The more the United States comes to dominate Latin America, the more Latin Americans will come to dominate the United States. 

Earlier this year, President Trump was taken with the idea of making Venezuela the 51st state. Such threats to annex portions of the Americas have become almost routine: Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal, and now Venezuela. Previous US expansion schemes failed in Baja California, the Yucatan, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and even Quebec.

Yet it is worth dwelling on what an American Venezuela would mean for the United States. The Bolivarian Republic has a population just shy of 32 million people. As the 51st star on the American flag, it would be the second largest state in the union by population, behind only California and just ahead of Texas. Allocated a fair number of electoral college votes, it would overnight become the decisive swing state in any US presidential election, with more people than Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio combined. 

Presiding over the greatest expansion of US citizenship to a Latin American population ever would be an ironic outcome for MAGA. By comparison, the Reagan Amnesty of 1986 extended a pathway to citizenship to fewer than 3 million undocumented immigrants, predominantly from Latin America. The Trump administration is currently trying to strip 600,000 Venezuelans living in the United States of Temporary Protected Status, a legal category that protects foreign nationals from deportation but does not offer a pathway to US citizenship. To then turn around and offer it to 32 million Venezuelans, who would then presumably be free to move across state lines, would be unexpected to say the least.

Assuming any deeper thought has been put into it, perhaps the kind of US citizenship envisioned for Venezuelans in this hypothetical 51st state is a second-class variety. This was the experience of the newly minted Mexican-Americans created by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and put the territories of New Mexico, and California under US control. The former Mexican citizens lost much of their land to white settlers during the Gold Rush, and were not able to call on the rule of law to defend themselves. De facto second-class status is already the case for US citizens of Latin American origin today, thanks to the Trump administration’s deportation policies and its reliance on racial profiling, a reality that has been driving an ever-growing number of Latinos away from Trump’s political coalition. Perhaps he simply hopes to create in Venezuela a population of US-citizen Latinos who would still like to vote for him. 

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In reality, the annexation of Venezuela is highly unlikely. Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez has been accommodating to Trump since the US capture of her predecessor, but even for her, the prospect of complete annexation seems a bridge too far. The prospect of a prolonged counterinsurgency is probably unattractive. Indeed, guerrilla resistance was a major factor in protecting Mexican territory in Baja California, Sonora, and the Yucatan Peninsula from annexation by the United States during negotiations for the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Members of Congress were also opposed, not just liberal opponents of the war, but also white supremacists. As slaveholder Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina put it: “Are we to associate with ourselves as equals, companions, and fellow-citizens, the Indians and mixed race of Mexico?” There’s probably at least one Groyper in the White House wondering the same about Venezuela right now. 

Yet, it is worth acknowledging that becoming US citizens would suit many Venezuelans, Cubans, and Mexicans just fine. Many risk life and limb merely to work in America, even without the hope of becoming citizens. As unhappy as Puerto Ricans are with their commonwealth status, at least they can move to New York City or Miami at will, and vote the moment they get there. Many Latin Americans are envious. 

Furthermore, decisions that dramatically impact Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela are being made in Washington every day. Everything from Mexico’s security policy to Cuba’s ability to import oil is being decided by the White House. And Nicolas Maduro, nominally the head of a foreign state, is being treated not as a prisoner of war, but as a common criminal arrested under US law, and charged in a Manhattan court. If the lives of Cubans, Venezuelans, and Mexicans are going to be shaped by the US presidency and their sovereign leaders subject to US laws, wouldn’t it be fair if they at least got to vote on it? 

Many more millions of Latin Americans will indeed get to vote. Whether naturalized immigrants or their far more numerous US-born descendants, they are already one of America’s largest voting blocs. The first Latin Americans to obtain US citizenship at scale were the conquered Mexicans of the Southwest. Millions more Mexicans would later migrate north into the former Mexican territories, often actively recruited as cheap labor to work in the extractive industries of the American West. American military conquest similarly created the other large and permanent US-citizen population of Latin Americans when it annexed Puerto Rico after defeating Spain in 1898. If you are unhappy that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is eligible to run for president, blame President McKinley. 

Meanwhile Cuba, while not formally annexed, was subjected to near-total US economic and political control, a quasi-colonial reality only broken by Fidel Castro in 1959, though Trump is now attempting to reverse the outcome. The political and economic entanglements with Cuba created a vast Cuban diaspora in the United States, even before Castro came to power. For example, Marco Rubio’s parents came to Florida not as political refugees but as economic migrants two years before the Cuban Revolution. 

In more recent history, US trade policies like NAFTA created dislocation and job loss in Mexico’s agricultural heartlands, at a scale similar to the destruction of the Midwestern Rust Belt. Millions of Mexicans headed north to build new lives in the United States, very belatedly meeting the hopes of the Spanish Crown in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries to settle its vast North American empire with Catholic Spanish-speakers. And these pioneers in the 1990s and 2000s largely remain in the United States today, excluded from citizenship, essential for our economy, and having in most cases already produced US-born offspring. They are increasingly joining electoral populist revolts of both the Right and Left — and have proven to be open to Trump’s pitch. Yet if you deport their parents, they have the ability to punish you at the polls. 

Despite its recent Latino support, Trumpism first emerged as a backlash to the post-NAFTA wave of mass Mexican migration. Earlier Anglo-American backlash, such as the state-level efforts of Proposition 187 in California or Senate Bill 1070 in Arizona had already made immigration the defining conservative issue in the American Southwest, an issue that ultimately helped shift both states blue. The restrictionist tendency has found its champion in Trump. Yet the US has already become a Latin American country in ways the Trump presidency is unable to reverse. And this would still be true if every undocumented immigrant were somehow deported tomorrow. 

The United States is already home to more native Spanish-speakers than any country other than Mexico. Latin American cultural influence abounds — the Bad Bunny performance at the Super Bowl was remarkable precisely because of how mundane it was. And the American Right itself is ever more Latin American. In 2024, Trump won his second term in large part because of historic levels of Latino support. Marco Rubio, the first man since Henry Kissinger to simultaneously serve as both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, records tributes to the United States’ distinctly Hispanic and Catholic roots. The Border Patrol agents who shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis are both Mexican-Americans. Hispanic authoritarians from Bukele to Pinochet to Franco are figures of open admiration in many corners of the American Right. The infamous Nick Fuentes is proud of his Hispanic heritage. In Donald Trump’s America, even our Nazis are Mexican! 

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Geopolitically, a US shift away from Europe and towards Latin America is also a defining feature of Trump’s second term. The White House endorses presidential candidates in Latin American contests as routinely as if they were governor’s races in a US state. And often, the MAGA label is attractive to voters in Honduras, Argentina, Colombia, and elsewhere in Latin America. Rubio’s “Americas First” foreign policy — experienced by Latin Americans as bullying and Europeans as abandonment — can nevertheless be read as Washington finally realizing exactly where it is and who it shares the continent with. The rumored possible shift in the US position on the Falkland Islands — from backing Britain to backing Argentina — should be understood as merely the geopolitical manifestation of America’s increasing Hispanization. The United States today is as much part of Latin America as it is the Anglosphere. It is, in Trump’s words, “OUR hemisphere.” And the more Latin America belongs to the US, the more Latin American the US will become.

It’s already happening. For Anglo politicians from the Southwest like Beto O’Rourke or George W. Bush, the ability to deploy Spanish is now an indispensable part of retail politics. Down the class ladder, white guys aspiring to work anywhere from a kitchen to a construction site need to pick up a fair amount of español just to talk to the other guys. Even Pope Leo, the first American Pope, is really more of a Latin American, admitting he would prefer to root for Peru in the World Cup over the United States. The pontiff is simply the highest-profile example of the reverse assimilation into Latinidad that will become an ever more common part of 21st-century American life.

It is natural then for both Republicans and Democrats to want to elevate Latino candidates to win over an increasingly Latino electorate. Based on recent 2028 polling, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio is a frontrunner for the Republican one. The 2028 campaign for the White House could well be between a Miami Cuban and a Bronx Boricua. That’s what a Monroe Doctrine gets you.

A Latino-on-Latina presidential contest in 2028 would be an objectively funny way to finally bring the Trump era of American politics to a close. A political movement which began with “Build the Wall” as its defining slogan and has lately devolved into “annex Venezuela” was never going to reverse centuries-long migration and demographic patterns. Whether these changes usher in a Lusotropical Neoconservatism or a Mestizo Socialism remains to be seen. Yet the arc of the moral universe is bending inexorably towards Latinidad. This may be the future that MAGA deserves: oprime 2 para inglés. 

Today, however, they have far more in common. China is now the major trading partner of most South American states, which marks a substantial change from the 20th century when the US dominated bilateral trade with the region. Brazil sold 110 million tons of soy beans to China in 2025, while Chinese firms are building a new metro line in the Chilean capital Santiago, and in 2024 opened a brand new port near Lima. Overall, South American-Chinese trade in 2024 topped half a trillion dollars.

In the wake of Nicolás Maduro’s rendition, many have been asking whether the incident marks a major blow for China’s prospects in South America. One of Beijing’s representatives was in talks with Maduro mere hours before Delta Force came calling. Beijing won’t be thrilled about Maduro’s loss, but his presence probably isn’t critical to its influence in the region. American oil companies are proving skeptical about investing in Venezuela’s decrepit oil infrastructure, but China has readily made much longer-term investments there and in other South American countries. Beijing has long believed that in the 21st century, real power lies in tech infrastructure — and it shows.

Under Maduro, Venezuela committed on a grand scale to Chinese Huawei systems to run 5G. Huawei and other Chinese players have also moved into cloud computing in recent years, and have penetrated much of South America. It is not yet clear whether America’s new arrangements with Venezuela’s interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez, will change all this. There are alternative 5G providers in operation in Venezuela, but it will be hard — and costly — to remove Chinese infrastructure that has already been installed.

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That infrastructure includes energy as well as communications. South America has shifted decisively toward renewables: over 60% of its electricity generation is from renewables (including hydropower), and more than 90% of the region’s solar and wind equipment is from Chinese producers. Meanwhile, Chinese EVs have more than a quarter of the market in Chile, Ecuador and Uruguay, and their presence is growing fast in the continent’s other markets.

Will the Trump administration demand that South America abandon its current dependence on Chinese infrastructure, electric vehicles and green energy? And if so, will the US help pay for an alternative in a region where consumers want cheap, efficient products here and now? American taxpayers might not be delighted to hear that Venezuelan oil revenues, if they ever arrive, are spent on subsidizing cloud computing in Caracas or Buenos Aires.

If the Americans allow China to remain the region’s infrastructure giant, then many in Beijing will be fine with the loss of Maduro. In the long term, tech dominance assures China leverage in Venezuela regardless of who sits in the presidential palace. If arresting a head of state is America’s way of showing its dominance in a key region, then influencing everything from business to energy infrastructure might be Beijing’s way of doing the same thing. China has multiple opportunities to adapt and find new opportunities in a region where it’s indisputably a major economic player.

Meanwhile, Trump’s success in decapitating the Venezuelan leadership has revived his enthusiasm for talking about taking Greenland. In an interview with the New York Times, he suggested that Russia and China might take over Greenland if America didn’t get there first. Yet this implies that China’s Arctic plans are further advanced than is really the case.

In 2018, China declared itself a “near-Arctic state” — the word “near” is carrying a lot of weight in that formulation. China’s interest in the far north is rooted in a historical sense, developed over the past century, that the country is surrounded by enemies and that an alliance of adversaries might cut off important sea routes to China by blocking the Strait of Malacca. It’s hard to imagine that many powers would actually seek to provoke China, now a military superpower, in that way. But Beijing has long sought alternative ways to supply itself if one key route is cut off. The warming waters of the Arctic provide one possible pathway. China has invested in new icebreaker ships and has sought increased status in the Arctic Council, the international body where issues relating to the region are discussed.

This is still a policy for the 2030s and beyond, but the thinking started years ago. In 2018, China introduced the term “Polar Silk Road”, describing its interest in sea routes from northern Chinese ports across the Arctic waters to the Atlantic and beyond, though the phrase hasn’t caught on in quite the same way as its more famous Belt and Road Initiative. A few prescient Western researchers have been tracking China’s increased interest in the Arctic, and Greenland in particular, for some years now, including Eyck Freymann, who co-wrote, with Calvin Heng, an important paper for the Belfer Center of the Harvard Kennedy School on the Arctic intentions of Asian powers. As they point out, the Arctic is one of the areas where greater cooperation between Russia and China, which is certainly real in a broad sense, is still fragile. Other analysts point out that Russia has a very strong sense of the Arctic as part of its own identity. A greater Chinese presence there would cause significant anguish among the Russian nationalists who both inspire and goad Putin online.

The aspiration to expand beyond China’s traditional Asian position is influenced in part by three Western figures who have been prominent in its thinking on geopolitics over the past few decades: Mahan, Mackinder and Monroe. Alfred Thayer Mahan, one of the most prominent naval theorists of the 19th century, argued that control of the oceans through a powerful navy was central to dominance in the global economy; Sir Halford Mackinder maintained that control of the “World Island” of Eurasia was central to any power’s search for global dominance. US president James Monroe’s doctrine of hemispheric dominance has come into prominence this month because of its recasting as the “Donroe Doctrine”, but Chinese thinkers have been debating an “Asian Monroe Doctrine” since at least the Thirties, when Japan’s empire sought to dominate the continent.

China has little obvious interest in classic territorial dominance over Greenland, though mineral rights are another matter. But a new approach to global politics, one that enables Beijing to push its case around disputed islands and maritime routes in Asia, will be of great interest. It has had longstanding disputes with other maritime powers over islands in the East and South China Seas: Vietnam, the Philippines, and Japan. In the longer term, the precedents set by the Donroe Doctrine might yet lead online Chinese nationalists, many of whom love a bilingual pun, to start agitating for dominance in the South China Xi.

As the world now knows, it wasn’t. But what that means for this city and Fermín’s country remains unclear. For though Fermín felt euphoria over Maduro’s arrest, after years of Chavista misrule, Venezuela’s ruling socialist party is still in power, and a dangerous pro-government militia is still active in Fermín’s neighborhood. Indeed, with its web of guerrillas, gangsters, soldiers and political police, the frontier city of San Antonio del Táchira speaks vividly to explosive problems in Venezuela and the dangers of them spilling into more violence — amid Trump’s new “Donroe Doctrine” of open aggression in Latin America.

Since 2014, almost eight million people have fled hunger and poverty in Venezuela. Close to three million have settled in Colombia, and frontier towns like the sprawling Cúcuta are particularly popular destinations. With the Venezuelan economy in a mess — inflation currently sits at 225% — many of Fermín’s countrymen follow him over the border into Cúcuta to work. In the evenings, they cross back over the Táchira River, being sure to return before the Simón Bolívar International Bridge closes at 9pm. Close by, as dusk falls, I talk to Venezuelans as they are blasting salsa and reggaeton, drinking Coca-Cola and beer in plastic cups, and eating hot dogs from a stand.

There are more opportunities in Cúcuta than in Venezuela. The sweaty city of a million people, framed by green hills, has a booming clothes industry, coffee and sugar trades and universities. Even so, this lively community where they sell food and drinks, and zoom about as motorcycle taxis, has its problems. On the Venezuelan side, there are pro-government militias: the so-called colectivos. Since the American attack, they are reported to be putting up checkpoints and detaining people suspected of siding with Washington. The army and political police, known by the acronym SEBIN, also keep tabs on opponents.

Repression is increasing in other ways, too. The government is detaining journalists in Caracas and it has blocked foreign journalists from entering since the strike. Several teams tried to cross in as tourists at Cúcuta; Venezuelan troops held them and deleted photos and video before deporting them back across the river. In front of the bridge, dozens of TV crews made do with taking live shots from Colombian soil, a boon to the gaggle of drinks sellers nearby.

Locals must also contend with guerrillas from the National Liberation Army, or ELN, which has an estimated 5,000 fighters. Active on both sides of the border, the ELN is a fierce backer of Chavismo; following Trump’s attack, it released a statement calling on Venezuelans to defend against “the gringo aggression”. In more prosaic terms, though, the guerrillas extort many businesses in the area, calling payments “vaccines”. One Venezuelan tells me he used to have a food business but gave up because of the extortion, and now drives a taxi.

Whatever its Marxist rhetoric, the ELN also makes money from the drugs trade. Close to the bridge, along a stony river where goats munch on bags of trash, are dirt tracks known as trochas. They’re used by smugglers to take contraband over the border, whether sides of beef — or bricks of cocaine. Once the runners reach Venezuela, crossing the river on rickety wooden planks, they’re liable to face a tax: whether from guerrillas or soldiers. “They all work together,” says Celio, a charismatic former gasoline smuggler. Gangs get their cut too: Celio warns me not to go further along the trochas because it’s the home to infamous gangs like the Tren de Aragua. Five men with guns recently held up a photographer friend there, stealing his equipment.

Collaboration between gangsters and the state is key to the case against Maduro. US prosecutors indicted him in 2020 and again this year on crimes including narco-terrorism conspiracy. Though Venezuela is not a significant producer of cocaine, nor of other drugs like fentanyl, narco traffickers do shift tons of white powder from Colombia through places like Catatumbo, north of here, and on to the United States and Europe, all with the alleged complicity of the Venezuelan army. In 2018, I interviewed convicted Mexican trafficker Fernando Blengio, who told me that the military worked openly with narcos.

While Trump may have taken out Maduro, then, these broader criminal networks still appear firmly in place. And if the regime begins genuinely to totter — violence has lately erupted on the streets of Caracas — corrupt soldiers and gangsters could yet be used to repress the population. Another possibility, of course, is that they instead turn on each other, transforming Venezuela into a low-intensity civil war.

Amid this tangled mesh of state power and criminal violence, the people of La Parada, the local term for the Bolívar bridge checkpoint, seem unsurprisingly cynical of the government in Caracas. Several speculate that the army had not put up a fight but let Maduro be captured. “How come things are normal here if there was really an invasion of our country?” asked Sarai*, selling drinks by the river crossing in Cúcuta. Even so, some are optimistic that acting president Delcy Rodríguez is capable of overseeing a transition back to democracy. “We have to move slowly to change the institutions,” suggests Roberto*, a stocky former Venezuelan soldier. “We need someone inside the government to do that.” The guerrillas, gangs and militias of Cúcuta show how difficult such change could be.

Nor is Venezuela the only country facing challenges following America’s attack on Caracas. On the west bank of the river, I join a Colombian army convoy as it patrols the roads north of Cúcuta. It’s nighttime, and a bright moon bounces light off the heavily armored vehicles. The colonel in charge describes how he also woke to news of the US attack on Venezuela; unlike Fermín, he was soon on a call with Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who ordered 30,000 police and soldiers to reinforce the 1,300-mile frontier with Venezuela.

Petro, himself a former guerrilla, fervently condemned the abduction of Maduro, posting that “the United States is the first country in the world to bomb a South American capital in human history”. Trump responded by accusing Petro of being involved in cocaine production and saying he didn’t have long left himself. Ominous words — though there’s currently no known indictment of Petro, and he’s anyway due to step down this year once his term ends. If the Donroe Doctrine means additional attacks in Latin America, then, other countries may have more to fear. That includes Cuba and Nicaragua, both with more entrenched authoritarian Leftist leaders. Trump, as always, has shown he can be impossible to predict.

