Dame Emily Thornberry, the chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, warns that US actions in Venezuela risk emboldening Russia and China
17:38, 04 Jan 2026
In the middle of the night the Venezuelan dictator and his wife were snatched from their beds and bundled into helicopters by American Special Forces.
Is Trump allowed to do that? Well no. You really aren’t allowed to walk into other countries and arrest the leadership, then take them off to be tried in your domestic court. Where would it end?
Anyway, it’s not really about drugs, it’s about oil. If it was about drugs, there are many other countries that are much bigger sources of illicit drugs, Venezuela is a long way down the list.
If Trump was so worried about drugs from South America, why did he last month pardon former Honduras President Hernandez, who’d been sentenced to 45 years by a US court for importing cocaine.
Trump and friends have said it themselves. We’re “getting back the oil that was stolen”.
That’s Venezuelan oil to you and me: 303bn barrels of it, the biggest reserves in the world.
This oil is going to make America (and the Venezuelans) rich. Sound familiar?
You can’t walk into a smaller country and take its resources, tell its leadership what to do or throw the leaders in jail.
There are rules. These came out of the chaos, suffering and bloodshed of the Second World War.
Might must not be right. Just because larger countries can walk into smaller ones doesn’t mean they are allowed to.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, but it is in everyone’s interests that it doesn’t and it has to be called out.
Trump says that Venezuela is in his “sphere of influence” and therefore he has a free hand.
The worry is that China may today be thinking “Isn’t Taiwan in our sphere of influence?” And Putin thinking “And Ukraine is in mine”.
Emily Thornberry is the Chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee