Some Ironies of Absolute Resolve

Trump’s Special Military Operation in Venezuela

Here are some of my initial thoughts on Operation Absolute Resolve, the “tactically precise and swiftly executed operation that extracted Mr. Maduro from his country with no loss of American life,” as the New York Times reports. We will be learning a lot more in the coming days, weeks, and years as we try to make sense of a signal moment in the evolution of Trump’s foreign policy, or the devolution of American international leadership. More information may shed light on the planning, thinking, and diplomacy—or lack of all three—in the run up to the operation. And some things will remain mysterious even with more information, since this whole venture is riddled with confusion.

Relatively Unresolved

Let’s start with the name—Operation Absolute Resolve. What is that supposed to mean? What exactly is the United States absolutely resolved to do? Are we resolved only to decapitate Venezuela? To run the country after it collapses into chaos? To take out any other national leader that we don’t like? To aggressively assert the “Donroe Doctrine” throughout the Western Hemisphere? To finally fight and win the war on drugs (which are mostly cocaine not fentanyl, and mostly bound for Europe not the US, as we pardon the former Honduran president imprisoned on drug charges)? Maybe the SecWar just thinks it sounds cool in a Signal chat.

There is another possibility, given the doublespeak tendencies of this administration. This is that the operation was named “absolute resolve” precisely because American resolve toward Venezuela is relatively lacking.

Resolve is willpower. A highly resolved actor is motivated to try and do something it cares about deeply, no matter the costs or obstacles. You can demonstrate resolve by taking risks and having skin in the game. In the popular bargaining model of war, resolve is defined as simply the willingness to pay. A resolved actor is willing to spend down some of the surplus of the negotiation to signal that it is serious. Thus, we describe costly signals of resolve with metaphors of tying hands or sinking costs (or burning bridges or burning money). These are things that you are willing to do only do if you really care about getting your way. Bluffers and braggarts will not do these things because they are not resolved.

“Absolute resolve” thus implies a willingness to pay absolutely. An actor with absolute resolve should thus be willing to pay any price and bear any burden, to paraphrase the former sole namesake of that performing arts center in DC. The name of the recent US operation thus implies that the stakes of the Venezuela operation must have been grand indeed. But this is absurd.

In reality, there are few things short of existential survival for which a state will be willing to pay absolutely (and maybe not even then, given that infinite costs will outweigh any conceivable reward). There are many things that a state might be willing to try if the costs and risks are expected to be low, but unless there is a vital national interest at stake, most political leaders will be less likely to risk blood and treasure, or their chances for political survival, on a costly gamble.

The stakes in Venezuela, for the United States, were never very great. Maduro was an unpopular and illegitimate autocrat of a minor regional power dabbling in the European cocaine trade. An irritant to be sure, but one who had been endured and could be endured indefinitely. Imagine a counterfactual world in which deposing Maduro would have required trillions of dollars and thousands of American deaths over years of fighting, as in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have a hard time imagining that any American government would ever be resolved enough to pay this price, let alone one that ran on no more foreign wars. Measuring resolve is hard without a big war, but I expect that the United States was in fact willing to pay very little for Operation Absolute Resolve.

The only reason that the Trump administration could get away with decapitation is that the U.S. military was strong enough, and the Venezuelan military weak enough, that it expected to succeed at relatively low cost. There was no expectation of retaliation by Venezuela or others (more on that below). Thus, through technical ingenuity, brilliant planning, exquisite intelligence, and elite special operations forces, the U.S. military was able to promise its civilian masters a quick and relatively painless raid.

Decapitation on the Cheap

According to the New York Times, “More than 150 military aircraft, including drones, fighter planes and bombers, took part in the mission, taking off from 20 different military bases and Navy ships” in a mission that “took about two hours and 20 minutes.” This probably makes it the most elaborate special operations raid of all time, but it was also the quickest and easiest sovereign decapitation in recent history. A few US helicopters were reportedly shot up, and six service members were injured, but it seems that all Americans who got in got out. Maybe the story is not so genial for intelligence sources or officers on the ground, but we don’t know much about that yet and their fate is low profile by design. The U.S. military delivered on its promise and decapitated Venezuela on the cheap, at least in this initial phase.

But low-cost military operations create a serious, and seriously underappreciated, problem for coercive diplomacy. The problem is that if you have an effective low-cost military option, I cannot tell if you are using it because if is effective or because it is cheap. Maybe you are highly resolved, and the high-tech SOF raid is the best way to get what you want. Or maybe you are only marginally resolved, and you are only willing to conduct that raid if you can to it on the cheap. In bargaining terms, low-cost military power causes low-resolve and high-resolve types to pool together.