As for Colombia, an army officer in the convoy tells me he thinks the Americans are more likely to strike a cocaine lab than attack the government itself. Yet even if Petro and his successors avoid direct intervention, the challenges of Cúcuta still hint at trouble ahead. For one thing, there are those ELN guerillas. Colombian army sources warn that a large concentration have lately crossed the border from Venezuela. In December, the ELN also carried out a wave of bomb and gun attacks on Colombian targets, causing terror with makeshift explosives and killing an ambulance driver as they shot up a police station.

It goes without saying, meanwhile, that a meltdown in Venezuela is likely to spark even more violence across the border. Guerrillas and gangs operate across the two countries and flee heat from one to the other, and that’s before you add Colombia’s own brutal history of drug runners and Marxist fighters. One US argument for taking out Maduro was that his regime causes instability. But a collapse in Venezuela could cause even more.

For the moment, anyway, the rhythms of life in Cúcuta continue. As night falls, Fermín says he’d have to return home to Venezuela — and the fears and hardships he has faced for years. But, he adds, Venezuelans have learned to wait, hardly surprising when the Chavistas have been in power since 1999, when Fermín was just 12 years old. “Before,” he adds, “we made the mistake of thinking things would change when they wouldn’t. Now, we have learned to be patient.” The risk, of course, is that change could be violent, with US forces weakening the regime from the top and guerrillas and militias taking advantage of the power vacuum from below. So while things might get better, there is also the fear they could get even worse.

*Names have been changed.

Such was the fate of Viktor Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian leader who fled to Russia following his ousting in the 2014 Maidan Revolution, and who would likely have succeeded Zelensky if Putin’s forces had captured Kyiv in 2022. More recently, a comfy retirement was also the fate of Bashar al-Assad, who traded running one of the world’s most brutal regimes for playing online video games and brushing up on his ophthalmology.

Of course, Maduro, Yanukovych and Assad all led very different countries. But in comparing the fate of the Venezuelan strongman with his fellow ex-despots we can learn much about US power in the Americas — and the Kremlin’s willingness to cede it. Just last May, after all, Maduro visited Moscow for the annual Victory Day parade, with Vladimir Putin waxing lyrical about strengthening economic ties with socialist Venezuela. Yet in the end, Putin did nothing to save Maduro, and has remained tellingly quiet on his arrest by US commandos. The comparison with other erstwhile Russian allies couldn’t be starker.

This matters, for it shows how America’s foreign policy revolution dovetails with Russia’s own geopolitical recalibration. Just as Trump has signaled that he’s ready to wash his hands of Ukraine as quickly as possible — for mutual Russian and American enrichment — so too has Putin decided that Venezuela isn’t worth Moscow’s time. And while there may not have been any explicit deal between the White House and the Kremlin, when the dust settles, a Putin corollary to the Monroe Doctrine may likely emerge, with vast consequences across Eurasia.

Russian dominance over Ukraine is far from guaranteed, and Trump has lately been openly frustrated with his counterpart in Moscow. But with the Russians remaining steadfast as ever in their maximalist aims in their invasion, thumbing their noses at any Ukrainian proposal and driving a wedge between an increasingly Ukraine-skeptical Trump and Kyiv’s European allies, the mercurial Trump is unlikely to resist Russia’s ultimatums forever. And whatever form the Ukraine peace deal eventually takes, Putin is sure to come away with the understanding that Trump has taken from Venezuela — that military action in his corner of the world is not only an effective, but indeed a necessary, method of maintaining his sphere of influence in the so-called Russkiy mir, or Russian world.

Reacting to Trump’s attack, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev was strikingly effusive. “He and his team are very staunchly defending their country’s national interests,” Medvedev said of Trump, adding that as a result of the operation, the US has “nothing to reproach our country for”. For Russian leaders, then, Trump’s actions mirror their invasion of Ukraine not just in form but also in strategic logic — that maintaining a regional sphere of obedient client states through force, and punishing those that step out of line, isn’t aggressive imperialism, but merely guarding a superpower’s legitimate national security priorities.

This logic has lain behind Russia’s geopolitical behavior ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, especially since Putin’s rise to power, and indeed has animated its opposition to Nato expansion and efforts by countries as varied as Ukraine, Georgia and Kazakhstan to break free from Russia’s orbit. As far as Putin is concerned, the biggest problem with the Soviet collapse was not necessarily the end of communism, but the disintegration of Russia’s imperial sphere, and the subsequent lack of clarity over where Russia’s sphere ended and America’s began.

For Russia, the existence of such spheres of influence is as natural as the existence of national boundaries themselves — before the Soviet Union, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Tsarist Russia held sway over Eastern European countries such as Bulgaria and Serbia, while also enjoying authority in Iran and China. Putin has long seen Trump and his Ukraine peace process as a vehicle to formalize a new division of the world, and regards Trump’s move in Venezuela to be a decisive step in that direction.

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He’s right to see it that way. For Trump, Venezuela is not a culmination of his policy in Latin America, but a new geopolitical beginning. While he has never shied away from coercive diplomacy in the region, his pressure campaigns had thus far been primarily economic — bolstering allies like Javier Milei in Argentina, while punishing critics like Colombian President Gustavo Petro with sanctions. Now, though, not only has he deployed the military to advance his interests, he’s unified his agenda under the banner of wholesale American domination of the New World, hinting at military action in Cuba, Colombia, and even Mexico, not to mention ramping up threats against Greenland.

Combined with the US troop drawdown that is quietly but meaningfully underway along Nato’s eastern flank, all this looks like a fundamental recalibration of American priorities, and one that is duly being emulated by Russia. Putin has failed to match his words of support for Maduro with concrete actions — Venezuela’s pleas for military aid in the lead-up to the American operation were apparently met with shrugs by the Kremlin. Not that Maduro should have expected anything else. He may have invited Assad to Moscow, but Putin was nonetheless happy to abandon the Syrian regime as rebels conquered Damascus in December 2024. Why, then, would Moscow stick its neck out for a more distant, even less important partner halfway around the world? As in Syria, Putin is likely counting on the fact that regime change in Caracas will be much less transformative than hinted at by Washington, and that Russia will manage to salvage the bulk of its investments in the country’s oil sector without stepping on America’s toes.

It’s hardly lost on Putin that Trump was able to achieve in Venezuela in a matter of hours what his forces have failed to achieve over four years of war in Ukraine, and at the cost of over a million casualties. More than that, America’s victory in Caracas is likely to have sent a clear signal to Russia: what matters is less US power, but where Trump is willing to deploy it. Zelensky reacted to news of Maduro’s capture by hinting that the US should do the same against Putin. But though it’s entirely possible that the US could carry out such a mission, the new rules Trump and Putin are laying out mean that it never will, and nor will it intervene against lower-level Russian proxies in Moscow’s near-abroad either.

Of course, 19th-century-style spheres of influence are not created overnight, and despite Trump’s desire to dictate terms to his neighbors in the Western Hemisphere, a leader cannot steer the course of other nations through shock-and-awe alone. While Trump has clearly set the groundwork for an American counterpart to the Russian world, it’s likely it will fall to a more disciplined and strategically minded successor to finalize this new American empire. Though self-proclaimed isolationists like Tulsi Gabbard may well object to this seeming bastardization of America First, there are plenty others in the MAGA camp who’d be happy to take this mantle up. Despite their origins outside the movement, JD Vance and Marco Rubio are now both loyal Trumpists, and would have no qualms about cementing American dominance in the Western Hemisphere.

But in opening the door for such a foundational reorientation of US priorities, Trump has given Putin the signal that a thoroughgoing division of the world is right around the corner. This remains true despite the cyclical back-and-forth over Ukraine — Trump’s on-and-off annoyance with Putin is based not on fundamental differences in outlook, but on the Russian leader’s unwillingness to meet Trump halfway, even though both of them understand, broadly speaking, how the conflict’s end will impact geopolitics. Regardless of who ultimately controls the northwestern part of Donetsk Oblast, Russia will carve out its own version of victory in one way or another, and will go on to force the Colombias and Greenlands of its own neighborhood to its will.

As in Iran a century ago, Russia may establish a partial sphere of influence in Ukraine while wielding less direct, coercive influence over Kyiv. That’s likely to be echoed by increasingly kinetic threats against the eastern Nato states, newly exposed to Russian pressure by the great American reorientation. While Russia has lately saved its most dramatic hybrid attacks for Poland, it’s unlikely to try to occupy the country as it seeks to rebuild its old sphere of influence. Estonia and the Baltic states are a different story — with the US retreating from Europe, and threatening to unravel the entire Nato alliance by considering military action against Greenland, a Russian assault on these countries, especially a hybrid one, is no longer the stuff of fantasy. Recent US intelligence findings have confirmed that Russia has never abandoned its dreams of reclaiming Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania after losing them in 1991, and with the resurgence of multipolar spheres of influence where might is right, reestablishing some sort of control over them will naturally be high on Putin’s to-do list after Ukraine.

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Elsewhere in Europe, Bosnia and Serbia will be as ripe as ever for Russian retrenchment. Despite already being friendly toward Moscow, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has long sought to balance Putin against the EU, but with his political future looking shakier than ever, as the country’s youth turn against him, Russia may offer him a much-needed lifeline — albeit at the cost of Serbia’s European ambitions. Bosnia’s Serbs likewise have long relied on Moscow for support, and the twin earthquakes of declining American power in the Old World and Russia’s ascendancy in Eastern Europe may give them the opportunity to finally unite with Serbia proper.

Further afield, countries like Armenia, which have previously drifted away from Moscow toward Washington, could find themselves handed back to Putin on a silver platter. Yerevan has recently been warming up to Russia, after years of diplomatic backsliding, and in a tell-tale sign of things to come, Russia has been investing in disinformation campaigns in the country. With neighboring Georgia already firmly in Russia’s grasp, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan shouldn’t be terribly surprised if he found himself Maduro’ed in future. In Central Asia, too, another corner of Russia’s traditional backyard, Moscow may have incentives to rein in nominal allies that have started to split from the herd — though with Chinese influence on the rise, Putin may have to establish the limits of his sphere of influence there not with Trump, but with Xi Jinping.

Outside of this near-abroad, much less is clear. Russia, for instance, has been able to weather the loss of Assad in Syria. That’s largely because the political transition there, under Ahmad al-Sharaa, like the one seemingly on the horizon in Venezuela, proved to be much more pragmatic than initially advertised. For one thing, Russia has managed to hold onto its bases in the country in 2025. Yet the question is: to what end? Russia’s Syria bases at this point serve mainly as logistical resupply points for warships and aircraft headed to Africa, where Russia continues to exert influence through mercenary groups like the Africa Corps, a rebranded version of Wagner. Even so, it remains unclear if Moscow will be able to have its cake and eat it too, as it rebuilds its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia while deepening its influence elsewhere. The answer is probably not, but with a caveat — like Trump, Putin will concentrate his attention much closer to his own borders, all while continuing to project economic and soft power into Africa and the Global South.

At the same time, something else will happen: the emergence of Russia as a wholesale diplomatic sponsor, offering its services as the anti-Western strongman of the world and providing political cover for dictators like it did for Assad until 2024. Already, amid growing protests in Iran, the Ayatollah has made plans to hightail it to Moscow if things get dire, and it’s likely Russia will provide the same service to other state and non-state leaders too. The reason Maduro didn’t get the same treatment wasn’t because Russia was too incompetent to provide it to him — rather, amid the geopolitical realignment underway, the Venezuelan leader was the sacrificial lamb Putin needed to bring his preferred international order into being.

In the days since the Venezuela raid, Eastern European opponents of Russia have sneered at the ousting of Maduro, viewing his downfall as a reflection of Moscow’s weakness. But while Russia may be happy to stay passive in some corners of the world, the country’s neighbors may soon see it toppling Maduros of its own much closer to home — and this time, it will have Trump’s precedent to back it up.

For Trump, the Venezuela scenario presents significant intertwined problems. Firstly, his officials must come up with “stabilization” policies to rebuild, or at least patch up, the country’s horribly decayed public services — the result of years of thievery and neglect. Secondly, he must persuade his own followers, who are devoted to the credo of “America First”, that what is going on is not, repeat not, “nation-building” — the infamous military malpractice that ensured the very expensive US defeat in the Vietnam War and, decades later, in Afghanistan.

By stating that Venezuela’s notoriously hardline vice-president would remain in place to rule in place of Maduro, implicitly over an unchanged government, Trump was signaling to his alarmed followers that he was not seeking “regime change” and that the US would not start spending billions to build the government of a new and democratic Venezuela. The only spending that he has so far mentioned is the investment of US oil companies to rehabilitate Venezuela’s long-neglected oil fields and increase their output and profitability.

I was frankly surprised to hear Trump talk of Venezuela’s “immense” oil reserves, rhetoric which not only provides ammunition to anti-American propagandists, but which is also factually wrong. As everybody in the trade has long known, those reserves are only “immense” for practical purposes if the country’s very heavy oil can be extracted — and given that huge investments are necessary to do that, the reserves cannot be profitable unless oil prices rise far above current, or even remotely probable, levels.

As things currently stand, Venezuela can only produce one million barrels a day of oil. If its petroleum infrastructure is rehabilitated, it could quickly double its production. Then, with more investment, it could double it again to four million barrels a day, the level of Iran and Iraq, not of Saudi Arabia, the US or Russia.

Trump’s restraint in letting the regime continue essentially as is — but for an end to its logistic support of Colombian drug shipments to the US and Europe, and to its ties with Cuba, Iran and Russia — is unlikely to last.

Past US attempts at “nation-building” amounted to very costly failures because the task was entrusted to the US armed forces, whose deep and varied expertise did not, and does not, include the techniques of imperial governance. Such statecraft moreover requires the confident assertion of a decisive civilizational superiority — terribly unfashionable these days but the only possible justification for imperial rule.

It was a feat last accomplished by General Douglas MacArthur, from the moment he arrived to rule Japan on August 30, 1945, fully ready and willing to make decisions on anything that came his way. That included the feasibility of Emperor Hirohito’s continued rule, which he emphatically favored, ultimately having his way in spite of global opposition by endorsing the execution of hundreds of captured Japanese officers, which culminated with the 1948 hanging of seven top imperial lieges.

Compare that with David H. Petraeus’s record as US commander in Afghanistan. He thought it wise to piously mumble about the “Holy Koran” in a land ravaged by Islamist extremism — once even in response to the killing of a female Norwegian lieutenant colonel by a mob which had been stirred to action by a state-salaried Imam lying about a Koran burning in Florida.

Venezuela is neither Japan nor Afghanistan, however, but a structurally misgoverned Latino republic, which once nonetheless thrived thanks to its oil revenues that were collected directly by the state, and which once also enjoyed democratic elections, clean drinking water and affluence. Now its people starve as the wealthy elites are in exile and have been replaced by several million Chavistas who do little or no work to collect their wages and benefits as militia members. All the while, disorder appears to be increasing on the streets of Caracas.

What does Trump intend to do if not nation-build? How does he convince his followers of his actual intent? And who will produce the necessary stabilization policies?

What the country needs is rebuilding, and that starts with the economy. The country’s devastating decline began when Hugo Chavez came to power in 1998, quickly replacing capitalist failure with communist failure imported from Cuba. But unlike Cuba, whose only competitive industry is prostitution for hard-currency tourists, Venezuela was always rich in oil. The greatest economic crime that Chavez initiated, and that Maduro completed, was the destruction of the country’s once-admirable state-owned oil company Pedevesa. Before Chavez began replacing its executives and even engineers with his unqualified followers, the company was very efficiently run by a cadre of highly professional petroleum engineers.

It was not enough for Chavez to weaken Pedevesa’s profitability by giving large amounts of oil to Cuba for free: he replaced its executives with his political hangers-on, and then did the same even with its production engineers. Because Brazil’s oil industry was growing during those same years, and because Pedevesa had an excellent reputation, many of its expert employees migrated to Brazil, and inevitably Venezuela’s oil output started to decline, eventually down to one million barrels of oil per day or fewer, instead of three million and more.

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When Maduro took over, he might have saved Pedevesa — and his country’s economy — by expelling the Chavez parasites and issuing a call for the company’s veterans to return. Instead, he chose to earn US dollars by using the Venezuelan armed forces to help the Colombian drug cartels send their goods to the US, Canada and Europe by land and sea.

Now the key to Venezuela’s recovery is the return of the diaspora. The wealthy Venezuelan exiles in the Dominican Republic’s La Romana enclave, as well as in Key Biscayne, Florida, and beyond, include highly skilled professionals who are badly needed back home. Yet while they may be celebrating Maduro’s ouster, they are unlikely to return until the country is fully stabilized by others.

The far larger number of very recent exiles — in the millions — who have fled as far as Chile to feed their families are much more likely to return because they have no wealth to live on, nor have they settled down. Facilitating their return with the provision of transport and food is the one thing that the US could do with its military means, along with the implicit threat of more air strikes if the militia prevents the return of the exiles to their abandoned homes. That is all the US can do without a politically and practically impossible return to “nation-building”.

Having seized control of Venezuela, the US must restore the country to working order and do so quickly. Otherwise it will soon exhaust the patience of Trump’s America First followers — who have every reason to be skeptical.

Since the operation to extract Nicolás Maduro from Caracas and fly him to the US to face trial, much has been said about how the American operation will shake up geopolitics and the world economy. China, which imports about half a million barrels of oil daily from Venezuela, has just lost a key strategic partner, delivering the advantage in the US-China rivalry to Washington. Meanwhile Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, which we keep being reminded are the biggest in the world, have now fallen into the grip of the US. With this control secured, America will control a vast supply of cheap energy, which it can use to enrich its oil companies, power its industrial renaissance and dictate policy to world energy markets.

But if all that were true, we’d have expected to see big movements in world markets. As traders digested the dramatic news, Chinese stocks would have plunged as the country’s growth prospects dimmed; oil prices would have either plummeted as the world anticipated the massive supply of new crude, or alternatively soared as the risk of conflict and attendant supply disruptions heightened; government bonds and the dollar would have rallied as investors flocked to the safety of US treasury paper in anticipation of wider conflict. That was, after all, what happened in past conflicts over oil: the 1973 Yom Kippur War tipped the world economy into recession, and the 1979 Iranian Revolution, by sending inflation skywards, helped bring down governments in the British and American elections in the next year.

But none of that came to pass this time round. Chinese stocks were up on Monday. Bonds barely budged. Currency markets revealed few signs of major movements to safe havens. The oil price moved sideways for most of the day. Essentially, traders were telling us there was nothing much to see here, folks.

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Put simply, little has changed. The suggestion that a sudden flood of Venezuelan oil will swell global supply rests on the apparent assumption that all you need to do is sink a well a few feet down and black gold, ready to put into automobiles and diesel generators, will come gushing out. In fact, Venezuela’s oil infrastructure is so degraded by years of neglect, and its business environment so difficult to navigate due to decades of corruption and poor governance, that the scale of investment required to revive production, refinement and exports is vast — typical estimates being north of $100 billion over 15 years.

Where will all that money come from? Venezuela is broke and, in the absence of US security or financial guarantees, is unlikely to suddenly obtain access to abundant cheap credit. Even though Venezuelan bond prices shot up some 24% on Monday, that means investors will still pay a mere 41 cents on the dollar — which, when converted into a yield, leaves Venezuelan interest rates well into double digits. As for the private sector, although in the wake of the operation US President Donald Trump said US oil majors would “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country”, those same companies have so far been noticeably silent on their own plans. A former executive for Chevron, the only American major that still has operations in the country, has floated the possibility of raising $2 billion for further Venezuelan investment. But the majors are, at least so far, waiting for more clarity.

