Replug: As Trump Strikes Maduro, Revisiting Outlook's Special 'Endless Wars' Issue

US President Donald Trump has said that the US has captured Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro after striking the South American country. In a Truth Social post Trump said, "The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the country." The announcement came hours after the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, was rocked by a series of explosions. 

This marks a direct intervention carried out by US in Latin America, almost four decades since its invasion of Panama. The U.S. Army's Delta Force, an elite special forces unit, carried out the operation to capture the Venezuelan President. The strikes also hit the states of Miranda, Aragua and La Guaira, according to the Venezuelan government.

With Maduro poised to face criminal charges in the US, the Venezuelan government declared a national emergency "to protect the rights of the population, the full functioning of republican institutions, and to immediately transition to armed struggle" while terming the strikes to be 'imperialist aggression'. People have taken to social media to post videos of the sudden attacks which have triggered panic among millions. The attack comes after a long stretch of soaring tensions between the US and the Venezuelan government.

A few days into the new year, as the world relapses into a cycle of bloodlust and unquenchable war-mongering, we look back at Outlook's January 11 2025 issue titled War and Peace. An issue that explored the endless cycle of wars and the horror that the world has been dealing with, in memory and reality. As editor Chinki Sinha writes in the piece titled, Song For His Disappeared Love, "We have been spectators and consumers of war. Few have gone in and told the stories that are hard to cover and to report...we have tried to tell the biggest story of our times. The story of wartime…in fragments, because all wars leave us fragmented."

Addressing the question at the kernel- of whatever happened to the predictions of post-Cold War peace, Phillip Golub raises the crucial point of war not being the inevitable condition of humankind in his piece, The Zone Of Interest ."To a great extent, the mass violence of the present reflects the failure of imagination and will of the political leaders—who presided over the end of the Cold War and who missed the historic opportunity to build a renovated international system firmly based on international law, multilateral cooperation and a fairer and more sustainable distribution of resources and wealth."

The issue explores the impact of war beyond theories and the condensed understanding of cause and effect, shining a very important light on human understanding of loss, memory and pain. Journalist and historian Vijay Prasad reflected on his travels through war-torn Iraq, Vietnam and describes the enduring parts of modern warfare that are hard to calculate in numbers in his moving account, The Face Of War.

Hope is a dangerous thing in a world where wars remain a constant and baying for blood comes with political endorsement. As the people of Venezuela ushered in the new year with plumes of black smoke emanating from civilian pockets where new hopes, stories and resolutions were being born, Outlook's issue, War and Peace serves as a critical reminder of a world we seek to heal, of accounts we forget and the humans behind the soldiers who are killed, where the human cost of war is still a footer note on the flowery accounts of power.