Donald Trump says Delcy Rodríguez, who will be sworn in today as Venezuelan president, must give Washington “total access” to her government as well as the country’s vast oil reserves. “If they don’t behave,” said the US president, “we will do a second strike”. Nicolás Maduro is due to appear in front of a federal judge in New York this afternoon on charges of narco-terrorism. Since toppling the Venezuelan leader on Saturday, Trump has also appeared to threaten Colombia with military action and has repeated his calls for the annexation of Greenland. Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen has warned the US president to “stop the threats” after he said yesterday that America needed the territory for national security. Last night’s Critics’ Choice awards saw Timothée Chalamet win Best Actor for his performance in Marty Supreme and Jessie Buckley scoop the Best Actress gong for Hamnet. Best Picture went to One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn.

Operation Absolute Resolve – the audacious mission to capture Nicolás Maduro – has demonstrated again that the worst mistake a world leader can make is to “underestimate Donald Trump”, says Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal. With the ousted Venezuelan president mouldering in a Brooklyn prison cell, dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua and beyond will be wondering whether the time has come for a “graceful retirement”. China, Iran and North Korea have condemned the American operation, obviously, as have the dwindling band of idealists bitterly clinging to the dream of a magical force called “international law”. But the “competence and resolve” demonstrated by the operation will do more for American power and world peace than all the best speeches President Obama ever made. As Obama found in Libya, however, like George Bush in Iraq, “it is the afterparty that causes the biggest headaches”.

What made this operation seem unavoidable, at least to Trump, says Eliot Cohen in The Atlantic, is that overthrowing a failing dictatorship from the inside has become almost impossible. The world’s revolutionary dictatorships have aged, replacing idealistic fervour with rule by a “deeply corrupt and brutal” nomenklatura. Techniques of repression and “coup-proofing” have become so refined that, as we’ve seen in Iran, the public can be deftly restrained with efficient riot control and selective arrest and murders. And dictators help each other out. Cuba has provided thousands of advisers to Venezuela; Iran uses Chinese technology (including facial recognition and riot police kits). What makes the next phase in Venezuela even harder is that – as was also the case in Iraq – years of tyranny have left an “atomised and brutalised” public and many highly-armed young men aggrieved at the loss of their patron. American commandos have ended the rule of Maduro, “though not necessarily that of his regime”.