With projects already underway elsewhere, it’s not clear what advantage they’d gain from suddenly re-allocating capital to Venezuela — not least because the long time-horizons involved would require a stable, predictable environment before the majors feel comfortable sinking money again. Which is to say, a regime change. And what happened on Saturday fell far short of that.

Instead, all that the weekend’s military operation accomplished was to change the leader, not the regime. And while the administration maintains that the new acting president Delcy Rodríguez, who is seen as a relative pragmatist among the Chavistas, will effectively do what the White House instructs it to do, the idea that the US can simply install a satrap and then retreat to the comfort of Pennsylvania Avenue stretches credulity.

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With hardline Chavistas still in control of the military and a network of militias throughout the country, Trump will find it difficult to shape events without putting boots on the ground. Assuming he doesn’t do that, he will likely get lip service and not much more from a leader that is likely to have a weak base of domestic support. It’s hard to imagine any Venezuelan leader who acts as a US puppet being able to retain significant backing from either rival elites or the population at large. If Trump does try to bolster her by sending in American soldiers to establish order, it will do to his presidency what happens to most presidencies that start with a major foreign invasion: mark the beginning of the end.

Americans seldom like foreign military incursions, except for those that are brief and successful, like last summer’s bombing of Iran. And as the President who was elected on a pledge to end the country’s “forever wars”, Donald Trump has little political leeway to commit resources to a major Venezuelan operation. With his Venezuelan action already polling badly, he can talk the talk but will find it very difficult to walk the walk.

Investors therefore know that little has changed, which is why their response to the operation has so far been to stand by and wait for more. Which makes one wonder, what was this all for? As a piece of theater for the home audience, the daring and stunningly effective intervention may have been a ratings hit. But if it now bogs the US down in a country which has previously given it a lot of grief, all while hurting America’s international standing, it risks turning into a Pyrrhic victory.

In fact, there’s something about this whole operation that feels strangely anachronistic. Although some see this fight as an extension of the US sphere of influence or even a battle over drugs, most of the commentary, at least in the Western media, has treated this as a resource war, a variant of the Great Game to secure control of a key resource and thereby gain a stranglehold over one’s rivals. The sort of great-power conflicts which defined much of the past two centuries.

But the world has changed. The global economy is far less resource-intensive than it once was, and its oil intensity has been in long-term decline. In the 20th century, the world economy was powered by oil and coal. Today, even though that remains the case, the world is rapidly transitioning to diversified supplies of renewable energy which depend entirely on local resources. Over time, the carbon intensity of the world energy supply will thus decline further, making oil less strategically important. That no doubt explains why China’s markets were unmoved by the weekend’s events — it had already reduced its dependence on Venezuela to the point it accounted for only about 4% of its total oil imports. The country is leading the world into the energy transition at a rapid pace, installing renewable energy and reducing its oil imports precisely to end such vulnerability to disruptions to global supply.

And while Western countries are following Trump’s lead and starting to temper some of their moves towards renewable energy, the rest of the world is instead following China’s lead. The main markets for Chinese exports of EVs and solar panels are now shifting from Europe to the developing world. What is driving their transition is not concern with climate change but the more immediate gain of reducing import dependence and foreign exchange bills.

If anything, Trump’s move on Venezuela will further incentivize developing countries to speed up their efforts to decarbonize their economies. American administrations of all stripes have demonstrated their willingness to use their control of energy and financial markets as weapons. What better way for developing countries to remove that weapon than by eliminating one’s dependence on what America — or any other country for that matter — controls? They’ll localize energy supply and look for other ways to manage their money than parking it in the US. (Perhaps not coincidentally, gold was one of the few assets whose price did move sharply higher on Monday). Ethiopia, with its abundant hydroelectric resources, recently banned the importation of internal combustion engine cars in order to reduce its fuel bill, while Ukraine is making its electrical grid more resistant to Russian bombs by shifting away from big power plants to rooftop solar. Europe, one recalls, fell into recession when the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine cut off its gas supply, so it knows a thing or two about strategic vulnerability.

All that helps to explain why oil has been in a long bear market and has largely shrugged off the events that would have once caused major shocks to world energy markets, from Middle East wars to Latin American invasions. Trump has devoted American resources to seizing a prize which will over time be increasingly less sought. Which is why when he brandished it before the world, investors scarcely budged.

For all the talk of a return to 19th-century style gunboat diplomacy, a lot has changed since the high age of European imperialism. As Robert Pape, a specialist in insurgency at the University of Chicago puts it, the capacity to resist imperial aggression today far surpasses then. Where Gatling guns once faced men with spears, today, potential guerrillas have access to modern lethal weaponry on an industrial scale. It takes a lot of gunboats to assert supremacy today. Trump thus faces an unpleasant choice: either cut bait now, or go all in and watch his presidency be defined by the successes, or more likely failures, of what will be seen as his war.

That about sums up the theory of international law under which President Trump extracted Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro from his home at a military base in Caracas to put him on trial in New York City for drug trafficking. It’s law for a stateless space — which is to say, for our world. 

There are, of course, other theories of international law. One view — call it the Hobbesian, after the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes — holds that there is no such thing as international law. In this view, in the absence of a world government with its own police, law exists within states, but not among them, other than the law of the jungle, tempered by whatever restraints morality or prudence might support.

At the other extreme is what might be called the Wilsonian view, after President Woodrow Wilson. In the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, many idealists dreamed of world federalism, which would replace international affairs with the internal affairs of a world government. 

Other reformers a century ago put their hopes in international agencies — leagues of nations, world courts and arbitration tribunals, international police forces, international agencies — that could create de-facto world governance in the absence of a world state by means of cooperation among independent states. Wilsonians put great weight on multilateral treaties and the rulings of transnational agencies and courts as definitive and compulsory international law.

But the most persuasive account is the one depicted in The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven. It could be described as the vigilante theory of international law. Vigilantism is the practice by which members of a community or outsiders carry out rough justice in the absence of a functioning or legitimate state. In this view, international law is genuine law — but it is the customary law of a stateless society.

The bureaucratic state — in which legislators and judges and police and military officers are paid out of taxation to enact, judge, and enforce laws — is a recent development in human history. But law is much, much older. It has long existed in societies that have lacked modern states or anything resembling a state at all.

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In stateless societies, laws are norms that rest upon a widespread social consensus but are enforced informally, voluntarily, and by interested parties. Lacking a salaried constabulary, the stateless society relies on enforcement by individuals and groups. But the enforcers can’t be compelled to enforce the norm against violators, and their decision to do so may be colored by self-interest of some kind.

The Viking-era Icelandic commonwealth that lasted from the 900s until its subordination to Norway in 1262 is an example of a stateless society. Customary law was recited by law-speakers at the Thing, the assembly of free Icelanders. Judges selected from among the attendees had the power to find criminals guilty. But lacking a professional constabulary or a professional army, the judges could only declare an alleged wrongdoer to be an outlaw. In the case of full outlawry, such a finding permitted anyone to kill the outlaw without legal repercussions. Usually, those who took on the risk of killing an outlaw had a personal interest in the case, like relatives of a murder victim. 

Medieval Latin Christendom offers another example of law in a stateless society. The effective powerlessness of the Holy Roman Emperor meant there was no real government above the level of kings and other potentates. The pope could excommunicate a king, but the king’s overthrow had to be carried out by the king’s subjects or other monarchs, and in practice, they chose whether or not to do so.

The execution of justice in the absence of a functioning or non-corrupt state is a familiar theme of cinema. Hence, The Seven Samurai. In gangster movies like The Godfather, the mafia functions as an informal, extra-legal, parallel government, with its own customary rules and deliberative councils which can order murders. In Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western classic, Unforgiven, prostitutes offer to pay bounty hunters to avenge one of their own in a town run by a tyrannical sheriff and his henchmen.

In a world without a world government — our world — the equivalent of masterless samurai, private gunslingers, and medieval knights-errant are the few great and middling powers that possess the military capacity to project power and intervene in other countries, in addition to defending themselves.

In a modern country with a functioning government, it would be an outrage if a salaried police officer personally decided whether or not to respond to a 911 call, and if salaried firefighters, after rescuing a family from their blazing home, insisted that they be paid by the victims in cash or took some of their possessions as a reward. But in a world that has law but lacks a world state, law enforcement can be both voluntary and self-interested. 

The few military powers that can enforce customary international law have the right to choose when and where they intervene and can legitimately ask to be repaid by the nations whom they rescue in the form of cash, basing rights, or economic access for their own companies and investors. 

What about the content of contemporary international law? Conventional accounts try to cover all bases, by saying that evidence of international law can be sought in treaties, domestic judicial decisions and laws, and the practice of states. But the practice of states — and of great military powers, in particular — is the main evidence of the existence of an international legal norm, because laws which aren’t enforced are just words on paper.

The practices that are legitimate according to the customary “tribal” law of our stateless international society change over time. Before World War I, it was widely accepted that countries could invade and occupy other countries to force them to repay debts to foreign nationals. This practice has fallen out of favor, as has the practice of hiring privateers to seize and loot enemy shipping in wartime, though a vestige remains in Congress’s power to authorize “letters of marque and reprisal” under the US Constitution.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the rights of nations — usually defined as identifiable ethnocultural groups — have increasingly weakened or displaced older notions of state sovereignty and territorial integrity. There is a strong norm against genocide, the deliberate extermination of an ethnic nation or minority, which emerged following World War II and the Holocaust. More recently, following the Balkan Wars, a norm against ethnic cleansing or forcible transfers of an ethnic nation has taken hold. Such norms didn’t exist in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when the victorious Allies allowed population transfers involving millions of ethnic Germans, Poles, and Ukrainians.

Even the Trump administration, otherwise allied with the far Right in Israel, has backed away from Trump’s earlier horrifying endorsement of the permanent eviction of the people of Gaza from their homeland. In 2019, the first Trump administration declared that the annexation of the occupied West Bank and the slow-motion squeezing out of Arabs to make way for Jewish settlers were not “per se incompatible with international law.” Yet Trump last month restored the policy of previous presidents of both parties opposing the colonization and annexation of Palestinian land by Israel.

Thus, there is strong evidence of a norm against the dismemberment and annexation of foreign states and disputed territories: from global opposition to Israel’s annexation of the Occupied Territories, to broad international support for the US war to evict Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from Kuwait, to the widespread opposition to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and efforts to seize the Donbass region of Ukraine.

In today’s customary international law, however, state borders aren’t absolute, to judge from the practice of the great powers and other states. True, foreigners can’t invade a country, expel the inhabitants, and annex the territory. But the national right to self-determination has been allowed to alter the borders of existing states. German reunification after the Cold War is one example.  And since 1945, many former colonial countries or breakaway nations have won recognition of their sovereignty. Following the Cold War, Czechoslovakia broke up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in a bloodless “velvet divorce,” while Yugoslavia broke up in bloody conflict into seven countries, and the Soviet Union dissolved into 15 independent successor states in 1991. 

Nations that have failed to obtain their own independence, like the Kurds and Igbo and others in Biafra in Nigeria, have lacked great-power support for their ambitions, a fact that illustrates the role of the great powers in choosing when and where to enforce a norm — in this case, the norm favoring national self-determination. The fact that norms are enforced selectively or hypocritically, however, doesn’t undermine their status as norms.

The flip side of national self-determination is popular sovereignty when it comes to choosing constitutions and leaders. Although it is far from universal, the custom of legitimating governments through free and fair popular elections is more widespread than ever. Elections and plebiscites are far from perfect, but the alternative is worse — allowing a supposed norm of “state sovereignty” to protect any tyrant or junta that seizes effective control in a country, no matter how much it abuses its power by executing, torturing, imprisoning, or exiling its opponents.

Which brings us back to Venezuela under Maduro. In that case, the United States and 10 Latin-American neighbors, along with Japan and most of the democracies of Europe, either refused to recognize Maduro’s legitimacy or raised questions about it, given his obvious theft of the 2024 election in Venezuela.

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The Trump administration plausibly could have won widespread international support — outside of autocracies like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea — by emphasizing enforcement of the international norm favoring democracy as the main purpose of its intervention in Venezuela, with US support for rebuilding the decayed Venezuelan oil industry subordinated to the decisions of Venezuela’s democratically elected leaders about what to do with their country’s oil.

But Team Trump chose not to emphasize democratic restoration, relying on other rationales. Trump and his deputies have claimed that the overthrow and imprisonment of Maduro was merely a case of extraterritorial American enforcement of domestic US anti-drug laws — an excuse as transparently dishonest in the case of Maduro as it was in the case of Manuel Noriega’s ouster from Panama in 1989. This pretext was made even more preposterous by Trump’s recent pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who’d been sentenced to prison for 45 years in the United States for drug trafficking and violating US weapons laws.

Trump also claimed, falsely, that beginning in 2007, under former strongman Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan government “unilaterally seized and stole American oil.” But the oil was never “American.” Under Venezuela’s democratic 1999 constitution, all oil and gas in the country belongs to the state, which can collaborate with private companies to extract it. Moreover, Saudi Arabia nationalized American oil company interests between 1973 and 1980, and Mexico did the same in the 1920s, without Washington regarding either as justification for a regime-change war.

Worst of all, Trump has implied that instead of handing over power to the winners of the 2024 election, the United States, either directly or through remnants of Maduro’s dictatorship, will govern Venezuela for an indefinite period, a strategy that appears to put the interest of US oil companies above the restoration of Venezuelan democracy. Such a policy is likely to galvanize nationalists and anti-imperialists throughout Latin America and around the world, and bolster the stereotype of US foreign policy as “capitalist imperialism.” 

Given the importance of elections in legitimating governments in today’s world, it is hard to make a case from customary international law against a limited intervention by a foreign power that replaces a dictator and restores democracy in a country. But if the intervening power does not move quickly to support a transition to rule by the country’s own democratically elected leaders, it risks violating another strong norm of modern customary international law: the norm against conquest, annexation, and indefinite occupations.

Unfortunately, the efforts of Trump and his aides to explain why the United States overthrew Maduro have been as botched and counterproductive as the operation to capture and remove the Venezuelan dictator was tactically effective.

In a world without a world government and a world constabulary, vigilantism by major military powers is often the only way to bring about rough justice under customary international law. But when it comes to the norms they invoke, the enforcers aren’t judges in their own case. Others, including those whom the vigilantes claim to liberate, will decide whether justice has been done — as a matter of morality, if not enforcement. Audiences admire the protagonists of The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven because, while self-interested, the justice they render is finally real justice. The Trump administration would be wise to follow suit.

Despite Donald Trump’s provocative assertion that the United States is going to “run” Venezuela and manage its transition for the foreseeable future, Washington has so far avoided the far costlier path of outright occupation. Trump has openly dismissed US-backed opposition figure María Corina Machado as lacking the domestic “support and respect” necessary to lead the country, while signaling that his administration is instead liaising with Venezuela’s vice president (and, tellingly, its oil and finance minister) Delcy Rodríguez, whom he described as “willing to do what we think is necessary.” 

With Rodríguez named interim president by Venezuela’s Supreme Court (presumably with American approval), and no indication that Washington is prepared to deploy the hundreds of thousands of troops required to govern the country directly, Trump appears intent on “running” Venezuela indirectly — through the existing state apparatus and the military — while using sanctions, naval embargoes, and the credible threat of renewed force as an albatross around the neck of the Venezuelan leadership. 

The objective, in short, is not regime change in the conventional War on Terror sense, but instead managed continuity: preventing immediate collapse, securing oil infrastructure, and coercing compliance without assuming responsibility for the country’s political and social wreckage. If true, this raises the likelihood that the entire episode has been a US-backed military coup that will ironically preserve Chavismo and Bolivarian politics in Venezuela in a new US-dealing, “business-first” garb: simply without Maduro himself.

Such an outcome would suggest that the Trump administration resisted the temptation of full-scale ideological regime change and remains pragmatic enough to avoid a prolonged ground invasion of Venezuela. The fallout — refugee crisis, internal unrest, and elite fragmentation — remains to be seen. Yet history offers little comfort that Maduro’s removal will lead to stability, let alone liberal democracy. If past US interventions are any guide, the long-term effect is more likely to be the further militarization of Venezuelan politics, with nationalism and social order emerging as the primary glue of regime solidarity. 

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Indeed, despite widespread discontent with Maduro’s rule, pro-government crowds have already gathered in Caracas to protest his overnight ouster by a foreign power. Chavismo, long sustained by anti-imperialist rhetoric, may now find renewed legitimacy precisely because Maduro was removed not by Venezuelans themselves, but by Washington and the CIA.

Beyond Venezuela itself, the broader message of the operation is unmistakable. The United States has forcefully communicated to the nations of the Western Hemisphere that it will justify its military interventions by claiming the right to enforce US law internationally — at least in the Americas — regardless of sovereignty, regional instability, or political blowback. Coming on the heels of the National Security Strategy’s call to reassert an updated, neo-mercantilist version of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the strike represents an ultimatum: Washington will act as the hemisphere’s police, enforcing its economic sphere of influence by force if necessary.

Washington’s actions in Venezuela reflect a Trump doctrine that views the world less as an ideological battlefield of liberals and autocrats than as an arena of zero-sum economic competition among great powers. In this framing, the Western Hemisphere is not merely a security perimeter, as in Roosevelt’s doctrine, but a commercial hinterland whose resources, markets, and supply chains must remain firmly under American control. Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, critical minerals, and strategic location for maritime trade therefore loom far larger in Washington’s calculus than any abstract concern with democracy, international law, or human rights.

Ideology, again, is secondary here. What matters is deal-making, playing ball, and cooperating with US commercial interests. This helps explain Washington’s readiness to work with figures drawn from the core of the Chavista state rather than the long-favored exile opposition. Loyalty is transactional, not doctrinal; legitimacy flows not from ballots or values, but from compliance with the imperial center.

This also explains why the attack on Venezuela appears unprovoked when assessed through traditional security frameworks. Caracas posed no credible military threat to the United States, nor was the country on the brink of imminent collapse, something that might have triggered intervention on classical Rooseveltian grounds. The intervention’s triggers were economic; its legalistic framing as countering narco-terrorism or drug-trafficking is nothing but window dressing. The goal was to secure US leverage over Venezuelan resources while decisively excluding non-hemispheric competitors — above all China and Russia — from consolidating their economic footholds in the Americas.

The unresolved question is whether this “Trump Corollary” is geographically bounded. Does it, to put it bluntly, actually put America First? Will the military interventions stop in the Americas, or does it foreshadow a broader claim that the entire world constitutes a legitimate US sphere of interest — continuing the decades-long tradition of transforming the American military into a global police force?

Only time will tell. But if the “American-Sphere” logic that undergirds the Trump doctrine loses its geographic grip and sense of limits to bleed into outright globalism, promoting US corporatism worldwide down the barrel of a gun, then the Trump administration has learned the wrong lesson from America’s postwar misadventures. While the more macho America Firsters might try to justify military interventions in the hemisphere on realpolitik and geoeconomic grounds, such militarism will be exceedingly difficult to explain, and indeed execute, across far-flung Eurasia: where other regional powers will inevitably exercise their own claims to sphere of influence. 