Erik Gartzke and I wrote about this in Elements of Deterrence for the case of drones and other artificial intelligence (AI) enabled weapons. AI weapons may be useful on the battlefield but have little skin in the game (almost by definition). The tragedy is that actors who want to test the resolve of the actor with the low-cost military strategy will look for other ways to impose costs; thus we have empirical evidence that militants subjected to drone attacks will shift to attacking civilians more often. The secrecy that often accompanies technical operations, and which was certainly a critical precondition for the operational success of Absolute

This may have troubling implications for Venezuela. Absolute Resolve was so cheap and easy that even a rather unresolved government might be willing to attempt it. Or maybe it was just the best way for a highly resolved actor to act under the circumstances. Now that we’ve seen it, what have we learned? Should we judge that the Trump administration is a high-resolve type with an effective decapitation option. Or is it a low-resolve type with a low-cost option? We can’t tell directly, at least not from this operation alone. But I think there are plenty of other reasons to guess that it’s the latter. That is, Trump’s Absolute Resolve is most likely a fig leaf for relatively low resolve. We know that Trump likes to punch down. It’s no accident that he decided to pick on Venezuela rather than Russia or China.

The troubling implication is, what happens when someone tries to figure out what type of resolve Trump truly has? Say you are an angry Venezuelan nationalist who resents being attacked by the neighborhood imperialist. How would you test Yankee resolve? You need to find another way to impose cost. You can try to make it hard for Trump to “run the country,” perhaps by starting an insurgency, oppressing the civilian population, or flooding the region with migrants. Maybe you will discover in the process that Trump is in fact resolved. That would be bad news for millions of Venezuelans as Trump presides over a bloody American occupation. On the other hand, maybe you will find that the TACO principle holds: “Trump always chickens out” especially in the face of highly resolved opponents. There’s a joke in there somewhere about TACO being more likely in Latin America.

Sadly this sort of test is all too plausible. Absolute Resolve was a leadership decapitation raid. It was not a regime change. The regime is still very much in place. This appears to have been part of the rationale for controlling costs, as Trump implied that Acting President Delcy Rodríguez would manage things. But Rodríguez and other Venezuelan officials may not be so willing to be quislings: Rodriguez denounced the US operation as “a barbarity” aimed at “the seizure of our energy, mineral and natural resources,” even as she softened her tone somewhat. Nationalism is a potent force, and the specter of renewed Imperialismo Yanqui could encourage resistance to US efforts. There is also no shortage of corrupt violent entrepreneurs in the region waiting to fill the political vacuum created by Maduro’s abrupt departure. The Venezuelan regime or other nonstate actors could thus act to test American resolve after the glow of “mission accomplished” begins to fade.

Isn’t that special?

Strategic confusion manifests in other ways, too. I am tempted to call Absolute Resolve a “special military operation.” The US military certainly used many special operations forces to get the job done. US military planners make a distinction between supported and supporting forces. The main supported forces were the Delta Force commandos, who captured Maduro. All the other elaborate US military enablers acted in a supporting role for Delta Force. This is why I think it’s fair to call this the most elaborate special operations raid of all time.

Map of the 3 Jan 2026 US strikes on Venezuela, Wikimedia commons (that was fast!)

But even more special is that the Trump administration likes to describe the entire military effort is as a law enforcement operation. The actual arrest of Maduro was performed by FBI agents with the Delta team. This means that the raid is also the most up-armored sting of FBI history. Maybe you can argue that this is in fact a quite costly signal of resolve from a law enforcement perspective, as the long arm of Donald Trump (with its small fingers) is demonstrable willing to reach across the precedents of international law to bring evildoers to justice. The signal is muddied at best, because the justifications of the operation are at best varied and ambiguous and at worst completely arbitrary.

There is plenty of precedent for using military forces to support law enforcement, as when Coast Guard teams perform the actual boardings of drug vessels intercepted by US Navy warships (at least until the US military started blowing them out of the water), but that usually happens in international waters, not via a major military incursion. In any case, President Trump and Secretary of State Rubio have been describing the attack as essentially a law enforcement operation, which also seems to be its tenuous legal justification. This suggests that the Trump administration views an indictment from its own Department of Justice as sufficient grounds for launching a unilateral strike to decapitate a sovereign country without seeking Congressional approval.

And we haven’t even mentioned the oil. Or the theory that decapitating the regime without changing it will produce a pliable client. Or that decapitating Venezuela will compel Colombia and Cuba to bend the knee. Or that China will be scared away from a region in which it has been heavily investing for years. Or that “mission accomplished” here is not the prelude to another disastrous forever war. Or that Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth, who Trump said will “run the country,” have any plan or competence for their new role as imperial viceroys of Venezuela. Or perhaps that a foreign diversion might help to unify the MAGA base before the midterms. The strategic rationale of this operation is certainly “special,” in every sense of the word.

“Special military operation” is of course the phrase that Vladimir Putin uses to describe his war in Ukraine, which seems to have been originally intended as a lightning-fast regime-change operation. This went badly for Putin in 2022, of course, because the Russian military was extremely disorganized, and Ukrainians and their supporters were highly resolved to resist it. The operational preparation and coordination of the US military operation to decapitate Venezuela was far more impressive, with an admittedly more modest operational goal of snatching and grabbing the leader. There was a modicum of Venezuelan resistance during the raid itself, but it was largely ineffective, partly owing to the state of the Venezuelan military and more to the US adroitly turning off the lights and suppressing air defenses.

