What happened
Operation Absolute Resolve escalated the months-long boat-strike campaign into a full military strike on a sovereign nation's capital, bombing air defence sites to clear the way for ground forces to seize the sitting head of state from his own compound. Members of Congress from both parties objected specifically to the absence of any prior authorisation or even notification before an operation of this scale — a strike on a foreign capital to capture its president is a fundamentally different act of war than the boat interdictions that preceded it, and Congress was not consulted on either.
Trump's own public framing of what would follow made the operation's underlying interest explicit: US oil companies would be brought in to operate Venezuela's oil infrastructure and the administration would seek to recover oil revenue it characterised as stolen, rather than describing the operation primarily in terms of restoring Venezuelan democracy. Oil sales resumed and by several months after the capture had reached over 50 million barrels. Analysts drew direct comparisons to earlier US interventions in Latin America, including the 1973 removal of Chile's Salvador Allende, where control of strategic natural resources sat at the centre of the intervening country's stated and unstated interests alike.
Criticism of the operation was not confined to its legality. Reporting months after Maduro's capture found that under his successor, Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, arbitrary arrests, surveillance, and restrictions on political organising remained largely in place — meaning the operation replaced one authoritarian government with a transitional one exhibiting many of the same human rights problems, while securing US commercial access to Venezuelan oil in the process.