Ultimately, unrestrained militarism is not only expensive and inflationary, but risky and escalatory. If Trump loses touch with basic tenets of Washingtonian realism, and refuses to adapt to the more regionalist and civilizational world that is emerging, then his checkmating of Maduro will be remembered as a pyrrhic victory that reenergized military interventionism, emboldened the globalists, and precipitated America’s decline as a great power.

Regardless, the approach lays bare the fiction that Trump’s foreign policy is isolationist. It is not. The Trump Doctrine may be skeptical of nation-building, regime change, and Middle-East-style forever wars, but it has no aversion to unilateral, willful, and even unprovoked use of force. On the contrary, it will resort to military action whenever and wherever it perceives American economic dominance to be challenged.

This exposes the central contradiction at the heart of Trumpian realism. While the National Security Strategy speaks the language of sovereignty, national interest, and restraint, it simultaneously treats the sovereignty of adversarial states as conditional and expendable. The logic is blunt and unapologetic: power decides. Unless adversaries are sufficiently strong to deter American action, they can be intimidated, coerced, or even removed.

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Maduro has called Trump's bluff

By John Masko

By framing a cross-border military strike and the forcible abduction of a sitting head of state as an extension of domestic criminal process, Washington has effectively asserted a doctrine of extraterritorial police power backed by overwhelming force to use as cover for economic conquest. If national sovereignty can be nullified by indictment from a foreign, extra-judicial court, then no state outside the protective umbrella of US power can consider itself secure. Today it is Venezuela; tomorrow it could just as easily be Iran — or any other regime that can be rhetorically and legalistically reframed as “criminal” rather than simply a political, ideological, or strategic rival.

There is an uncomfortable irony at play here. In removing the head of a sovereign country through a swift “special military operation”, Donald Trump accomplished precisely what Vladimir Putin attempted — and failed — to achieve in Ukraine. He excised an intractable thorn on his side in hopes of reestablishing America’s sphere of influence over a country in its near-abroad. The difference lies not in principle, but in capability. The operation showcased the overwhelming superiority of US military power while signaling Washington’s renewed willingness to enforce its hemispheric dominance. After all, preventing Western encroachment in Ukraine is far more existential for Russia than Venezuela is for the US. 

Trump will undoubtedly tout this as a decisive victory. He outmaneuvered Maduro, avoided US casualties — at least for now — and demonstrated American primacy and resolve to the region. Yet the more difficult task lies ahead. Whether Washington can compel Maduro’s successor — be it Vice President Rodríguez or Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López — to subordinate Venezuelan sovereignty to American economic and strategic interests remains far from certain. The assumption that, through US military coercion or its “Big Stick”, Venezuela will simply offer up its oil and mineral wealth to US companies reflects a deep imperial hubris that harkens to the 19th century and is at odds with the post-unipolar reality of our time.

In the end, US machismo may have bested Chavismo tactically. Strategically, however, it risks entrenching the very dynamics it claims to oppose: hardened nationalism, militarized politics, and a regional order defined less by stability and mutual recognition than by fear and intimidation. It also does little to address the fentanyl crisis in the United States, which has nothing to do with Venezuela being a cocaine transit hub. 

Still, the precedent has been set for new waves of US military interventions abroad — and in a multinodal world increasingly resistant to American primacy, the costs of enforcing an economic empire through global policing may yet exceed the benefits.

The symbolism of the Venezuelan exfiltration op, on the anniversary of Noriega’s surrender, speaks volumes about the Trump administration’s thinking on Venezuela. The conclusion of Operation Just Cause in 1990 delivered a rare success in US-imposed regime change: Panama has since emerged as a vibrant democracy. The same may not be true of Venezuela.

As of this writing, the exact circumstances of Maduro’s capture remain unclear. Members of the Venezuelan opposition claim that the arrest was negotiated with the regime, implying that some of the dictator’s underlings turned against him. Asked at a news conference whether opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado would take power, Trump replied: “They have a vice president, y’know?” and suggested that Machado lacks the popular “respect” needed to govern. But he later implied in an address that Washington would oversee a regime transition and run Venezuela’s oil industry.

A Panamanian scenario the White House might be considering is one in which Vice President Delcy Rodríguez will call for free and fair elections, as a result of which some other figure — perhaps Edmundo Gonzalez, who ran in Machado’s place in 2024’s stolen vote — assumes the presidency. Another alternative is that Maduro’s regime remains largely in place, with Rodríguez and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello kowtowing to Trump’s oil and deportation demands.

Then there are the dangerous scenarios. Infighting between regime loyalists and the opposition could provoke a prolonged conflict akin to the guerrilla battles and terrorism that racked neighboring Colombia for decades. Even if Venezuela avoids outright state collapse as in Libya or Haiti, Marxist guerrillas and other pro-regime elements are likely to wage an insurgency against an opposition government.

Maduro’s regime is unlikely to survive if Trump follows through on his threats of further strikes should the remnant junta not meet his demands. Opposition from the Venezuelan military and guerrilla proxies could prove resilient to US air strikes, with Rodríguez stating she intends to retain power (though it is possible that she maintains a more pro-American posture than her ex-boss, Maduro). The White House has also shown a reluctance to put boots on the ground. Trump, however, has floated the prospect of funding American support — perhaps even an occupation — through the appropriation of Venezuelan oil.

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By Juan David Rojas

To be fair to Venezuelans, and Miami neoconservatives like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, it’s plausible that Maduro’s ouster could prove a modest success. A good indicator of a country’s prospects of returning to democracy is a past history of electing and peacefully transferring power. Unlike Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, or Syria, Venezuela had a relatively strong tradition of continuous (if flawed) democratic government before Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, took power in 1999.

Despite years of repression and a grievous humanitarian crisis, Venezuelan civil society remains vibrant. Numerous polls have suggested that majorities in the diaspora are willing to repatriate to a post-Maduro government. Cheering crowds have erupted throughout the country in scenes reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s downfall in Iraq.

There’s likewise cause to believe that many within the regime voted for the opposition in the 2024 election. For all of his faults, Chavez was an effective populist, in that he always valued his regime’s legitimacy via popular will, expressed at the ballot box. While deeply corrupt, the Leftist icon won all four of his elections fairly and by large margins. This fact brought him to the short-sighted conclusion that his regime could only fall thanks to fraud by his elitist opponents. His government thus instituted a seemingly foolproof electoral process, whereby all participants signed and received electoral tallies with unique QR codes from electronic voting machines.

In 2024, it was these tallies, courageously collected and uploaded by the Venezuelan opposition, that corroborated a likely 40-point victory by Maduro’s opponent, Gonzalez. In the wake of more than 10 years of mass killings, torture, mismanagement, opposition own goals, sanctions. and US-backed coup attempts, Chavez’s regime lost all claims to popular legitimacy under his successor, Maduro. If a future opposition government can retain the loyalty of the armed forces, it’s more likely that a guerrilla insurgency could be contained; elected leaders could then begin to rebuild the institutions that Chavismo destroyed.

Yet there’s enough reason to doubt a happy ending in Venezuela. It may not be possible to ensure a stable opposition government without lasting support from the US military. Unlike Noriega, Maduro’s regime never exercised a true monopoly of force. Rather, it achieved relative peace in recent years by cutting deals with various armed groups on a case-by-case basis. Thousands of guerrillas from the Colombian National Liberation Army, known as the ELN, and FARC dissidents control vast swaths of the country, particularly along the Colombian-Venezuelan border. Both groups have pledged to defend the regime’s “Bolivarian Revolution” and have decades of experience combating security forces, sabotaging vital infrastructure, and conducting acts of terror.

The best model for a guerrilla insurgency in Venezuela comes from the height of Colombia’s Armed Conflict at the end of the 20th century. During the 1980s, ’90s and early aughts, guerrillas and drug cartels conducted hundreds of car bombings, massacred civilians, and even captured the Palace of Justice in the heart of Bogotá. Colombia, however, avoided the kind of economic collapse and inflationary chaos seen recently in Venezuela and has a highly sophisticated military, hardened by more than 60 years of experience in counterinsurgency tactics. Venezuela, by contrast, has an undisciplined and profoundly corrupt military, armed with mostly outdated equipment.

It’s possible and even likely, moreover, that elements within the Venezuelan military will refuse to lay down their arms and carve out fiefdoms in conjunction with criminal and insurgent groups. Even in Panama, it took months to completely quash Noriega loyalists after his surrender, despite the presence of some 27,000 American troops.

Venezuela has more than 10 times the area and six times the population as Panama. In practice, the regime built by Chavez, a colonel, was a military dictatorship akin to Noriega’s and other US-backed regimes in the Americas. Thus, the military is the most decisive facet of the country’s future, with or without Maduro. The regime has more than 500 generals, the most of any country in the world and a means for dividing spoils and coup-proofing its leadership. Any successor to Maduro will confront 500 problems in attempting to extricate the military from its criminal rackets.

The regime’s relative security in recent years via mass repression and symbiosis with armed groups also saw the country’s homicide rate fall to 26 per 100,000 last year, down from 90 per 100,000 in 2016. A power vacuum could portend an explosion in violence amid a truly failed state carved up by various factions. Unlike Panama in 1990, Venezuela has been teetering on the verge of failed-state status since the price of its bulk commodity, oil, first collapsed in 2014. Its economy is roughly four times smaller than what it was during the aughts and is the third most corrupt on the planet after Somalia and South Sudan.

Against this backdrop, nation building will be a tall order.

Whatever is in the cards for Venezuela’s future, the Trump administration should remember its campaign promises and avoid dragging Washington into another forever war, this time in America’s own backyard. Even if chaos doesn’t trigger a mass exodus of refugees, a prolonged military presence will necessarily boost legal immigration, thanks to chain migration through military personnel marrying locals. For all its talk of restoring an American arcadia by way of 100 million deportations, the administration itself has halted deportation flights to Venezuela by repeatedly closing the country’s airspace.

Maduro’s ouster also has significant geopolitical implications. Hours before his capture, the dictator met with a special envoy from Chinese President Xi Jinping. Beyond symbolic statements of solidarity, the Chinese Communist Party almost certainly relayed a message that Caracas, an unreliable debtor to Beijing, was on its own. The harsh truth for Maduro is that he wasn’t worth saving by his preoccupied Chinese and Russian allies.

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By Ian Birrell

The “anti-imperialist” leader largely dug his own grave by alienating his most vital regional allies. Chavez spent decades promoting Venezuelan soft power in the region through discounted oil sales. But by threatening to invade and annex two-thirds of Guyana and later Trinidad, Maduro turned once-close allies in the Caribbean into states willing to act as the staging grounds for his own ouster; he also sponsored guerrilla violence against his Leftist neighbor, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro, for failing to recognize his “re-election.”

At the same time, Trump’s embrace of naked plunder on charges of “counternarcotics” sends a clear signal to the CCP that an equally preposterous pretext is fair game for invading Taiwan. Considering that the president has pardoned dozens of convicted fraudsters and drug traffickers — including former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was indicted by Trump-appointed stalwart P. Kevin Hastel of trafficking 500 tons of cocaine into the homeland—the White House’s war-on-drugs justification stretches credulity.

The message sent to other Leftist governments in the Americas is that they can be deposed at any time and for any reason. Speaking on Fox News on Saturday, Trump suggested that it was the cartels that really run Mexico, rather than President Claudia Sheinbaum: “I’ve asked her a number of times, ‘Would you like us to take out the cartels?’… Something is gonna have to be done with Mexico.”

Then again, if Venezuela deseconds into a true failed state, or if American troops get mired in a South-American Afghanistan, it’s possible that the administration will learn from its mistakes and avoid turning the rest of Latin America into the Middle East. Alternatively, modest success in a post-Maduro state could embolden the White House to bomb neighboring Colombia, Brazil, Central America, and, of course, Mexico, as some MAGA luminaries have always wanted. Never mind the refugees who would then storm the southern border.

For now, Venezuelans can rejoice that their country’s long night of Bolivarian tyranny might be coming to a close. It is to be hoped that the American people’s reluctance to sink into a Latin-American quagmire will ensure that whatever comes next will be on Venezuelans’ own terms.

Right now, President Donald Trump’s policy towards Venezuela is running such a risk, and Trump, the consummate political stage director, knows it. His gun has been on the wall ever since he began his military buildup in the seas around Venezuela in late August. For the past several weeks, he has played for time by conducting a foreign policy reminiscent in its unpredictability of a fraternity hazing ritual. He has periodically threatened military strikes against targets in Venezuela, walked back those threats, claimed that President Nicolás Maduro’s regime needs to fall, and suggested a meeting with Maduro and brokering a deal. All the while, he has conducted periodic open-sea strikes on Venezuelan and Colombian drug boats.

But now, even from the perspective of an American public generally sympathetic to Maduro’s removal, the drama has gone on too long. Trump knows that in order both to save face internationally and to avoid American voters’ perception that he’s jerking them around, he needs to do something, soon. For Maduro, that makes the next few weeks exceptionally dangerous.

Trump’s first instinct is usually to use military threats to compel a deal — a deal that persuades a rogue state to follow a course better aligned with American interests. (In fact, the only case in which Trump has made public military threats and then followed through came this past June in his bombing of Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility.) But if Trump is still holding out for a deal that convinces Maduro to address his main concerns — to take a hard stand against drug and human trafficking — he will be disappointed. There is simply no peace deal that advances US interests to be had with the Maduro government. 

This is not primarily because the Venezuela of onetime bus driver Maduro, and his predecessor Hugo Chávez, is an untrustworthy partner, untrustworthy though it certainly is. The country expropriated ExxonMobil’s Venezuelan oil fields in 2007. A decade later, it compensated Exxon for a tenth of the fields’ worth, and only when compelled to by an international court. Given these circumstances, it would be reasonable for American leaders never to trust a Venezuelan Chavista regime again. But the main reason that no deal with Maduro can help the US is that he lacks the power to deliver on any of the promises Trump will be looking for.

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By Michael Lind

In today’s Venezuela, significant swaths of the country, including those most involved in the distribution of drugs, are functionally outside government control. In the country’s West, the Colombian National Liberation Army runs cocaine across the Colombian border and distributes it using local airstrips. Much of the country’s South, along the Brazilian border, is held by megabandas — that is, large and armed criminal groups — like El Tren de Aragua, which distribute drugs internationally. Even many territories involved in mining, which is Venezuela’s largest legal industry after oil, are functionally ungoverned. 

None of this means, of course, that government officials are not involved in Venezuela’s illegal commerce. The opposite is true — it’s their lifeblood. But it does mean that the Maduro government is not in a position to put a stop to any of it, even if Trump were to make them a very attractive deal. A government crackdown on drugs would mean pitched military confrontations between the cartels and a Venezuelan army that is undersupplied, underfed, badly commanded, and old. The chances that Maduro would take a chance at being humiliated, whatever he promises Trump, are slim.

There are many in the US government and media who still believe Maduro can effectively address Trump’s concerns over drug trafficking and migration if he chooses to. After all, they say, he has effectively remained in power for almost a decade and a half; he can’t be totally ineffectual. But such optimism displays a confusion between regime stability and regime effectiveness. 

While it is true that stable regimes typically achieve stability through the legitimacy accorded by effective governance, Maduro’s is an exception. His is a regime that is totally ineffective but surprisingly stable. Venezuela’s public safety, order, and social welfare system have broken down almost entirely, to the point that 30% of the country’s population has left during Maduro’s reign– for Colombia and destinations further abroad, including the U.S. Its economy hasn’t been stable enough even to report an annual GDP figure since 2014. And yet, last year Maduro managed quite easily to remain in office despite losing an election, marginalising his opposition while consolidating power.

Why? Because since the mid-2010s, Maduro has been running a criminal enterprise rather than a state government, and he runs that enterprise well. He has achieved stability by tying the fortunes of Venezuela’s military and civil power brokers so tightly to the country’s endemic graft, corruption and drug trade that they know they can only survive as long as Maduro remains in power. Hanging the sword of Damocles over the heads of all one’s rivals can be as powerful a guarantor of regime stability as democratic legitimacy itself. 

In this sense, President Trump is correct to call the Venezuelan government itself a sort of cartel, which the administration did two weeks ago when it designated the Cartel de los Soles (a Venezuelan colloquialism for Maduro’s graft-ridden government) a foreign terrorist organisation (FTO). Maduro’s government is not a cartel in the same sense that El Tren de Aragua is, but it is one insofar as its existence depends upon illegal commerce. 

It might be tempting for Trump to meet with Maduro, receive a grant of oil or mining concessions, and declare victory. But such concessions, as we know from ExxonMobil’s experience, would not be worth the paper they are printed on. Neither would a promise to crack down on the drug trade. The only near-term Trump-Maduro deal that could serve American interests would not be peaceful. It would not involve sanctions relief or a decrease in military pressure. It would be a deal in which the US military has free rein to attack drug distributors in Venezuela, and in exchange for Maduro’s non-interference, we leave him alone. But if that’s going to be the deal, why make a deal at all?

If Maduro had a slim chance of convincing Trump otherwise, he might have bungled it on Sunday. It was then that the Venezuelan National Assembly (controlled by Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela) announced that it would be conducting its own investigation into the Trump administration’s alleged second strike to kill survivors on a drug boat carrying Venezuelan nationals. The war crime allegations, first reported in the Washington Post, have ignited a media firestorm and spurred a US congressional investigation. Trump and his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, have claimed to have no advance knowledge of the strike and have dismissed the story as a distraction. Further reporting by the New York Times has cast doubt on whether the second strike was intended to kill survivors (which would have been a war crime), as opposed to fully destroying the boat and drugs on board (perfectly legal under the laws of war). 

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Venezuela has reached its nadir

By John Masko

It is tempting for foreign adversaries, when the transparency of American democracy brings to light some scandal favourable to their case, to press their advantage by piling on. Those weaker adversaries who know how to negotiate with President Trump, however, do not do this. They know that there is no surer way to provoke the president’s ire than to make him look bad on the world stage. Instead, they garner his sympathy with public shows of flattery, modesty, and deference, even while holding to their own bottom line. No one understands this better than Vladimir Putin, whose handling of the American president is usually virtuosic.

Until recently, Maduro seemed to be following Putin’s playbook. He made no attempt to fight the legitimacy of the strikes, and did not even acknowledge that any of the boat’s crews were Venezuelan until last week. But with this most recent strike, the temptation for him to piggyback on the US. Congress’s own investigation seems to have been irresistible. Venezuela’s government has now not only admitted that there were Venezuelans aboard the boat, but launched its own investigation into the US’s purported criminal activity. The presumptuousness of this gesture is likely to infuriate Trump and drive him further away from the negotiating table. 

With no desirable deal on the horizon, Trump faces a strategic quandary. If his opening gambit was to persuade Maduro to leave office peacefully, through an overwhelming show of American force, that effort has clearly failed. With the magnitude of the US military buildup and the FTO designation for the Venezuelan government (an unprecedented move that opens possible legal justifications for regime change), it is hard to imagine any means by which Trump could further turn up the heat without ordering an actual attack. He ran up against the limits of his foreign-policy-by-threat this past weekend, when he attempted to declare, via his social media app Truth Social, that the airspace over Venezuela was closed — an announcement that the Maduro government denounced and then ignored.