The diplomatic context contrasts starkly, too. Ukraine received crucial diplomatic and material support from other countries to resist the Russian invasion. Venezuela is quite isolated. Russia has provided a lot of military and diplomatic support to the Maduro regime in recent years, but Moscow did not impede Maduro’s abrupt removal. Maybe there was not much that anyone could do, given the nature of surprise attacks. Yet there was ample strategic warning given the large US buildup in the region, including the arrival of numerous specialized support aircraft. Even with Russian military attention focused on Ukraine, there is still much that Russian intelligence services or outright Russian warnings could have done to create friction and risk for the United States.

It is quite likely that Putin simply abandoned Maduro. Fiona Hill testified in 2019 that “the Russians at this particular juncture were signaling very strongly that they wanted to somehow make some very strange swap arrangement between Venezuela and Ukraine…. You know, you have your Monroe doctrine. You want us out of your backyard. Well, you know, we have our own version of this. You’re in our backyard in Ukraine.” We don’t know anything more at this point about whether the second Trump administration has been open to this deal or something like it. It wouldn’t be the first time that Trump accepted help from Moscow. Secret assurances from Russia would be helpful for controlling the costs of Absolute Resolve, especially in case Trump was not actually so resolved to pay them. Secret diplomacy with the Russians at this point remains totally speculative but completely plausible.

The diplomatic situation is still complex and fluid. Reuters reports some pro-forma criticism “that U.S. President Donald Trump’s actions in Venezuela were unlawful and destabilizing.” This sounds like simple schadenfreude to me, using the same language that is often used to describe Putin. Perhaps Russia, and/or China, will put up more resistance if (and when) the US gets more militarily involved. Cuba and other regional actors are additional wildcards, in addition to the Venezuelan actors who have the most skin in the game. In short, there are many ways things could get ugly.

The downsides of military excellence

Operation Absolute Resolve was an impressive piece of operational art and will probably be studied in war colleges for years to come. Yet its strategic and legal justifications are also dubious to say the least. This contradiction is not necessarily a surprise. It would not be the first time in military history that we have seen operational excellence in the service of strategic idiocy. If that comparison is uncomfortable it should be.

I might go one step further and argue that operational excellence is especially vulnerable to capture by dubious strategic ends. The ability to coordinate sophisticated technologies and complex operations across multiple domains has at least three pernicious strategic implications.

First, this ability tends to lower the overall cost and risk of military operations, or at least the short-term assessment of cost and risk. This creates an obvious temptation to reach for the military instrument if you believe that you can achieve cheap success without the political cost of blood and treasure. The use of highly efficient military operations should be especially likely against weaker targets who lack any meaningful strategic deterrent. High tech capabilities are thus more likely to be used by the strong against the weak.

Second, this ability is predicated on the organizational ability to insulate service members from asking hard questions about political goals. Military professionals are highly skilled engineers who solve the problems that are given to them by civilian leaders. Military professionalism focuses the organization on means rather than ends, which makes it more likely to salute smartly and execute even dubious strategic projects. Smart operational organizations are thus less more likely to be used for stupid strategy.

Third, well organized, Hi-Tech operations are very impressive to behold. If everything goes off properly, they are of immense propaganda value. This helps to reinforce the esprit d’corps of military participants and the perception of power for the political regime. You can expect the department of War to be crowing about futurism and masculine lethality for a while. The fetish of lethal efficiency will bolster the popular image of the regime while masking complicated questions about long-term cost and risks.

Fourth, operational excellence may be especially attractive for domestic political purposes. All three of the above points (low costs, objective control, sex appeal) combine to provide an embattled political leader with a powerful means to divide and conquer. There is the diversionary war or "wag the dog" scenario: the arbitrary use of dramatic military power in a polarized political society will be useful for mobilizing and unifying supporters on one side and demonizing and ridiculing opponents on the other. And there is the patronage or cronyist scenario: clients or corporations who stand to benefit from the operation can render various kinds of support or simple enrichment.

One OAR in the water

It is getting late, so I am going to wrap this up. I just wanted to get some of my initial reactions in writing in order to figure out what they were. These are hot takes. They may be bad takes. One important theme that I have not addressed at all here is the important role of cyber, intelligence, deception, and secret statecraft generally in this operation. That is hopefully a topic for a future post. We are all going to be stuggling to make sense of this episode for a long time to come.

A general theme that emerges from these rambling thoughts is that Absolute Resolve is an impressive military operation in the service of a discombobulated political strategy. It is a triumph of short-term thinking that takes on far more long-term risk than I think the Trump administration may appreciate. The very operational features that made special operations enabled decapitation so attractive—low risk, low cost, high rewards—could end up inviting numerous actors to test the administration’s resolve.

Operation Absolute Resolve—OAR—is just one oar in the water, and that’s not sufficient to navigate the ship of state.