{"id":14465,"date":"2026-01-16T08:00:46","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T13:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=14465"},"modified":"2026-01-22T23:05:51","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T04:05:51","slug":"the-end-of-pretenses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2026\/01\/the-end-of-pretenses\/","title":{"rendered":"The end of pretenses"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"dropcap\">O<\/span>n January 3, 2026, the United States carried out a direct military operation against Venezuela. U.S. forces bombed targets in and around Caracas, struck the electrical grid, killed over one hundred people, and abducted Venezuela\u2019s sitting president, Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, along with his wife, Cilia Flores.<\/p>\n<p>Within hours, President Donald Trump declared that the United States would \u201crun\u201d Venezuela until a \u201csafe transition\u201d was completed. United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio underscored the regional warning: \u201cIf I lived in Havana\u2026 I would be worried.\u201d Trump threatened other countries, too\u2014Colombia and Mexico included\u2014showing again that this wasn\u2019t about democracy. It was about submission.<\/p>\n<p>The operation was presented to the world as something far smaller than what it was. Rubio called it a \u201cpolice action.\u201d Trump described it as a \u201ccounter-narcotics\u201d operation. Others invoked democracy and the rule of law. But in Trump\u2019s own post-invasion press conference, the word democracy did not appear even once.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">It was the moment when even the pretense of a \u201crules-based order\u201d was abandoned.<\/aside>\n<p>What took place that day was not law enforcement. It was not drug interdiction. And it had nothing to do with democracy. It was the forcible removal of a head of state by the world\u2019s most powerful military and the imposition of a new political order under U.S. control.<\/p>\n<p>January 3 marked the culmination of a months-long campaign of pressure and intimidation that began at sea, escalated through economic coercion and acts of piracy, and ended with bombs over Caracas and the abduction of a head of state.<\/p>\n<p>But it also marked something larger than Venezuela. It signaled a new phase of U.S. imperial assertion\u2014one defined by openly seizing political authority, imposing neocolonial tutelage, and discarding international law whenever it obstructs Washington\u2019s goals. In effect, it was the moment when even the pretense of a \u201crules-based order\u201d was abandoned.<\/p>\n<h4>The Caribbean prelude<\/h4>\n<p>Throughout late 2025, the United States carried out a wave of attacks on boats in the southern Caribbean near Venezuela under the pretext of \u201cfighting drug trafficking.\u201d This was not standard interdiction. Instead of boarding vessels and making arrests, the U.S. shifted to militarized punishment\u2014destroying boats, killing people from the air, and doing so as a public spectacle.<\/p>\n<p>By late December, dozens of strikes had killed roughly a hundred people at sea, without transparent evidence, judicial oversight, or even clear identification of who the victims were or what they were allegedly transporting. Rubio openly boasted about the new doctrine: Instead of interdicting, \u201con the president\u2019s orders, we blew it up.\u201d Trump framed it explicitly as intimidation: \u201cWhen they watch that tape, they\u2019re going to say, \u2018let\u2019s not do this.\u2019\u201d The point was not law enforcement but precedent\u2014asserting the right to summarily execute civilians from the air, outside any declared war, based solely on U.S. unilateral claims.<\/p>\n<p>The pretext itself was paper-thin. Most cocaine trafficking to the United States runs through the Pacific, not the Caribbean, and fentanyl overwhelmingly enters through Mexico. Venezuela has historically been a transit country, not a major producer. Even if corruption and criminal networks exist, the leap from \u201cdrug trafficking exists\u201d to \u201cwe bomb boats and kill people\u201d is the real story. Here, drug trafficking functions as a floating signifier\u2014like \u201cterrorism\u201d or \u201cweapons of mass destruction\u201d\u2014a justification that can be invoked whenever empire wants to authorize unlimited violence.<\/p>\n<p>This maritime campaign was paired with economic coercion and pressure around oil. In late 2025, the U.S. seized Venezuelan crude and imposed a blockade logic on sanctioned tankers. Asked what would happen to the seized oil, Trump replied casually, \u201cwe keep it, I guess.