Now that Maduro has called his bluff, what is Trump’s next step? Militarily, he has a few options. He could initiate a land strike against cartels operating in Venezuela’s South or West. This would be a logical extension of the drug boat strikes. Such a campaign might compel Maduro into making a deal that provides for continued American anti-drug policing in Venezuela. Alternatively, it could draw Maduro’s army into direct conflict with American troops, giving Trump a pretext for forcible regime change. Trump could also skip the formality of attacking cartels and instead attack Maduro directly with airstrikes or a ground assault, working with opposition leaders to install a post-Maduro government. Either of these options carry some risk of an Iraq-style “forever war”, should Venezuela’s opposition government prove unable to consolidate power.

The other option is a covertly-led coup. This option would likely offer a higher likelihood of post-regime-change stability than a direct American attack, and would demand less future involvement from the US. But given Maduro’s tight control over his inner circle, Trump may have to wait a long time for such a plot to come together. One can’t help but wonder whether, if such a coup had been immediately possible, it would have happened already. Either way, it is Trump’s move. 

Over the last few months, Trump has orchestrated a crescendo worthy of Beethoven’s most powerful symphonic finales. But big crescendos must lead somewhere; they cannot simply peter out. To make narrative sense, Chekhov’s gun must be fired. If Trump acts against Venezuela, either with an attack on Maduro’s regime or on the cartels he protects, he introduces uncertainties. Uncertainty as to what will follow — an orderly restoration under the leadership of dissidents like Nobel Laureate María Corina Machado, civil war, or something in between; and uncertainty over what American resources will be required, and for how long. 

But politically, the consequences of inaction at this late date would be worse. Over recent months, Trump has declared a great reversion in American strategy — from the Wilsonian aspiration of making the world safe for democracy to the Rooseveltian one of making the Western Hemisphere safe for the United States. He chose Venezuela as that strategy’s first proving ground. And if all it takes to stop that strategy is the obstinacy of a single South American crime-boss caudillo, Trump will have shown his administration to be worse than impotent. It will take years, and a new administration, for any foreign adversary to take such American pressure seriously again.

Much of the criticism has centered on the role of Secretary of Defense — ahem, War — Pete Hegseth’s decision to “double tap” the alleged traffickers: hitting survivors a second time to ensure death — after they’ve already been incapacitated. Such conduct is indeed ethically troubling, however, the current controversy elides the larger issues.

I should know. After a stint in the army, I served as a targeting analyst attached to the Joint Special Operations Command from 2011 to 2013, helping to identify Taliban targets for elimination or capture. For all the flaws of what used to be called the Global War on Terror, my comrades and I acted according to tight restrictions, guided by the laws of war. Furthermore we conducted our operations against armed combatants and under the authority of an Authorization for Use of Military Force voted on by Congress.

The current controversy misses the bigger flaw in the administration’s hemispheric operations: contrary to Vance’s arguments, the extralegal operations against trafficking don’t repudiate “permanent Washington” — but offer it succor. The military-industrial complex and the hawkish security establishment want nothing more than to see the nation embroiled in yet another long and constitutionally dubious conflict with unclear goals and the potential to topple yet another government willy-nilly.

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By Juan David Rojas

In the two decades after 9/11, the Bush and Obama administrations launched several wars of this kind, wasting thousands of American lives and trillions of taxpayer dollars — for what, exactly? In 2016, Trump clinched the GOP presidential nomination by condemning this enormous waste. Now, by embracing a state of never-ending war and state of emergency, a condition declared by an omnipotent executive branch, the second Trump administration has embraced essential elements of the deep state, the very machine the Trumpians were twice elected to dismantle.

Once upon a time, American conservatives were deeply committed to resisting the expansion of presidential war powers. Indeed, “Mr. Republican” himself, Sen. Robert A. Taft, commenting on the state of American pseudo-belligerency in the North Atlantic in 1941, argued that “if the President can declare or create an undeclared naval war beyond [Congress’s] power to act upon, the Constitution might just as well be abolished”.

Conservative Republicans similarly balked at President Truman’s unilateral use of military force in Korea and other trappings of the early Cold War state, arguing that the condition of permanent emergency empowered their liberal political enemies, “the war party” at the expense of constitutional norms and limited government.

They lost that political fight, and a new paradigm of an empowered presidency, tasked with securing an ever-expanding set of “national-security” interests, was born. Over the course of the Cold War and afterward, presidents from both parties upheld this new model, one that sanctioned a massive, permanent military bureaucracy. Americans became inured to a chief executive who could order US troops into combat with little to no congressional input, seeing the empowered presidency as an essential component of a modern state. The imperial presidency, as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called it, became the core political supposition of postwar America, one that survived the interregnum of Watergate and the Fall of the Berlin Wall.    

Throughout the Global War on Terror, successive presidents from both parties leaned on this legacy to justify military action in Yemen, Somalia, and Syria — wars conducted without explicit congressional authorization or clear, achievable political ends. Indeed, the open-endedness of these “forever wars” made possible by unbounded executive authority provided an essential plank for the MAGA platform, one that the Trump administration is now ripping up. The White House is instead doubling down on the original endless war, on the assumption that attempting the impossible in one’s neighborhood — winning the war on drugs — is somehow more prudent than attempting “the impossible all over the world”.

Southern Spear, as with the War on Terror and the Cold War before it, conserves another component of permanent Washington: namely, a permanent emergency based on emotionalism and obfuscation. Under the imperial presidency, America’s wars have been sold via slippery language and amorphous geographical and conceptual boundaries. Washington inched its way into both world wars based, in part, on open-ended conceptions of neutrality and shifting boundaries of the Western Hemisphere. In both Korea and Vietnam, such quagmires were deepened through incremental escalation, crises that silenced debate and left tens of thousands of American dead.

More recently, the Global War on Terror, a quixotic war against a tactic — terrorism — yielded a 20-year morass without an achievable political objective, all the while furthering the growth of the security state at home. Throughout the War on Terror, the security state sold adventurism abroad by personalizing and inflating the threat of terrorism at home, making individual Americans unduly afraid that they could be the victims of terror. In all of these wars, the real winners were the Beltway bureaucrats — Vance’s permanent Washington — who administered them, often in careers that spanned eras, thereby preventing genuine national-security reform.  

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By Heather Penatzer

In Latin America, the Trump administration is conserving the core interests of permanent Washington. The White House has not only preserved the imperial presidency, but expanded its powers. While Trump’s recent predecessors pushed the boundaries of existing Authorizations for the Use of Military Force, the Trump administration, through a novel interpretation of the terrorism designation, has given itself the authority to commit acts of war. The administration’s obscurantism about the strikes and its guiding strategy for them are another inherited facet of permanent Washington’s predilection for secrecy in the service of unachievable goals.

The Trump administration is employing the same narrative games used by previous administrations. The primary rhetorical vehicle, the fluctuating label of “narcoterrorism”, once applied to acts of terror in service of the drug trade, has been applied to the trade itself. Similarly, the administration and its supporters have spuriously compared overdose deaths — tragic as they are — to American combat casualties. Associating an overdose of American at home to the death of an American draftee in the rice paddies of Vietnam is an absurd conflation that strips the drug epidemic of its context. This narrative slippage is but the latest example of Washington’s shameless shifting of symbols to prep the public for another unwinnable war like the ones that defined much of my career as a soldier and intelligence professional.

Someday in the near future, the Trump era will end. Betraying its campaign pledges, the Trump administration has not served as a disruptive force for permanent Washington, the deep state, or whatever euphemism one favors for the suite of institutions and assumptions that guide American geopolitics in the postwar era. By remilitarizing the War on Drugs — to say nothing of a potential regime change in Venezuela — the White House is breathing new life into the political forces that it claimed to oppose.

Southern Spear is not a break with permanent Washington — it is its logical conclusion.

Early on, there was some hope that the White House would forgo the first term’s amateur coup attempts and moralistic posturing against Maduro. Among his first acts in 2025, President Trump dispatched special envoy Richard “Ric” Grenell to broker an America First understanding with the Caracas regime.

Under the deal, Chevron could continue to export Venezuelan crude Stateside through the renewal of a Biden-era oil license. In exchange, Caracas agreed to accept deportation flights of its citizens — a vital priority given the subsequent suspension of Temporary Protected Status for some 350,000 Venezuelans in the US homeland. The administration thus made good on two campaign pledges: boosting fossil fuels and deporting illegal migrants. 

Sadly, this understanding underwent a series of erratic twists in the ensuing months, a turn of events caused mostly by Miami’s community of Right-wing Latin-American exiles.

Fly to Miami from the American heartland, and you’ll find what can appear like a Right-wing foreign country, where Spanish prevails over English; and where denizens of Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and, especially, Cuban extraction pray at the altar of neoconservative ideology. This, even as they have recreated the clientelist politics of their homelands within the city council. 

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Drug trafficking, money laundering, as well as state- and nonstate-sponsored regime-change operations across the hemisphere form part of the city’s past and present mythology. Influencers like Alexander Otaola grandstand in the form of three-hour, Castro-esque rants on YouTube, offering any and all justification for toppling regimes from Havana to Tehran.

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s initial pragmatism on Venezuela didn’t play well in Miami. Similarly, many were also blindsided by the administration’s DOGE-era austerity drive. In tandem with the virtual dismantling of USAID, the White House slashed more than $100 million in grants for the National Endowment of Democracy and related South Florida NGOs set up to combat the Cuban, Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan regimes. In March, two of the city’s hawk honchos — Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat, the spokesperson for the NED-funded Cuban Democratic Directorate, and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart — assured the Spanish-language network Telemundo that the administration would restore funding for the city’s neoconservative jobs programs.

Sure enough, Miami elites deployed their man on the inside, Marco Rubio, as well as the Miami-Dade trio of lawmakers Diaz-Balart, Carlos Gimenez, and Maria Elvira Salazar. The secretary of state (and later acting national-security adviser) quickly got to work restoring the various regime-change programs and helping appoint a list of allies to key government offices, including Miami native Mauricio Claver-Carone as special envoy to Latin America, former Miami-Dade Commissioner Kevin Cabrera as ambassador to Panama, Florida neoconservative Mike Waltz as national-security adviser and later UN ambassador, and longtime hemispheric hawk Christopher Landau as deputy secretary of state.  

The trio of representatives threatened to sink Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill in Congress unless the administration rescinded Chevron’s oil license. The White House caved, with severe consequences for the welfare of the oppressed Venezuelans that Miami neocons claim to represent. 

Unable to deport them to their home country after the deal was nixed, the administration labeled 238 Venezuelan nationals as “narcoterrorist” combatants, deporting them to El Salvador’s gruesome Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). Yet 87 percent of the deportees lacked criminal records, which reportedly infuriated Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele, who had explicitly insisted that only hardened criminals be sent for imprisonment in the CECOT. 

All the more ironic was the revelation that many of the same deportees qualified as Venezuelan dissidents, having suffered persecution from the regime after participating in anti-Maduro demonstrations during the 2010s. Beyond the Salvadoran debacle, the administration’s draconian treatment of legal and illegal immigrants — and in some cases, US citizens — has stirred animosities in South Florida.

Historically, Florida Republicans have been more than willing to “import voters” via an open border with Cuba through the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. Activists like Gutierrez-Boronat have argued that any and all Cubans are eligible for asylum on account of the island’s repressive conditions as a Communist country. Similarly, Rubio was an ardent defender of the Biden administration’s Temporary Protected Status program for Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans up until he joined the Trump administration.

Like Rubio, local influencers and elected officials have since attempted to spin mass deportation to a conflicted South Florida constituency; in my hometown of Coral Springs, Fla., agents in military gear surrounded a home with rifles to arrest an unarmed handyman with no criminal record. Accordingly, Rep. Salazar cosponsored the bipartisan Dignity Act, pairing national and mandatory E-Verify with a path for certain illegals to obtain legal status. For this crime, MAGA luminaries like Ryan Girdusky called for Salazar to be primaried.

But amid the back and forth, Rubio again got busy cultivating his influence operation. Miami’s dutiful son is today simultaneously serving as secretary of state, national-security adviser, and US archivist. Seeking to placate Bukele and to outflank Grenell, Rubio brokered a three-way prisoner swap repatriating CECOT’s Venezuelan nationals in exchange for the release of 10 US citizens under Venezuelan custody. Chevron’s oil license was once more renewed, which subsequently led to the resumption of deportation flights to Venezuela in July.

But apparently, to Rubio’s mind, this was a temporary reprieve. The secretary soon focused his efforts on persuading MAGA’s militarist and Jacksonian factions, which have long yearned for cartel wars in Mexico, to redirect their fire and fury toward Venezuela. In addition to Rubio and his allies, it’s worth noting that Trump is surrounded by Florida natives well versed in the narrative of Venezuelan “narcoterrorism,” including Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich.

The secretary has likely persuaded the president as well as Stephen Miller that removing Maduro would not only halt drug flows, but also enable further deportations by installing the subservient Venezuelan opposition. And while Maduro has allegedly offered to hand over all of Venezuela’s resource wealth to Washington, the hawks no doubt argue that the opposition, once in power, would hand over the country’s oil anyway; in October, Trump ordered Grenell to halt further outreach to Caracas. 

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Finally, the White House’s about-face on Venezuela also serves a clear electoral logic. In 2024, Trump won a historic 45% of Latinos, including 70% and 50% of Cuban- and Venezuelan-Americans, respectively. A year later, the president’s approval rating with the same group has fallen to just 27%, including an 18-point drop among Latino Republicans. Electorally, regime change in Venezuela provides a strong incentive for Latino neocons to overlook abuses like deporting a Cuban national without charge or process to a maximum security prison in Eswatini. When I asked my Venezuelan neighbor on the subject, he said he resented Venezuelans being treated like animals but would look the other way if Washington deposed Maduro.

Yet there are significant flaws in the plan. Venezuela has been on the cusp of failed-state status for more than a decade and is the third most corrupt country on the planet. Regime change via foreign military intervention could trigger complete state collapse, inviting warlords and armed groups to carve up the country into criminal fiefdoms. Leftist guerrillas like the ELN and FARC are deeply entrenched within Venezuelan society and have pledged to defend the regime’s “Bolivarian Revolution.” A violent insurgency of the kind waged by both groups during the Nineties in neighboring Colombia against a US-installed government would likely lead to calls for further interventions from Washington; quagmires in Latin America are no more pleasant than those in Mesopotamia.

Such a scenario could trigger more emigration to neighboring countries and eventually the United States, not to mention jeopardize oil production and ironically strengthen the drug trade. Trump has claimed that for every boat bombed in the Caribbean, 25,000 lives were saved in the homeland. Yet Venezuela acts mainly as a transit country for no more than 13% of Colombian cocaine and zero percent of the far deadlier fentanyl.

Under Trump, fentanyl flows through the southern border have declined by more than 40% thanks to the president’s border policies and historic cooperation with the government of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. So far this year, Sheinbaum has extradited nearly 60 drug lords north of the border, including Chinese fentanyl kingpin Zhi Dong Zhang on Friday; fentanyl precursor chemicals are known to originate in China before being shipped to Mexico. Why divert energy and focus from these efforts to a regime-change war in a country that, though misruled, has little to do with fentanyl?  

As for regime change, in 2019, Marco Rubio posted a bloodied image of former dictator Muammar Gaddafi in response to protests against Maduro. But Gaddafi’s overthrow was in retrospect a disaster, creating state failure and disorder that continues to radiate in North Africa and Southern Europe. Overthrowing Maduro willy-nilly could create similar conditions — only much closer home. Rather than enable a post-Gaddafi Libya in our hemisphere, the Trump administration would do well to sideline Rubio and his allies and cut another deal with Maduro.    

As of this week, the US had positioned 10 F-35 fighter jets in Puerto Rico, along with three MQ-9 reaper drones. More than 4,500 Marines and sailors have taken up residence at US Southern Command in Miami, Florida. Last week, President Trump publicly announced that he was authorizing CIA covert operations in Venezuela, and a group of B-52 bombers flew near Venezuela’s coast. More than five suspected drug ships, some originating in Venezuela, have been interdicted and destroyed by US forces over recent weeks.

To many in the foreign policy establishment, Trump’s fixation on squeezing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has been an enigma. He has justified the buildup on the grounds that Maduro’s regime harbors drug producers and distributors. But when Maduro has tried to satisfy Trump — even accepting planeloads of deported Venezuelan nationals from America — Trump has rebuffed him and redoubled US pressure. Perplexed analysts are asking: what exactly is Trump trying to achieve, if nothing Maduro can offer will please him? Where can this lead except to war or a humiliating walk-back?

This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding between the Trump administration and the foreign policy establishment. Rather than focusing on the near-term risks of war in Venezuela, Trump is asking a higher-order question: What is the point of being a superpower if you can’t stop your neighbors from sneaking deadly drugs and unapproved migrants across your borders?

In Trump’s understanding, security begins at home, and then extends to the near-abroad. When weak or corrupt leaders nearby threaten the stability of the US, they must be either forced to change their behavior, or they must be replaced. This has not been US policy for several decades, but for most of the 20th century, it was. The name of this policy was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. What Trump is signaling in Venezuela is that the Roosevelt Corollary is back.

President Theodore Roosevelt announced the Corollary in 1904 in his Annual Address to Congress. Since the presidency of James Monroe a century earlier, it had been American policy to oppose any new colonization or subjugation of lands in the Western Hemisphere by European powers. Monroe’s policy did not, however, provide a road map for when European countries sent ships into America’s backyard to collect debts or fight wars, as occurred during the British, Italian and German blockade of Venezuela in 1902. Determined to keep European warships out of America’s near-abroad, Roosevelt declared that US policy would be to have a monopoly over policing power in the Western seas. He further declared that it was no longer the sole purpose of the Monroe Doctrine to keep Europe out of our near-abroad; the doctrine would also now be used to protect American interests more generally. He explained: “It is always possible that wrong actions toward this nation or toward citizens of this nation… may result in our having to take action to protect our rights; but such action will not be taken with a view to territorial aggression, and it will be taken at all only with extreme reluctance.”

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During the ensuing decades, the Roosevelt Corollary was periodically called upon to reestablish order in Latin American war zones and to prevent the accession of regimes dedicated to, in Roosevelt’s words, “wronging” the US. The Corollary underlay the brief US occupation of Cuba, from 1906-1909, after the Spanish-American War, two occupations of the chronically unstable Dominican Republic, and support for the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. It also inspired the CIA-supported overthrows of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz following his nationalization of United Fruit Company lands, and of Chilean President Salvador Allende as he led that country’s mining-based economy into ruin. It was also behind America’s futile efforts — through an embargo, assassination attempts, and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion — to topple Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro.

America’s failure to overthrow Castro, coupled with the relative untouchability of many Soviet-allied Latin regimes during the Cold War period, caused the Roosevelt Corollary to fall into disuse. The liberal internationalist order that followed the Cold War further discouraged the use of hard power to overthrow regimes hostile to American interests. But in 2025, the Trump Administration seems determined to bring it back.

Within the Roosevelt Corollary (or, as I’ve been told it’s referred to within the administration, “Neo-Monroe Doctrine”) framework, some of Trump’s harder-to-figure foreign policy actions begin to make more sense. One of these is the appointment of Cuban-American Florida Senator Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, which was perplexing alongside Trump’s more provocative foreign policy nominations of Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard. But when one considers Rubio’s knowledge of Latin America and his hawkish record on Latin American dictators in the context of the Roosevelt Corollary agenda, he fits perfectly.

