
What is the significance of the United States’ intervention in Venezuela’s affairs? How does it affect how we understand sovereignty in 2026?
The intervention in Venezuela really only makes sense in the context of the recent national security strategy document released by the Trump administration, calling itself the “Trump Corollary” of the Monroe Doctrine. Going back to the beginning of the 19th century, the Monroe Doctrine has been a source of irritation for many Latin American countries precisely because it doesn't respect the principle of equal sovereignty.
It sets the United States up as the country that can police and intervene in the affairs of other countries in the Western Hemisphere to protect its own interests. So the intervention in Venezuela is a return to the past in an unfortunate way — it’s a return to a world of spheres of influence in which the United States positions itself as the dominant player in the hemisphere. You can't have a dominant player and equal sovereignty at the same time.
What do you think the implications are of Nicolás Maduro’s former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, assuming the role of interim president rather than opposition leader María Corina Machado?
Well, for me, there were several surprises in this military operation that led to Maduro being kidnapped. Perhaps the biggest surprise was the decision to leave Rodríguez in office as a substitute for Maduro, as opposed to insisting on regime change. You might have imagined that Trump would have attempted to install Machado, who is by far the most popular democratic politician in Venezuela. Yet Trump essentially threw her under the bus in the press conference on the day of the intervention and embraced Rodríguez.
I think the reason for doing this was based on the fear that if you tried to topple the Maduro regime, there would be real instability in Venezuela. This decision reinforces that what Trump cares about above all else is stability, American primacy and access to resources.
The United States has intervened in Latin American politics before (Panama in 1989, Chile in 1973). How does the current situation compare to these?
In 1973, the United States deposed a democratically-elected president in Chile and then installed a military dictatorship that lasted for 17 years. In some respects, what has happened in Venezuela resembles a coup more than an invasion. They didn't go in and establish a military presence. They went in and removed the leader, and that's what happens in a coup. So it was a bit as if it were a coup, but it was executed by the United States military. It's a very anomalous kind of situation.
I think that the closer precedent is Panama. While I do believe that the United States was guided by the belief that it could do something in Venezuela like what it did in Panama, I think it’s important to also recognize the fundamental differences between the two countries. Venezuela is a much bigger, more complicated country with an entrenched regime that is clearly hostile to the United States. In the case of Panama, they had a dictator who the United States alleged was involved in drug trafficking. They had a military presence on the ground around the Canal Zone and were able to extract him with minimal loss of life to civilians and others. In the case of Venezuela, a much more forceful but briefer intervention was required. And now the question is: Panama, subsequent to the overthrow of Noriega, became more democratic. What will happen in Venezuela? That we just don't know.
Venezuela has the world’s largest crude oil reserves, according to 2023 data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Donald Trump has spoken about taking control of the country’s oil and recruiting American companies to invest in its industry. How do you think the United States’ interests in these reserves will impact Canada’s economy?
I don’t think that there will be any immediate impact due to the significant time it will take to rebuild Venezuela’s petroleum sector. This is a badly eroded industry — the level of production is very, very low. It's going to take massive infusions of new capital to get the country back up to the level of production that it was at a couple of decades ago.
It’s true that Venezuelan crude is heavy, like Canadian oil sands crude, which also requires a lot of refining. Ultimately, it could compete with Canada, but we're talking about five, 10, 15 years down the road.
Some of the messaging we’re hearing from Canada about how this points to the urgency of pipelines is a little bit tendentious. People are jumping on the prospect of Venezuela’s oil coming back online as being a threat to Canadian competitiveness, leaving quite apart the whole question of whether we should be leaving the oil in the ground. I don't see this as being an immediate threat.
In an article for Maclean’s, you noted that a new Trump administration policy builds off of the Monroe Doctrine, an 1823 assertion of American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. How does Trump’s action in Venezuela and this new policy come as a potential threat to Canadian sovereignty?
It's a really interesting historical puzzle. The Monroe Doctrine was intended to defend the rise of Republican governments in the new world against the colonization and meddling by European monarchical powers. So its original conception, although it was paternalistic and opened the door to United States intervention, nonetheless, was anti-colonial — but it wasn't directed to Canada. The attitude of the Americans was “We’ll leave you alone if you leave the rest of the hemisphere to us.”
Canada never felt like the Monroe Doctrine was applied to it. Over the course of the 19th century, the doctrine was used to justify American expansion across the West, and then later more interference in South America, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and elsewhere until the Cold War, in which the United States took more of a global role. It's only with Reagan and the Central American conflict that we begin to hear talk of the Monroe Doctrine again.
Now that Trump is talking about the Monroe Doctrine, he clearly sees the whole of the Western Hemisphere as the sphere of influence of the United States, and I think that's part of what motivates him to want to take Greenland. It's why he's talking about Canada as the 51st state. He wants to apply the Monroe Doctrine to us.
I think that we have to remind the Americans that their creed is based on republicanism, democracy and a system based on citizenship. They have fought a civil war over these issues and are now retreating back to a stance that is in some ways inimical even to the original Monroe Doctrine. I think it puts us in a very awkward position.
Do you think the Prime Minister's vision laid out in his Davos speech adequately responds to the challenges Canada is facing?
Yeah, I do. I think Carney has given us the guidance that we need to respond to what the United States is saying about its role in the Western Hemisphere. Without explicitly naming the United States, he has acknowledged that the United States is a disruptive force — that we’re in a moment of rupture, not a transition. That means that countries like Canada need to hold fast to our principles of multilateralism with respect to human rights and democracy, but at the same time, we have to be realistic about what this means for us. We need to think about how we strengthen ourselves domestically so that we can survive this, while also building alliances with other like-minded countries.
The thing that I find interesting as a Latin Americanist is that the Carney speech could well have been given by Brazil or South Africa. It is very much the kind of speech that you hear from Non-Aligned countries in the Global South. That’s the position that we are being put in by the United States — by treating us as part of the Monroe Doctrine, we've been placed into the same bucket as the Global South.
I think this means there is an opportunity for us to make common cause with countries like Brazil, Mexico and others who have a long history of resistance against these infringements on sovereign equality.