\u201d That was not enforcement; it was international piracy\u2014outright theft dressed up as law.<\/p>\n<p>Together, these measures created the conditions for January 3: a pre-war configuration of military encirclement, economic strangulation, intelligence pressure, and psychological warfare.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">Maduro proposed giving \u2026 Trump \u2026 a dominant stake in Venezuela\u2019s oil and mineral wealth \u2026 and the ability to overrule the Venezuelan state itself. This \u2026 cannot be described as anti-imperialist in any meaningful sense.<\/aside>\n<p>This escalation did not follow a straight line from sanctions to bombs. There was also a period of rapprochement, and Nicol\u00e1s Maduro was more than willing to collaborate.<\/p>\n<p>In January 2025, Trump\u2019s envoy arrived in Caracas and reached an agreement: Venezuela would release several U.S. prisoners and accept migrants deported from the United States. Maduro actively participated in Trump\u2019s deportation policy, sending Conviasa\u2014Venezuela\u2019s national airline\u2014into U.S. territory to pick up deported Venezuelans. He spoke publicly of a \u201cnew beginning\u201d in relations between the two countries.<\/p>\n<p>The reason for this goodwill was simple. Maduro\u2019s priority was sanctions relief, preserving an oil-export lifeline, and above all staying in power. He wanted breathing room and access to revenue. And he signaled, repeatedly, that he was willing to make far-reaching concessions to get it.<\/p>\n<p>As negotiations continued through 2025\u2014especially in the months leading up to October\u2014those offers became more extreme. Maduro proposed giving the Trump administration a dominant stake in Venezuela\u2019s oil and mineral wealth: majority ownership, decisive control over boards, budgets, and strategy, and the ability to overrule the Venezuelan state itself. This represented a qualitative escalation in Maduro\u2019s long break with Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s resource nationalism and with constitutional requirements that PDVSA retain majority control. In plain terms, it was neocolonial\u2014and it cannot be described as anti-imperialist in any meaningful sense.<\/p>\n<p>Maduro also offered to open existing and future oil and gold projects to U.S. corporations, grant preferential contracts, reverse oil exports from China to the United States, and slash contracts with Chinese, Iranian, and Russian firms. That was not resistance. It was alignment\u2014offered from Caracas.<\/p>\n<p>One of the bitter ironies of this moment is that once Maduro made these offers, his program became increasingly indistinguishable from Mar\u00eda Corina Machado\u2019s long-standing \u201copen door\u201d agenda, which has always promised Venezuela\u2019s resources to foreign capital under aggressive neoliberal terms.<\/p>\n<h4>From rapprochement to aggression<\/h4>\n<p>If Maduro was willing to negotiate and was offering all these concessions then why did it still end in bombs and abduction? Because Trump\u2019s strategy in Venezuela was never simply transactional. It was hegemonic crisis management\u2014an effort to reassert U.S. hemispheric dominance under conditions of decline and to use Venezuela as a demonstration case for the region, especially to discipline states that hedge with China, Russia, or Iran.<\/p>\n<p>That is why the operation was designed as spectacle. It was not enough to extract concessions quietly. Power had to be staged: the ability to strike a sovereign country, remove its president in under ninety minutes, and send a message to the hemisphere that, as the U.S. ambassador to the UN put it, \u201cThis is our hemisphere.\u201d It was the Monroe Doctrine relaunched through raw force.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">It was hegemonic crisis management\u2014an effort to reassert U.S. hemispheric dominance under conditions of decline.<\/aside>\n<p>At a moment when U.S. consent-based hegemony is eroding, Venezuela represented an unacceptable breach: the world\u2019s largest proven oil reserves, aligned with U.S. rivals, and increasingly integrated into alternative circuits of trade and finance. After the coup, Washington made its priorities explicit\u2014privileged access for U.S. corporations, the severing of relations with designated adversaries, and the reorientation of Venezuela\u2019s political economy back into the U.S. orbit.This is why January 3 cannot be understood as a narrow oil grab. It is part of a broader imperial struggle over markets, raw materials, trade routes, and spheres of influence amid an intensifying crisis of global capitalism. The November 2025 National Security Strategy states this openly: the United States will \u201creassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine\u201d and deny non-hemispheric competitors\u2019 control over strategic assets in the hemisphere. Venezuela\u2014cheap labor, dismantled regulations, abundant resources, and a shattered social fabric\u2014is treated as both a warning and an opportunity: a place to expel rival powers and re-impose, by force if necessary, imperial order.