Then there are Trump’s recent actions toward Argentina and Colombia, both of which would have seemed peculiarly drastic in past administrations, but represent a return to a Rooseveltian approach to doing business. For Argentine President Javier Milei, a libertarian friend of the US who faces a fiscal crunch at home, Trump recently structured a $40 billion loan package and floated a huge purchase of Argentine beef, much to the chagrin of American cattle ranchers. Colombian socialist President Gustavo Petro, on the other hand, faced a cutoff of all American aid (Colombia has received $14 billion in aid since 2000) due to his failure to address Colombian drug trafficking. In a Rooseveltian world, the President wields plenty of carrots and a big stick.

In order to understand how Trump’s Roosevelt Corollary framework applies to Venezuela, we must first consider the state of the country today. Maduro’s Venezuela is a shambles by every possible metric: aside from its ruler’s personal security. Owing to a combination of mismanagement and corruption, Venezuela, once the wealthiest nation in Latin America, is now an economic basket case. Its economy is projected to contract by 3% this year, and inflation is at 682%. Venezuelan oil exports — the foundation of its economy — have declined by two thirds since 2012. As living standards and safety across the country have plummeted, nearly 30% of Venezuelans have left over the last 10 years, mostly for neighboring Colombia, but many for the US (both legally and illegally).

Even with a hostile third of the country now gone, Maduro still received fewer votes for president than opposition candidate Edmundo González in last year’s election. While international organizations urged him to accept defeat, he declared victory and began a third term in office. Opposition leader María Corina Machado, whose exit polling efforts demonstrated that Maduro’s reelection was rigged, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to fight the regime.

Yet while Maduro may be the world’s least legitimate leader, his position within Venezuela is still secure. As centuries of Latin American history have shown, military loyalty is the single most important requisite for regime security in the region. And while Maduro may have little else, he has that. As the Wall Street Journal has shown, Maduro has successfully “surrounded himself with a fortress of lieutenants whose fortunes and future are tied to his”. He has done this by imprisoning or exiling the disloyal, while encouraging the loyal to accept patronage jobs in state-run companies or payoffs from drug-traffickers to allow their shipments to pass. The result is a military that is just as fearful for the personal ramifications of regime failure as Maduro is himself. And in case Maduro’s reign of blackmail were to fail, there are Cuban counterintelligence officials and other paid spies installed in the ranks to detect any hint of insurrection. According to Edward Rodríguez, a defected former Venezuelan army colonel, snitching is richly rewarded with “jobs, money, cars and even homes” in a country where much of the population cannot consistently afford food.

With the government preoccupied by personal security and self-enrichment, it will surprise few that much of the official territory of Venezuela (precisely how much is unknown) is no longer under government control. Much of western Venezuela is controlled by Colombian drug-running and human-trafficking organizations like the National Liberation Army. And much of southern Venezuela is given over to feuding megabandas or organized crime rings — most infamously the gang Tren de Aragua, recently designated a foreign terrorist organization by the US. The megabandas have outposts in Venezuela’s major cities, and all around the world, including in the US. One reason for Venezuela’s declining exports is that large parts of its major extractive industries — particularly mining — have been taken over by criminal enterprises whose activities occur off the books. These organizations control territory in the Orinoco Mining Arc in Venezuela’s southeast, where many of their mines are located.

Since Trump’s pressure campaign, Maduro has pumped out propaganda to recruit a citizen militia that can bolster the country’s depleted military. According to the Wall Street Journal, “on state television, radio and social media, announcers are telling Venezuelans that the U.S. is a rapacious Nazi-like state that wants to dig its claws into the country’s oil wealth but that the Venezuelan military, the National Bolivarian Armed Forces, are positioning to repel any invasion”. Maduro’s army currently numbers about 125,000 — a combination of military regulars and new recruits, so many of whom are above typical military age that they have been dubbed a “Dad’s Army” in the British press. According to recent reporting, the army is underfed, under-resourced, and has suffered from a significant brain-drain due to Maduro’s loyalty tests. Maduro reportedly also plans, in the event of invasion, on having the support of Colombia’s National Liberation Army — the least it can do for Caracas’ salutary neglect of its drug and human smuggling (whether before or after he delivers to Trump his proof that there’s no drug trafficking in Venezuela, one can only guess).

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For the US, this all adds up to a puzzle: the Maduro regime’s continued existence directly hurts American interests, but the regime has hollowed out Venezuelan society and institutions to such a degree that regime change will probably result in further chaos, and very possibly a civil war — outcomes that also hurt American interests.

Trump has likely still concluded that regime change would help the US, but that to be effective, the muscle behind it will need to come from inside Venezuela itself. His military buildup is therefore an effort to pressure fence-sitters inside Venezuela’s military and underground political opposition (a group that still includes Machado herself) to provide that muscle. Perhaps if military brass begins to see that the Maduro regime’s days are numbered, their calculus on how best to preserve their own lives and careers will shift. There is also an outside chance that a skirmish with US forces, and a glimpse of the untenability of his position, might convince Maduro to resign or flee.

For the time being, direct covert action against Maduro’s person seems to be off the table. Ironically, we know this because of Trump’s highly irregular decision to broadcast his authorization of CIA covert action to the world — meaning it would no longer be, well, covert. Trump’s threat of covert action, rather, functions as a nuclear bomb of psychological warfare, ensuring that every night for the foreseeable future, Maduro dreams of exploding cigars. Far more likely is covert action that assists in forming and resourcing opposition parties or militias, as the US has done in past Latin American revolutions. Conventional military strikes on Venezuela are possible, but would need to be provoked. Conventional forces could also be deployed in ungoverned spaces against drug-traffickers, further underlining the impotence of the Maduro regime.

Where the Trump-Maduro standoff goes from here is hard to know. But the reasoning behind the buildup is abundantly clear, and it goes far beyond Venezuela’s drug distribution or human trafficking. It is a signal to the world, and to Latin America in particular, that American policy toward the Americas has changed. More precisely, it’s changed back from a policy of salutary neglect to an active posture in which American interests are stridently defended. As in the days of the Roosevelt Corollary, America will help its friends and hamper its foes. If a Latin American regime harms American interests, and regime change will improve the situation, America will not hesitate to effect its overthrow.

Venezuela resonates particularly with the original purpose of the Monroe Doctrine, which was to preclude European incursion into American waters. Venezuela is a long-term strategic partner of China, which relies heavily on Venezuelan oil and offers economic and political support to Venezuela internationally. Even as Venezuela has descended into ruin over the last few years, it has continued to serve as a beachhead for Chinese influence in America’s backyard. Just as President Monroe’s original doctrine intended to keep hostile foreign interference far away from American waters, President Trump’s updated Monroe Doctrine can do the same for America’s 21st-century threats.

Trump is likely gambling on the fact that Maduro’s fall would be universally popular. The rest of the world has watched in horror over the last several decades as Maduro and predecessor Hugo Chávez plunged their country into poverty and chaos. This means that if US pressure results in Maduro’s overthrow, Trump’s new Roosevelt Corollary will start out in the win column in the court of international public opinion. Whether the US stays in that column as it addresses challenges in Colombia, Peru and Argentina, only time will tell.

Despite being the most popular politician in Venezuela, María Corina Machado has been banned from standing in this weekend’s election. Forbidden from flying, she must rely on cars and motorcycles — even canoes, horses and tractors when the roads are deliberately blocked — to criss-cross the country for campaigning. She is kept off most of the media. Her rallies have been attacked. Her aides and supporters have been beaten, detained or forced to flee into friendly embassies.

Machado endures all of this in the hope of forcing out a thuggish regime that preaches socialism while pillaging the state, sparking economic meltdown, mass hunger and the world’s worst displacement crisis. “Last week, we went to the state of Apure and we stopped to have breakfast,” Machado said when I heard her speak last month. “A couple of hours later the regime sent officials to close this tiny restaurant on the route. If we stay in hotels when we travel around the country, they are closed for several months. Many of the people who give us sound, move us around on buses are searched at their homes and their trucks or equipment are detained, for months sometimes.”

Little wonder this 56-year-old woman, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, has been nicknamed the Iron Lady. As she admits, it will be tough to defeat one of the world’s most repulsive regimes — and there have been previous false dawns. If the elections were fair, her rival President Nicolás Maduro would be ousted along with his gangster pals in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela after overseeing the impoverishment of an oil-rich nation and driving out 7.7 million citizens — one-fifth of the population. The polls suggest the opposition has more more than twice the support of the ruling party. But they are taking on a government with a record of electoral fraud and frustrating democracy.

So Machado plans to mobilise hundreds of thousands of supporters to monitor all the polling stations during Sunday’s vote, which is being held after a deal was brokered last year in Barbados for fair elections in return for lifting United States sanctions and allowing in some outside observers. “We are not naive knowing what the regime will do,” she told fellow dissidents attending the Oslo Freedom Forum. “We’ve been facing persecution, violation of human rights. But the regime is weaker and weaker every day. They have totally lost their social base and at the same time the networks they use for terror in the population are breaking down.”

Last October, the charismatic Machado — a conservative former parliamentarian who once called for outside intervention to save her country — won a massive majority in the opposition’s primary contest. But after one survey found she was backed by more than two-thirds of voters with Maduro languishing on 8%, officials disqualified her from running for public office for 15 years on grounds of supporting sanctions. But she remains the driving force behind Venezuela’s united opposition. Machado and her substitute candidate, former ambassador Edmundo González, have been drawing big crowds to rallies despite all the efforts to disrupt their campaign. Such is the disillusionment over the country’s economic collapse and desperate desire to reunite families divided by the mass exodus of citizens, they claim they can win power against the odds.

Analysts compare Machado’s popular appeal, energising the opposition and rousing people out of apathy, with the rise of her arch-enemy Hugo Chávez in the Nineties — although her mission is rooted in despair rather than Marxist ideology. The flamboyant former army colonel, who led a failed coup in 1992, took office seven years later by harnessing public anger over corruption, inequality and nepotism. Then his socialist party machinery strangled democratic institutions such as the civil service, courts and press, while his cronies plundered state coffers. Chávez’s former finance minister estimated they stole $300 billion before their leader’s death in 2013, when he was replaced by Maduro.

Yet Chávez was feted by Western Leftists as a progressive idol supposedly fighting for social justice. Seduced by his social programmes, foolish Western celebrities, journalists and politicians turned a blind eye to his human rights abuses and looting. Never mind that his government fired 18,000 workers who went on strike in protest at the politicisation of the state-run oil firm, replacing them on the public payroll with loyalists. Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called him an “inspiration” for demonstrating “wealth can be shared”, while his sidekick John McDonnell praised Venezuela for showing “the contrast between capitalism in crisis and socialism in action”. Hollywood actor Sean Penn called Chávez a model democrat, even demanding jail for “mainstream media” journalists who dared to brand him a dictator.

Amid all this naive adulation for the Chavismo creed, Venezuela’s economy ended up suffering the biggest collapse outside of wartime in the past half-century. A country with the world’s biggest oil reserves was hit by severe blackouts, hyperinflation and mass hunger as bakeries could not find flour, hospitals ran out of medicines and pro-government militia terrorised urban areas.

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Faced with the inevitable disillusion that followed, last year Maduro tried to stir Venezuelans up into patriotic frenzy with a referendum on grabbing two-thirds of next-door Guyana after the discovery of big offshore oil reserves. But his ploy failed: turnout was thought to be lower than the 2.4 million voting in the opposition primaries, which were run without any state support. This did not stop the Venezuelan president from stunts such as printing new maps of his enlarged nation and granting energy licences for the disputed region, provoking fears the border dispute might be used to postpone the presidential election.

The tragedy of this failed revolution was symbolised by the mass exodus of people, many of whom fled across Latin America and into the United States. In the past two years alone, almost half a million Venezuelans entered the US. Two months ago, I was in Ecuador — home to the fourth largest number of these refugees and under a state of emergency amid spiralling gang violence — where I heard of growing hostility and xenophobia towards Venezuelan exiles. Yet one journalist told me how the region used to look wistfully at oil-rich Caracas, seeing a peaceful and prosperous beacon of stability.

But this is an election that might have immense significance extending far beyond those exiled Venezuelans who dream of going home. For if Maduro’s regime can be forced from power, it would be a serious setback for the axis of autocracy led by Russia and China that is engaged in an epochal global struggle against democracy, seen most acutely on the battlefields of Ukraine. As the journalist and historian Anne Applebaum dissects in her book Autocracy, Inc, Venezuela has evolved under Chávez and Maduro into a central player in an international alliance of repressive regimes. These states assist each other with a sinister and self-serving web of kleptocratic financial systems, surveillance technologies and propaganda machines to defy sanctions, shred internal dissent and challenge democratic freedoms. So Caracas developed commercial, fiscal and political links with Beijing and Moscow while Cuban security experts helped stifle opposition and showed them how to weaponise chronic food shortages created by theft and incompetence. Few were surprised when, in March, Maduro hailed the re-election of his Russian ally Vladimir Putin as “a flawless electoral process”.

Yet Applebaum points out that these Left-wing internationalists built their most important ties with the Islamic theocracy in Iran, highlighting how these new networks of repression are built on shared lust for power, wealth and impunity rather than ideology. “What binds them is oil, anti-Americanism, opposition to their own democracy movements and a shared need to learn the dark arts of sanctions evasion,” she writes. Iran has bought Venezuelan gold, advised on crushing dissent, helped with a drone factory and assisted with repairs on oil refineries. In return, Caracas has laundered cash for Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist group, and has provided passports for its leaders.

It is hard to believe that people power might finally topple the government of Venezuela, that its leader would accept the electoral verdict and not resort to trickery or violence even if defeat is beyond doubt. Yet Machado insists the regime is alarmed by her civic uprising and that even many former Chávez supporters want the misery to end so their children can return from exile. Her declared mission is bold: to turn the most corrosive hub of crime and destabilisation in the Western hemisphere and a key ally of Putin and Iran “into the biggest promoter of human rights in the region”. If that happens, it would certainly be a victory to celebrate far beyond the borders of this devastated South American country.

Looking at a postcard of Downtown Caracas from 1980, one could be forgiven for assuming that it depicted a different city than the blighted wasteland standing in its place today. That Caracas was a city worthy of “George Washington of the South” Simón Bolívar, who a century and a half earlier had liberated his home country of Venezuela, along with much of South America, from imperial Spanish rule. It was a city of tree-lined boulevards, cosmopolitan cafes, arts and learning. Its central arts centre, the Teresa Carreño, regularly played host to Ray Charles and Luciano Pavarotti. To quote Venezuelan author Ana Teresa Torres: “You truly felt, as we used to say around here, in the first world.” And no less an authority than my mother, who grew up in Buenos Aires and visited Caracas around that time, remembers that it “felt like New York”.

It is a popular oversimplification nowadays to claim that mid-century Venezuela’s “first-world” living standards, sophistication and opulence were built on quicksand. That, like most other Opec nations, Venezuela suffered from “the resource curse” — in that its over-reliance on oil temporarily gave Venezuelans developed-country living standards without compelling the country to build the diversified economy it needed to sustain that level of wealth.

To be sure, there is something to this. The oil price shocks of the Eighties certainly did spark the death spiral that culminated in Venezuela’s collapse. Over that decade and the following one, Venezuela’s economy stagnated and unemployment and poverty increased, fuelling the discontent that would lead the country to throw it all away. But to imply that Venezuela was a mere petrostate is to grossly misrepresent reality — because Venezuela in the Eighties was on its way to figuring out something that most of today’s Middle Eastern petrostates still have not: how to use its wealth to build a broad-based, vibrant, productive mass culture.

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During the Eighties and Nineties, Venezuela was the longest continually operating democracy in Latin America. Since 1958, it hosted regular, peaceful elections, and its political parties were generally moderate. Venezuela’s politics lacked the radical swings that characterised the latter half of the 20th century in most of the continent — there were no Bolsonaros or Peróns. Towards the end of the century, the country did experience rising levels of corruption at the bureaucratic level, but the democratic foundations remained.

At this time, Venezuela’s cultural exports were the envy of South America. Consider one extraordinary example: the Venezuelan national music education programme, El Sistema. Founded in 1975 by conductor José Antonio Abreu, El Sistema sought to use music as a vehicle for social uplift and general education. Its rigorous programme catered to students of all social strata, and several of its protégés ended up among the world’s top classical musicians — including Gustavo Dudamel, who was recently named the next music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Yet today, even as the memory of El Sistema continues to inspire imitators around the world, Venezuela’s own youth music programmes are in a shambles. As of 2017, a third of the members of Venezuela’s flagship Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra had fled the country.

By the Eighties and Nineties, Venezuela’s economy was beginning to diversify — particularly into manufacturing — but it remained deeply reliant on oil revenue, and thus beholden to that market’s vicissitudes. Oil shocks begot fiscal crises and, by the Nineties, Venezuela’s economy was regularly experiencing either recession, inflation or monetary instability. Perhaps most distressingly, the country’s ability to leverage its cultural resources and high levels of education for economic growth slowed as well. According to one study carried out in 1999, Venezuelans with a 12-year education had a nearly 20% chance of ending up in poverty, up from 2.5% in 1989.

Venezuela found itself at a similar crossroads to the one Chile had faced a quarter century earlier under military dictator Augusto Pinochet. After Chile’s single-resource copper economy ceased to work, the country’s leaders worked to diversify the economy — attracting foreign manufacturing dollars and investing in agriculture, aquaculture and viniculture. These reforms — carried out, admittedly, in an environment of political repression — set the stage for 50 years of economic growth and stability.

What Venezuela needed in the Nineties — frustrated by over-reliance on oil, economic stagnation and bureaucratic corruption — was exactly what Chile had gained in the Seventies: economic leadership. Even at that late date, Venezuela enjoyed many advantages that Chile had not — a still-functioning democracy, well-developed urban areas and impressive living standards. What Venezuela needed was reform. But what it got was revolution.

When Hugo Chávez took power in 1999 as a third-party president, he offered Venezuela a populist socialist platform the likes of which it had never seen. Feeding on the class resentments that had festered during the decades of fiscal crisis, Chávez promised voters a new Venezuela that would use the country’s prodigious natural resource wealth to help the poor. Rather than doing the hard work of diversifying the economy to free Venezuela from oil price fluctuations, Chávez did the opposite, increasing production and using the proceeds to set up comprehensive social welfare programmes. Helped along by favourable oil prices in 1999 and 2000, the approach worked at first, cutting poverty by 20% in only a couple of years.

But Chávez was about to demonstrate his ignorance of the petroleum industry. Around the same time that oil prices stagnated again in the early 2000s, thus requiring the country to increase production again to feed its social safety net, Chávez responded to an oil worker strike by firing most of the senior geologists at Venezuela’s state oil company. Drained of valuable expertise, Venezuela’s oil production fell. Chávez responded by nationalising foreign-owned oil reserves in Venezuela, including reserves owned by the American oil company ExxonMobil, leading multinational companies to divest from Venezuela in industries ranging from agriculture to auto manufacturing, fearing that the same fate might one day befall them. The economic vibrancy of Chávez’s first two years began to run in reverse.

Chávez’s nationalisations fit hand-in-glove with his general anti-American posture, which he also expressed through a refusal to cooperate with the US on counterterrorism and narcotics initiatives. In 2006, the George W. Bush administration imposed sanctions on Venezuela, blocking the Venezuelan state from using US financial institutions and American entities from buying Venezuelan state oil. In response, Chávez cultivated closer trading relationships with enemies of the US, including Cuba and Russia. US sanctions would later be tightened during the Obama administration in 2014 and then again during the Trump administration in 2017.

As Chávez’s popularity flagged in the late 2000s, he began altering Venezuela’s democratic political system in order to remain in power. He abolished presidential term limits, curtailed the powers of Venezuela’s supreme court and restrained the freedom of the press. Meanwhile, state oil production continued to decline — from 2.5 million barrels a day in 2005 to 500,000 by 2020 — and Chávez nationalised some 100 companies in a diverse array of industries that his government lacked the expertise to run. Predictably, both state revenues and Venezuela’s economy continued to decline.

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In 2013, Chávez died. And under his successor, Nicolás Maduro, the political system Chávez had run with at least a nod to democratic forms became an unapologetic dictatorship. Elections became charades and members of the political opposition began to fear for their lives. Economically, the country became a basket case. As The Economist put it in 2014: “A big oil producer unable to pay its bills during a protracted oil-price boom is a rare beast. Thanks to colossal economic mismanagement, that is exactly what Venezuela, the world’s tenth-largest oil exporter, has become.”

As domestic manufacturing and agriculture collapsed, Venezuela’s trade imbalance yawned so widely that the country ran out of currency. Its import-reliant food supply cratered, and the Maduro government became unable to pay for the provision of basic services or to keep the peace. Crime skyrocketed across the country, and starvation reigned. Typical was the case of a music teacher quoted in The Guardian in 2018, who claimed that he had lost 8kg in a year on the “Maduro Diet”. “A litre of milk,” he said, “costs 280 soberanos, a box of eggs is 1,000, a kilo of cheese 1,000. If I buy this, that’s my whole monthly salary.”

Unsurprisingly, what started as a trickle of emigration from Venezuela in the mid-2010s has turned into a flood, as Venezuelans who could afford to leave have sought asylum in other countries, particularly neighbouring Colombia. According to the UN Refugee Agency, 20% of Venezuela’s population has now left — a total of 7.7 million people.

If Maduro’s rigged third-term victory this week is allowed to stand, Venezuela’s near future looks just as bleak. Most likely, current opposition leader Edmundo González will soon be forced to leave the country out of fear for his safety, as his predecessor Juan Guaidó did last year. In the six years before the next sham election, Venezuela’s population is projected to decline by another 10%. As they see their country trapped in the hands of the Latin incarnation of Libyan despot Muammar Gaddafi, Venezuelan exiles will put down roots in Colombia, Peru, Brazil or the US. And the most valuable natural resource underlying Venezuela’s onetime blossoming — its people — will be irretrievably lost.

For those with Latin American roots, following the region’s politics often feels like having a younger sibling who every few years falls in with the same sort of bad partner or bad crowd. For more than 50 years, we’ve watched a continent bounce like a pinball machine from extreme to extreme. One decade: the caudillo with his sky-high deficit spending, agrarian reform, industrial nationalisations, hyperinflation, mass unemployment, poverty. The next: the military junta with its extreme fiscal austerities, incarceration of political opponents, desaparecidos, autocracy, fear. From Allende to Pinochet and back again in Chile, from Bolsonaro to Lula in Brazil, from Banzer to Morales in Bolivia, from Perón to Galtieri in my family’s native Argentina.

Through it all, constant unrest, constant suffering and a gradual siphoning off of the wealth, talent and international relevance of an entire continent. For centuries, European colonisers appropriated South America’s wealth. Today, the continent gives it away voluntarily — through brain drain, corruption and an omnipresent volatility that makes any smart foreign investor think twice. But there’s always a rock bottom. And the Chávez and Maduro regimes in Venezuela have achieved it. If there can be any silver lining to the devastation wrought upon Venezuela by this duo, it is that they have finally shown Latin America its nadir.

His critics countered that he has not only severed all connections with Left-wing outlets but attacks them with vindictive ferocity, and can now be seen regularly on Carlson’s show, where they get along famously. I interpreted Bump’s description as a deadpan provocation, challenging the idea that Greenwald’s long-running identification with the Left matters more than what he now says and does. A bigger question, not new but intensified by the Ukraine crisis, is whether “Left” and “Right” are remotely adequate descriptions of the current political landscape.

I’m bemused by the idea of “the Left” as a unified, monolithic entity. (For this reason I don’t capitalise “Left” or “Right” except when it is a publication’s house style.) History supplies no evidence to support this notion of homogeneity. The Labour Party, for example, often feels like a marriage of convenience between people who hate each other. No Conservative can needle a Corbynite as much as a Blairite can, and vice versa. When I read some publications, “the Left” encompasses everyone from Joe Biden to a bearded millennial with a hammer-and-sickle in his Twitter handle, but then I turn to Twitter and see Owen Jones denouncing Paul Mason, an actual loud-and-proud Marxist, as a “neo-McCarthyite” and remember that the Left is diverse and fractious.

Responses to the invasion of Ukraine have been educational. Few western commentators are stupid enough to be explicitly pro-Putin but a significant number, including Greenwald and Carlson, are anti-anti-Putin. You can identify them by their obsession with Nato, “legitimate security concerns”, “poking the Russian bear”, the Azov battalion, and hypothetical biological warfare laboratories, all of which are popular Kremlin talking points. Their arguments usually begin with some throat-clearing variation on: “The invasion of Ukraine is abhorrent but…”

Some of them were once associated with the Left but now occupy a more chaotic space: former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, former Labour MP George Galloway, former comedian Russell Brand and former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi. (This is the world of the former.) Some, like Carlson, JD Vance, Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon, are clearly on the Right, if not the far-Right.

Some appear to be nothing more than contrarian narcissists who trade as “free-thinkers”. Others, who can be found in varying proportions in organisations such as the Stop the War Coalition, Democratic Socialists of America and Young Labour, come to anti-anti-Putinism via the far-Left. It will not surprise you to learn that many of the above made regular appearances on the now-banned Russian television channel RT.

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Owen Jones gets into trouble because he insists on describing marginal groups as “the Left” and springing up to defend their honour. When the Labour leadership demanded that 11 MPs withdraw their signatures from a Stop the War statement, Jones decried it as “an excuse to purge the Left” — even though those 11 constituted about 5% of the PLP and one-third of the Socialist Campaign Group. Either the Left is a major political force with popular support for its policies, or it is a fringe of the fringe. Which is it?

The idea of a Left-Right spectrum originated with a seating arrangement. After the French Revolution, members of the new National Assembly who supported the king gathered to the president’s right and revolutionaries to the left. “Left” and “Right” caught on in Britain during the Spanish Civil War, which at the very same time exposed how inadequate those definitions were. Writers such as George Orwell and Franz Borkenau observed with horror that Stalinists in Spain murdered and defamed socialists and anarchists, employing tactics similar to those of the fascists they were fighting. The study of totalitarianism developed from those early efforts to explain the puzzling kinship between mortal enemies on the far-Left and the far-Right.

During the Forties, the likes of Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Andre Gide and Albert Camus became known as the “Non-Communist Left”. To them, the difference between Stalinism and democratic socialism was night and day — Clement Attlee suspended five Labour MPs for pro-Soviet sympathies — but this fundamental divide in the Left often confused conservatives. When the Duchess of Atholl, impressed by the anticommunism of Animal Farm, invited Orwell to address the Right-wing League for European Freedom, he wrote back: “I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence on this country.” In the early Sixties, rejection of Soviet communism was one of the founding principles of the New Left, even if many of its members went on to mimic the error by lionising Mao.

Despite these major fractures, Left and Right were useful labels so long as economics and class interest dominated politics. Party policies on tax and welfare may still cleave that way but voting behaviour does not. People regularly vote against their class interests, prioritising cultural values and identity over economics. If you hadn’t noticed before 2016 that parties of the Left were becoming, relatively speaking, more middle-class and parties of the Right more working-class, then Brexit and Trump made it unignorable. In the UK, while Labour broadly leaned towards Remain and the Tories towards Brexit, there were enough Thatcherite Remainers and socialist Leavers to create unlikely new alliances. (Then again, in the Seventies, the two most prominent Eurosceptic MPs were Tony Benn and Enoch Powell. Europe has that effect.)

Strange bedfellows have been a growing feature of the past decade in what we generally call populist movements even when they’re not popular. When it comes to anti-vaxxers, the gilets jaunes in France, or people who spread conspiracy theories about the White Helmets in Syria, it can be almost impossible to tell whether the person talking is on the far-Left, far-Right or has no coherent ideology at all. The rise of identity politics has fractured the Left, too. There are Marxists who reject it outright and socialists who gravitate towards the socially conservative Blue Labour. The language of politics has not yet caught up.

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The anti-anti-Putin Left are most usefully described as “campists”, whose geopolitical philosophy is summed up by the phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. America is the font of all evil, therefore its opponents must have something going for them.

The British-Syrian writer Leila Al-Shami calls this “the anti-imperialism of idiots”: “This pro-fascist Left seems blind to any form of imperialism that is non-western in origin. It combines identity politics with egoism. Everything that happens is viewed through the prism of what it means for westerners — only white men have the power to make history.” Russia’s unprovoked war of imperialist aggression is as inconvenient to campists as China’s oppression of the Uyghurs. Either they must find a way to blame America after all or they must downplay the issue. Left-wing support for corrupt authoritarians such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega is disappointing enough, but sympathy with Vladimir Putin, Bashir al-Assad and Xi Jinping is symptomatic of a morally broken worldview.

At the risk of sounding like Walter in The Big Lebowski — “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos” — old-fashioned Stalinism had a certain logic. The USSR was for a long time the world’s only socialist country, and many people believed that if socialism failed there, it would fail completely. So they shut their eyes and ears to the show trials, the purges, the gulags, the Holodomor and so on, until the denial became intolerable. Malcolm Muggeridge compared the British human-rights activists who whitewashed Stalin’s Russia to “vegetarians undertaking a pious pilgrimage to a slaughter-house because it displayed a notice recommending nut cutlets”.

Campists don’t even need the advertisement for nut cutlets, because they do not know what they stand for, only what they oppose. This is how you end up making excuses for dictators who bomb hospitals while demonising the people who pull the bodies from the rubble as terrorists and/or CIA assets. This is how people who define themselves by their opposition to the US invasion of Iraq find themselves claiming that Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine. It is obscene.

The French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye popularised the Horseshoe Theory, which argues that the extremes of Left and Right curve towards one another rather than sitting at opposite ends of a straight line. Hotly disputed by people who consider it a “smear” on the Left, it has the drawbacks of simplicity as well as the benefits. It does not mean that the far-Left are no different from fascists, any more than Stalin was a Nazi. I see it as an observation rather than an ironclad prescription. I know people far to my Left whose moral and intellectual integrity is unimpeachable, but I’ve also encountered antisemites, Assadists and Putin apologists who claim to be socialists. Another term for this, again harking back to the Thirties, is “red-brown alliance”.

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Back in 2009, Michelle Goldberg observed that Infowars host Alex Jones occupied “the shadowy territory where the far-Right curves around and meets the far-Left”. The invasion of Ukraine has made the existence of this tendency undeniable. Last week, Iranian state television broadcast a conversation between suspended Labour MP Chris Williamson, sacked university professor David Miller and prominent Stop the War member Lowkey about alleged Zionist influence in Ukraine. However that confederation of ghouls might define itself, it does not represent any Left that I identify with. Yet you can see for yourself how many influential people on the Left rallied to the defence of Williamson and Miller over allegations of antisemitism not so long ago.

In Britain, Left-wing writers such as Paul Mason, George Monbiot and Daniel Randall have long been fierce critics of campism. In recent weeks, Leftists from Ukraine and Syria have denounced it, too, while the Polish group Left Together has withdrawn from Yanis Varoufakis’s DiEM25 and the dubiously named Progressive International for their both-sides framing of the invasion. “You, decades after the Eastern European version of communism collapsed and Russia turned into a turbocapitalist, authoritarian regime, are still claiming that the man in charge of it is some kind of ‘anti-imperialist’ hero, despite him doing pretty much all he can to assure his stated aim of rebuilding the Russian empire and beyond,” wrote Zosia Brom in a furious piece called “Fuck leftist westplaining”. They have had enough of this nonsense, and who can blame them?

We are currently experiencing a moment of rare political unity on the subject of Putin and Ukraine, which makes the spectrum-scrambling dynamics of anti-anti-Putinism brutally clear. The Left-Right axis became popular because it helped to clarify existing political positions but now it obscures reality so frequently that I wonder we are so addicted to an archaic binary. Whether someone describes themselves as Left-wing or Right-wing no longer interests me. The only thing that matters is what they’re actually saying.

But despite the obvious differences between a failed Arab state of 18 million and a dual-island nation of 1.3 million, the two countries have become strange bedfellows. As unlikely as it may seem, Trinidad has become one of the world’s key recruiting grounds for Isis, a status linked to the country’s other big wheeze: drug trafficking.

I was reminded of the connection between the Caribbean, the caliphate and cocaine last week after hearing of the death of 80-year-old Yasin Abu Bakr, an imposing 6ft 6in former TV producer and ex-cop who, as leader of the Jamaat al Muslimeen movement, in 1990 pulled off an attempted coup in Trinidad. For the better part of a week, Abu Bakr was effectively the head of state, making him the only person to ever lead an Islamic coup in the Western Hemisphere.

I met Abu Bakr in Port of Spain, Trinidad’s capital, in 2018 while researching a book on tribalism. Initially, I was drawn to him after more than 100 Trinidadians left home to join Isis and the jihadi cause, lured by a mix of fundamentalist ideology, warped romanticism and, in many cases, money. These young men travelled not just to Syria but also Iraq, often taking with them, and usually against their will, scores of women and children.

Given its small population, Trinidad has provided disproportionate numbers of jihadis to the ISIS cause. The US and Canada, with a combined population of some 350 million, larger Muslim communities and a seemingly more fertile breeding ground for anti-Western sentiment, are believed to have exported just 300 or so men and women to the Levant for jihad.

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Yet in Trinidad, just 6% of the population are Muslim, and, of these, an estimated 90% are of Indian descent. While most are arguably “moderate”, a small minority has no strong attachment to their communities — thanks to a combination of atomised families, absent fathers, rampant drug addiction, gang culture and social marginalisation. Such a perfect storm feeds the worst excesses of identity politics, making young, impressionable and often desperate men vulnerable to the chest-beating Isis propaganda machine.

But even before Isis existed as an idea, let alone as an organised terror group, the foundations of Islamic extremism were being laid in Trinidad. In the late Seventies, the island saw a revival of Islam that came off the back of an American black power movement underscored by the teachings of Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, as well as the Islamic revolution in Iran and the assertion of a more muscular, global Muslim identity. This Islamic reboot differed from the prevailing, passive Trinidadian Muslim identity and capitalised on endemic corruption, a growing gang problem fuelled by a burgeoning cocaine trade and a sense of alienation felt by many youths who were unable to access a piece of the oil and gas pie being divvied up by foreign capitalists and their government cronies.

Without proper education and lacking job opportunities, those who felt left behind began to turn to Islam as a way out, and a means of clearing the streets of the drugs that went hand in glove with the new money. Located seven miles north of Venezuela, which has an ultra-porous 1,378-mile border with the cocaine capital of the world, Colombia, drugs continue to enter Trinidad by speedboat and leave on container ships, planes and private yachts, as well as in condoms carried inside the stomachs of drug mules.

These narcotics often enter Trinidad with decommissioned Venezuelan military weapons, which explains the tendency of gangs in Port of Spain and elsewhere to have more firepower on the streets than most police forces. Perhaps that’s why an unofficial investigation by the government in 2009 found that up to 90% of cops were involved in illegality, ranging from “running and selling drugs, to colluding with gangs by renting out weapons to criminals, to performing extra-legal killings”.

Throughout the Eighties, the Islamist reboot was seen as a counterpoint to a society that was rapidly turning into a Sodom and Gomorrah for urban youth. Muslim militias took the fight to the dealers, drug lords and gangs on the streets of Port of Spain and beyond, becoming a vigilante force to be reckoned with. Indeed, as the new incarnation of Islam became more and more powerful, its more pernicious fringes — who were more concerned with financial gain than philosophical enlightenment — became enforcers, protection racketeers and, in many cases, out-and-out gangsters themselves.

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Already well-developed in the US, Prislam — a brand of prison-based Islam that conferred protection to its adherents and access to criminal networks both inside and outside of jail — soon took hold, causing schism after schism. Initially, these took the form of pseudo-religious “Muslims versus apostates” conflicts aimed at legitimising gang-on-gang assassinations. Then came “Muslims versus non-Muslims” contract killings — until it became expedient for gang members to either align themselves with the Prislamic “Muslim City” faction or their non-Muslim uber-gang rivals, “Rasta City”.

Semantics aside, the names of both organised crime groups soon had little to do with Mecca or Haile Selassie, save for some members who happened to be Muslims or Rastas, as well as drug dealers, hitmen and government stooges. But something had to give. With cocaine and oil came the juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, unbridled corruption and gangster politics, which eventually gave rise to an unprecedented rejection of the government.

Enter Abu Bakr.

Over afternoon tea in the Jamaat al Muslimeen compound in Port of Spain, Abu Bakr, a sardonic, charismatic character formerly known as Lennox Phillip, told me how on July 25, 1990, he mounted the coup with some 113 black Muslim foot soldiers, using intelligence sources to determine when key police and military figures were indisposed or out of town. The plotters duly blew up the capital’s main police station, took the local TV news channel and stormed parliament, taking the prime minister, ANR Robinson, and a number of his fellow legislators hostage at gunpoint for several days. Trinidad being Trinidad, chaos ensued. Riots led to several hundred injuries and some 30 deaths.

Having taken the Trinidadian government to task for its complicity in ramping up the country’s drug problems and spiralling violent crime, Abu Bakr’s audacious move, in fairness, was more a citizen’s arrest of the government than a coup d’état, designed to seize control and take the reins of power. Abu Bakr’s power grab came to an end when he and his followers gave themselves up. After being charged with murder and treason, Abu Bakr was released from prison two years later as part of an amnesty deal.

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“We were a community outreach organisation,” he told me in his modest office, adding he still believed that he could have reversed Trinidad’s crime epidemic if he had succeeded. “A hundred people would convert at Friday prayers. We got money from Libya. We were cleaning up the drugs on the street — we were doing good work. We had outreach centres, feeding centres, shops, businesses, land, medical centres… The Government feared us.”

That fear, Abu Bakr said, had led to the government violently clamping down on his organisation. With no recourse to the law, Jamaat al Muslimeen’s seizure of power was, he claimed, as much about self-preservation as it was about ending corruption.

“It’s a known fact that many people who said they were Muslims manifested themselves as something else,” he suggested. Certainly Jamaat al Muslimeen struck me more as a sort of Islamic scout movement than an insurgency. But for a few that wasn’t enough; the lure of jihad was too great. “The Trinidad-ISIS connection is not nonsense,” Abu Bakr told me. “Many people left Trinidad to fight for ISIS because of the lack of hope.”

Is there any sign of that hope being restored? If there is, it is hard to spot. Three years after our conversation, the drugs continue to flow into Trinidad — and violence continues to erupt. As Abu Bakr told me at the time: “This is the land of steel pan and carnival. This is supposed to be paradise. Yet for many, it is anything but.”

All was well before Donald Trump came along and all shall be well again now he is gone. This is the product Biden has on offer, but it is shoddy goods on two counts: all was not well before Trump took the White House, and all will not be well if, as Biden’s appointments indicate rather clearly, our forty-sixth president insists on pretending our forty-fourth had it all right.