<\/p>\n<h4>Inside Venezuela<\/h4>\n<p>The internal Venezuelan story explains why this was so easy.<\/p>\n<p>It was so easy because the Bolivarian process had been hollowed out\u2014politically, socially, and materially\u2014by Maduro\u2019s authoritarian, anti-worker, neoliberal turn. For more than a decade, Venezuela has endured economic collapse and social devastation. Wages were pulverized, public services collapsed, and millions were forced to migrate. The minimum wage fell to starvation levels\u2014less than one U.S. dollar a month\u2014pushing survival onto remittances, informal work, and discretionary government bonuses.<\/p>\n<p>Repression deepened as well: against trade unionists, human rights defenders, left critics, community organizers, and workers fighting for constitutional rights. Maduro jailed oil workers and union leaders, disciplining labor to attract capital while cloaking the project in socialist language. Through instruments like the 2020 Anti-Blockade Law, the government signed secret contracts, privatized behind closed doors, and bypassed democratic oversight in violation of constitutional requirements.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">Under Ch\u00e1vez, an external assault would have triggered mass mobilization. Under Maduro \u2026 the regime itself had exhausted and betrayed its social base.<\/aside>\n<p>Two consequences followed. First, anti-imperialist sentiment was fractured. Under Ch\u00e1vez, an external assault would have triggered mass mobilization. Under Maduro, anti-imperialism became precarious because the regime itself had exhausted and betrayed its social base. In a battered society, many people became demoralized or even tempted by the illusion that U.S. intervention might offer an escape. That illusion is tragic\u2014but it was produced by years of immiseration and repression.<\/p>\n<p>Second, the state itself became more compatible with neocolonial tutelage. A regime that already governs through secret deals, neoliberal openings, and labor repression is more structurally capable of conceding to imperial power, because its core project is no longer popular emancipation but regime survival and capitalist accumulation under authoritarian rule.<\/p>\n<p>When the U.S. attacked, the regime\u2019s \u201canti-imperialism\u201d collapsed into what it largely had become\u2014a rhetorical shell covering an apparatus ready to negotiate its own continuation.<\/p>\n<h4>Why Delcy Rodr\u00edguez and not Mar\u00eda Corina Machado?<\/h4>\n<p>That regional warning, and the open declaration of U.S. tutelage over Venezuela, immediately raised a question many expected to have an obvious answer: Why wasn\u2019t Mar\u00eda Corina Machado installed, Trump\u2019s longtime ally and the loudest advocate of U.S. intervention, but instead Delcy Rodr\u00edguez, Maduro\u2019s own vice president and a pillar of Maduro\u2019s party, the PSUV?<\/p>\n<p>Mar\u00eda Corina Machado was not installed because Trump wanted stability without occupation. She does not control the state or the military, which remains tied to Chavismo and Madurismo. Installing her would risk fracture, civil conflict and chaos\u2014and chaos would require U.S. troops, potentially tens of thousands. This is precisely what Trump wants to avoid.<\/p>\n<p>Rodr\u00edguez, by contrast, offered administrative continuity. The PSUV apparatus stayed intact. The same coercive institutions remained, and that apparatus can be kept in place under duress.\u00a0 The governing elite knows what Washington is willing to do. The threat of escalation becomes permanent leverage.<\/p>\n<p>In short, Rodr\u00edguez can deliver compliance stripped of symbolism. Maduro was a demonized figure in U.S. politics, but also\u2014however hollowly\u2014a symbol of anti-imperial defiance. Any deal with him looks like bargaining with an adversary. He also had to perform sovereignty, to maintain even a thin nationalist posture as part of regime legitimacy.<\/p>\n<p>Rodr\u00edguez can offer the same concessions without the baggage. And she can do it under the shadow of a protectorate-like arrangement. She can call it \u201ccooperation,\u201d \u201cdialogue,\u201d \u201cshared development.\u201d She can normalize tutelage. She can make a neocolonial arrangement appear like a transition.<\/p>\n<h4>Collusion?<\/h4>\n<p>This raises unavoidable question of collusion or negotiated surrender. The speed of the operation, the minimal resistance, the failure to release transparent casualty reports immediately, the choice to recognize Rodr\u00edguez rather than Machado and the apparent readiness of the remaining leadership to continue governing all suggest that sectors of the ruling elite were willing to sacrifice Maduro to preserve the structure of power.<\/p>\n<p>Rodr\u00edguez initially demanded Maduro\u2019s liberation and used some revolutionary symbolism\u2014but she quickly shifted tone toward \u201ccollaboration and dialogue\u201d with the United States, and toward restoring \u201cnormal activities,\u201d not mobilizing resistance. Increased military and police presence appeared, but not mass popular defense. The regime\u2019s priority seemed to be stability and continuation\u2014not sovereignty or resistance.<\/p>\n<p>What remains is Madurismo without Maduro: an authoritarian apparatus administering U.S. demands under duress\u2014a neocolonial state in practice if not in name.<\/p>\n<h4>Was this attack legal?<\/h4>\n<p>Legally, the operation was a clear act of aggression. Under the UN Charter, states may not use force against another country\u2019s territorial integrity or political independence except in self-defense against an armed attack or with Security Council authorization. Neither existed here. Trump\u2019s own words\u2014\u201cwe will run Venezuela\u201d\u2014made clear that this was not an \u201carrest operation\u201d or law enforcement but imperial rule.<\/p>\n<p>But it is important to remember, as Egyptian journalist Omar El Akkad <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/agog\/2025\/06\/17\/heartsick-breakup-with-the-west\/\">tells us<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In the end there is no international rules-based order, no universal human rights, no equal justice for all, simply fleeting arrangements of convenience in which any amount of human collateral is deemed acceptable so long as it works in the empire\u2019s interest.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That is the world January 3 belongs to.<\/p>\n<h4>Tasks for the Left<\/h4>\n<p>The task for the Left is not to choose between imperial tutelage and authoritarian neoliberalism. It is to defend sovereignty while building an independent, working-class, democratic alternative\u2014breaking with imperial capital, ending secret privatizations, restoring rights, freeing political prisoners, rebuilding unions, and restoring wages.<\/p>\n<p>Maduro\u2019s anti-worker neoliberalism did not protect Venezuela from imperialism; it weakened it. By hollowing out the Bolivarian process, the regime dismantled the very social forces capable of defending sovereignty from below, making Venezuela easier to discipline and easier to subordinate.<\/p>\n<p>January 3 was the collision of U.S. imperial escalation with Venezuela\u2019s internal exhaustion, an exhaustion produced by years of austerity, repression, and a regime that abandoned popular emancipation long ago.<\/p>\n<p>What comes next remains uncertain. What is already clear is that Venezuela is being used as a demonstration case for the hemisphere\u2014and resisting this is not only about Venezuela, but about refusing the normalization of a new imperial era in which sovereignty is discarded, and power is exercised openly and without pretense.<\/p>\n<hr class=\"half\" \/>\n<p><small><em>Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/about\/\">About Tempest Collective<\/a>.\u201d<\/em><\/small><br \/>\n<small>Featured Image credit: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/diariocriticove\/8560640268\">Diariocritico de Venezuela<\/a>; modified by Tempest.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The January 3 attack on Venezuela, says <strong>Anderson Bean<\/strong>, was the collision of U.S. imperial escalation with a regime that had dismantled the very social forces capable of defending sovereignty from below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":14467,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[349,434,249],"class_list":["post-14465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-article","tag-latin-america","tag-u-s-imperialism","tag-venezuela"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Copy-of-tempest_feature_card-28.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}