Diversity is de rigueur as Biden shapes his administration. He promises “the most diverse cabinet in history,” and his nominees so far are indeed dense with women and people of colour, just as former Obama Secretary of State Hillary Clinton played the diversity card during her 2016 campaign, naming women, black people, Asian-Americans, Hispanics and others to high office.

But now as then, it is diversity of identity that is supposed to count, not diversity of thought, of which one finds none among Biden’s newly-named people. This is a sales job, just as Barack Obama was a salesman — window dressing for an un-pretty foreign policy regime.

And there shall be no diversity among nations, either, as Joe Biden fashions his post-Trump idea of America’s proper place in the world. On this side of the pond, there are headlines about Team Biden’s abiding intention to use foreign policy to reconnect with the global community. “Biden Picks Team Set on Fortifying World Alliances,” The New York Times announced atop page one last week while Democracy Now!, a Democratic Party-aligned radio programme, puts it this way: “Biden’s National Security Appointments Focus on Multilateralism, International Cooperation.”

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We Americans love these multisyllabic words. And we love making them mean other than what one finds in our Merriam–Webster dictionary.

The lately prevailing theme — multipolarity, alliances, partnerships, shared responsibilities — is also to be traced back to the earliest days of the Obama administration. The most important of Biden’s newly-announced cabinet and advisory appointments — respectively Antony Blinken to State, Jake Sullivan as national security adviser — sound it routinely: We cannot solve the world’s problems alone, they say with solemn conviction.

It is an excellent thought, as it was first time round. But we had better look carefully at who these people are — both Obama administration holdovers — and listen carefully to what they say. The alliances-and-partnerships bit did not turn out well when Obama tried it, and there is nothing to suggest that, four years on, it will work this time round.

The first thing to note about the administration Biden is introducing to the world is never mentioned in the American press, and certainly not among the foreign policy cliques. Biden’s people are to a man and woman American exceptionalists — true believers in the country’s providentially-conferred destiny to light humanity’s way. There is nothing new or remarkable in this: our chosen-people consciousness goes back to Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” sermon, delivered before the celebrated Puritan set out from Southampton for these parts in 1630.

But as long as this credenda goes unquestioned, nobody is going to change the direction of American foreign policy in a way that responds imaginatively to the realities of the 21^st century. Chief among these is parity among nations, notably those of the West and non–West.

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To put this question in a useful context, one of Donald Trump’s supposed original sins, committed during his presidential campaign in 2016, was his full-frontal disavowal of our exceptionalist ideology. “I don’t like the term, I’ll be honest with you,” he told a Texas audience. “I don’t think it’s a very nice term: ‘We’re exceptional, you’re not.’” Three years later, when the fight to defeat Trump’s re-election bid was fully joined, the man now named Biden’s national security adviser published a spirited argument “for rescuing the idea of American exceptionalism” in The Atlantic. Jake Sullivan’s was “a case for a new American exceptionalism… as the basis for American leadership in the twenty-first century”.

All that flows from the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and the national security apparatus over the next four years will reflect this belief. But how does one reconcile all the talk of partnerships and common cause with “global leadership,” another of the Biden people’s running themes? When the next president declares that “America is back,” you have to read into the statement to grasp the true meaning: “It’s a team that reflects the fact that America is back. Ready to lead the world, not retreat from it. Once again, sit at the head of the table.”

America has long required enemies to maintain its spot at the “head of the table”, the Cold War being the case nearest to hand. So far as one can make out, China and Russia, America’s twin Beelzebubs, are to serve as the Biden administration’s primary organising principles. To be noted in this connection: Strategic rivalries with the Chinese and Russians were the primary topic at a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels this week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s last before Blinken replaces him.

Blinken and Sullivan are now preparing to enlist the Europeans, India and numerous East Asian nations as the U.S. conjures a new and dangerous Cold War with China. This is, of course, a straight-out continuation of the ultra-hawkish Pompeo’s cause. But Pompeo hasn’t got very far and neither will Team Biden. None of the Asians, not even the ever-loyal Japanese and certainly not congenitally non-aligned India, wants anything to do with an animated anti–Chinese coalition. Even Taiwan does not want confrontation; it wants protection. None of these countries desire to turn the region into another decades-long flashpoint.

It is now confirmed that Biden will extend the new START accord with Russia, due to expire early next year. This is wise, and one hopes Biden will go further on nuclear-arms reductions. But to the president-elect’s people this is an arms-control question, not a matter of U.S–Russian relations. These will not improve because Biden’s national security team are packed with Russophobes (including Joe himself). Antony Blinken, whose father was a noted advocate of détente, is vigorously of the view that ties with Russia can be repaired only if Moscow accepts unequal relations in which Washington sets the terms. Bill Clinton tried the same thing to no avail. Ditto Barack Obama.

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Will the Europeans re-enlist in this front in the new Cold War? One seriously doubts it. If Trump’s four years made anything clear in trans–Atlantic relations, it is that the continent no longer wishes to be force-marched into another of Washington’s anti–Russian crusades. Emmanuel Macron has been consistently outspoken on this point over the past couple of years. It is true the French president nurses a de Gaulle complex, but he is simply more forthright than others in expressing what is on a lot of European minds.

It was commonly assumed until last week that, along with the Paris climate pact and the WHO, Biden would also bring America back into the many-sided accord governing Iran’s nuclear programs. The assassination last Friday of Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh complicates things, but it was highly questionable whether Biden and Blinken would have made the move even if Iran’s top nuclear researcher hadn’t been murdered (almost certainly by Mossad). Biden, like almost all other American pols, is simply too close to Israel, which has made its objections to the nuclear agreement abundantly, belligerently clear.

So we’ve now got Sullivan saying “yes, we’ll get back in with other signatories — providing Tehran meets ‘these follow-on agreements’” — which are understood to be an awful lot like Pompeo’s preconditions, please note. This is an intended-to-fail position — and an easy way out for Biden. Net outcome: hostile stalemate in the Persian Gulf, continuing alienation from the European signatories to the accord, more trans–Atlantic drift.

If only America’s leaders understood that, with the emergence of new powers such as China and India and a new generation of post–Cold War leaders in Europe, ours is an age that requires us to accept — no, embrace — a diversity of perspectives. But our policy cliques, lost in nostalgia, travelling on presumption, and with no decisions to make for the past 75 years, simply cannot read the hands on the clock.

Biden’s “global leadership” will be the same as all previous versions — a polite term for American hegemony. Sullivan, Blinken and Biden’s other national security nominees may put themselves forward as vigorous proponents of partnerships, but look closely: they expect America’s allies to fall in line behind America’s we-know-best dictates. Apostles of exceptionalism can think no other way.

Buoyed by the rise of Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Sunkara argues that socialism is on the march again because the prevailing economic conditions demand it. “What I am certain about is that we live in a world marked by extreme inequality, by unnecessary pain and suffering, and that a better one can be constructed,” Sunkara writes.

And he is perhaps right to be optimistic. More than four in ten Americans now believe that socialism would be good for the United States, while a 2016 YouGov poll found that British people were more likely to view socialism favourably than capitalism.

The book argues that mainstream social democracy, in trying to tame capitalism, has failed and that more radical measures are required. Citing the example of Sweden, Sunkara argues that the victories won by reformist social democracy have nearly always been pyrrhic and short term; social democracy’s achievements have eventually been swept away by capitalist structural power.

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By Peter Franklin

The Socialist Manifesto is not really a manifesto at all, but rather a critique of the existing order and a potted history of the socialist movement. In this it is like many contemporary Left-wing books. However, unlike those books, this one is well-written, often intelligent as well as accessible to a wider audience that socialists ought to be speaking to.

Yet the book has its weaknesses. To start with, what does it mean to be a socialist in 2019? Even socialists themselves do not know. Instead they prefer vagaries and platitudes. “To be a socialist today is to believe that more, not less, democracy will help solve social ills – and to believe that ordinary people can shape the systems that shape their lives,” Sunkara writes.

This is fine as far as it goes, but what does it actually entail?

Sunkara implies that socialism means centralised economic planning. He proceeds to make a tentative case for planning on the basis that Asda/Walmart use something similar, which apparently shows that it can work.

Sunkara also equates socialism with workers’ democratic control. However there is a contradiction here that Sunkara spends no time fleshing out. Central planning is inimical to the lofty aim of workplace democracy and the prospect, as Sunkara puts it, of “more, not less democracy”. You cannot have a central plan unless organisations and workers adhere to it. Thus you cannot advocate central planning on the one hand and workplace democracy on the other. As soon as workers rebel against the state’s central plan their democratic rights are stripped from them. This is precisely what has happened during tentative experiments in workers’ democracy in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere.

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Moreover, if we are to build a more democratic society, a goal I’m sure many have sympathy with, it is surely important to thoroughly purge the socialist movement of those who are nostalgic for the failed Stalinist experiments of the past. Sunkara lionises Corbyn and Corbynism in his book but makes no mention of the fact that many of Corbyn’s closest allies and advisors are unreconstructed nostalgists for the USSR. He similarly dismisses all criticism of antisemitism in the Corbyn movement as a smear and an attempt to “undermine his [Corbyn’s] leadership”.

Sunkara resents the fact that socialism is associated with gulags and terror by its opponents. What does he expect when so many of its adherents remain apologists for such things? Sunkara himself slips into this type of apologism at times. He ludicrously writes that Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka who presided over the arbitrary killings of tens of thousands in the USSR during the Red Terror, “anguished over every execution order he signed”.

Sunkara similarly gushes over the Cuban revolution and its “achievements”. He writes nothing of the 15,000 political prisoners Fidel Castro held at one point, nor the thousands of summary executions, the labour camps for homosexuals, nor the fact that Cuban doctors, who serve “millions abroad” as Sunkara puts it, are indentured and have their passports taken away from them.

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Another elephant in the room is Venezuela. Less than a decade ago socialists were enthusiastically citing socialism in Venezuela as evidence that “another world is possible”. Today the country has been wiped from their collective memory like an out of favour Bolshevik being scrubbed from an official Soviet photograph. The resulting economic disaster has produced the largest refugee crisis in Latin American history. Yet Sunkara – who professes to care a great deal about humanity – deems the oppressed of that country unworthy of a single mention in a 243-page book about socialism.

Sunkara rightly takes aim in the book at the narcissism of identity politics, which equates victimhood with wisdom. In a neat irony, it was philosopher Bertrand Russell who coined the most fitting term for contemporary identity politics – “the fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed” – and who also wrote one of the earliest and best critiques of the Russian Revolution, which Sunkara misleadingly calls a “genuine popular revolution led by industrial workers”.

Moreover, Sunkara is right to reassert the importance of class: equality is not an ethnically diverse and gender-equal corporate boardroom where executives are paid a hundred times more than those who languish on the shop floor. Rosy corporate uplift about ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ are worthless if workers of all colours, genders and sexualities are afraid to take a toilet break.

But Marxian socialism easily slips into totalitarianism because changing the economic structure of society does not fundamentally change how people behave. Marx was wrong when he wrote in The Communist Manifesto that the “history of all hitherto existing society is a history of class conflict”. The drive for status, power and ego have provoked just as many wars as class interest. Even if one were able to abolish class categories altogether other inequalities would soon arise. When everyone has a house, the struggle begins over who has a house on the coast with a panoramic sea view.

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Moreover, while citizens create vastly unequal lives for themselves in free societies, it is not merely because they possess differing amounts of wealth (though that obviously helps). Some work harder and are more ambitious than others.

Conflict and unfairness come in many guises, which is why the state never does “wither away” – as Marx claimed it would – under communism. Instead it grows ever larger while jettisoning the separation of powers which protect citizens in liberal societies from arbitrary force.

The drive to “democratise every aspect of life” – a phrase beloved by democratic socialists – is also less desirable than it sounds. A mob should not decide the flavour of opinions a person can read in a newspaper. The majority should not decide what people get up to in their private lives behind closed doors. And nor, arguably, should it decide who a person may enter into economic relations with. The free marketeer deludes himself when he says that workers freely sell their labour under no compulsion. However the socialist makes an equally ludicrous claim when he says that all wage labour is “an unacceptable form of exploitation”.

Social democracy understands this, which is why it limits itself to harnessing capitalism for the greater good rather than seeking to remake the world.

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Sunkara approvingly cites Rosa Luxemburg, who likened social democratic reformism to the futility of Sisyphus attempting to roll his boulder up a mountain – only for it to roll back down again. Yet there can be no escape from this existential dilemma, as the philosopher Albert Camus recognised.

Some social democratic victories may prove short-lived. Yet this is not evidence of the futility of the project, but rather is an inherent feature of a free society: you win some battles and you lose some battles, and on the argument goes. The idea of an “end goal of socialism”, as Sunkara phrases it, is a dangerous illusion. It assumes there can be a final escape from conflict and uncertainty into a sort of beehive society where all tensions and ambiguities have been abolished. Yet a society with only a single viewpoint is implicitly totalitarian, even if the sought-after ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is that of a majority oppressing a minority.

The desire on the part of increasing numbers of young people to re-run the socialist experiment has several likely causes. One is, as Sunkara notes, economic insecurity. “Some thrive by depriving others of freedom, billions needlessly suffer amid plenty, and we move ever closer to ecological catastrophe,” he writes.

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Another is lack of historical memory: many of those who today sport Che Guevara T-shirts were not even born when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

Yet the re-emergence of socialism is also probably steeped in religious longing. “Christians knew that Christ would come again in his glory to judge the living and the dead. [Socialists] knew that every moment drew them closer to salvation on earth,” writes Sunkara about the early socialist movement.

Many people, it seems, cannot live without the belief that history – and by extension their own life – has some wider purpose or meaning. Oscar Wilde once complained that socialism took up too many evenings. Yet for many contemporary followers of socialism this appears to be part of the allure. Just as traditional religion provides a sense of solace and belonging for some, socialism gives others a reason to get up in the morning.

I have no problem with such delusions – provided I am left out of them. Yet when I read books such as this one, with their pious exhortations to change the world, I am reminded of the futility of such hopes. You may not be interested in the cause, but it is interested in you. This is why the return of socialism – or communism if we are to give it its proper name – does not fill me with joy as it does for Sunkara and others like him

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality, by Bhaskar Sunkara, is published by Verso

This is perhaps most obvious in the area of foreign policy. To be on the socialist Left in the twenty-first century is to be staunchly opposed to ‘regime change’ of any sort, especially when the regime in question is hostile to the United States. This is defined not merely by hostility toward western military intervention – perhaps understandable considering the recent history of botched American invasions – but opposition to revolution tout court.

This can be seen in the response to Venezuela. The economic incompetence of the Venezuelan government has prompted the largest refugee crisis in the history of Latin America. A brutal regime that imprisons, tortures and occasionally murders its political opponents is assailed by mass protests involving all sections of society.

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The demands of the protesters are modest: free elections and the replacement of the dictator Nicolas Maduro by the elected head of the National Assembly, Juan Guaido. The United States has directed veiled threats at the Maduro government and tightened economic sanctions. But no one seriously expects the US to launch a military invasion of Venezuela any time soon.

Yet the Western socialist Left – bar a few exceptions – has reacted to events in Venezuela by throwing its weight behind the discredited dictatorship. The Labour Party has set itself in opposition to almost all European and Latin American governments by failing to recognise Guaido as the legitimate representative of Venezuela. The Left’s activist media outlets have come down firmly on the side of the dictatorship. Others who in the past acted as mouthpieces for the Chavez/Maduro regimes have, for the most part, fallen into an embarrassed silence.

This indifference toward the aspirations of the Venezuelan people is of a piece with the socialist Left’s hostility toward the Syrian revolution. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has repeatedly equivocated when pressed about the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. Following the poison gas attack in Khan Sheikhoun in 2017, Corbyn refused to be drawn on whether Assad was responsible and remained silent when a UN investigation confirmed what the British, French and US governments had been saying all along – that Damascus was responsible for the attack. Corbyn’s favourite newspaper, The Morning Star, has thrown its full weight behind the dictatorship, describing Assad’s bloody bombardment of Aleppo as a “liberation”.

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The socialist Left adopted a similarly hostile stance toward protests against the Ayatollahs in Iran. As the ‘Green Revolution’ in 2009 saw Iranians pour onto the streets to demand freedom, Labour’s director of communication, Seumas Milne, dismissed the protests in a column for the Guardian as “an attempted coup”, and the protesters as “gilded youth”.

Milne went on to heap praise on the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – who has denied the Holocaust – as a politician who “is seen to stand up for the country’s independence, expose elite corruption on TV and use Iran’s oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority”.

And you can look further back at the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and find, once more, much of the socialist Left firmly on the side of discredited dictatorship.

This Leftist hostility toward ‘regime change’ goes well beyond fear of American military intervention. Indeed, the unlikely spectre of an American invasion is frequently summoned as an excuse for withholding solidarity from oppressed people. Last month Labour MPs including John McDonnell and Diane Abbott co-signed a letter together with Guardian columnist Owen Jones which claimed there was “no justification for backing the US attempt at regime change under way [in Venezuela]”.

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As in Iran and Syria previously, no attempt was made to draw out the amorphous nature of the crowds protesting against a brutal dictatorship. Instead, Venezuelans were stripped of individual agency and dismissed as pawns of American power.

This betrays a conservative disposition on the Left that has become dominant in recent years. To understand it, you must delve into some of the internecine squabbles of the mid-twentieth century, when debates raged on the Left over whether despotic regimes deserved conditional support because their economies were run on the basis of nationalised property.

The faction of the Left that argued in the affirmative won out, solidifying the notion that, as the critical Marxist theorist Sean Matgamna has written, “no crime by totalitarian rulers could destroy their credentials as a residually progressive locum… no crime, that is, except the dismantling of the nationalised economy”.[1. The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism Vol 1, edited by Sean Matgamna]

Thus regimes such as Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Maoist China, Stalinist North Korea – and even despotic governments that resembled fascism more than socialism, such as Ba’athist-regimes in countries like Iraq and Syria – received and continue to receive backing from sections of the Western socialist Left simply because economic life was ordered on a model that was distinct from Western capitalism. Never mind the restriction of trade union activity, the murder, disappearance and torture of dissidents, and the grey-wasteland of state-sponsored cultural life – the rejection of capitalism was seen to trump everything else.

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In truth, the socialist Left – as opposed to the social democratic Left – no longer has a credible economic programme to fall back on. State economic planning has left a sorry record of inefficiency and failure wherever it has been tried. Even where it has produced rapid economic growth, such as in China, it has been combined with a strain of capitalism as virulent and cruel as anything documented during Britain’s Industrial Revolution.

The social democratic Left grasps this and seeks to use the market economy to fashion a society that people actually wish to live in. The hard-Left doubles down, adopting an oppositional posture in which any movement that pertains to oppose American capitalism – however backwards or autocratic – receives support or acquiescence.

Look at any Left-wing news website to see this played out. Economic chaos in Venezuela is blamed on US sanctions and a drop in the oil price – despite sanctions not applying to the Venezuelan oil industry and no similar economic catastrophe occurring in any other oil-reliant nation.

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Poverty in Cuba is blamed entirely on the embargo, while chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian government are attributed to the opposition. Russian annexation of chunks of Eastern Europe are said to be the fault of NATO and the European Union. And mass uprisings that yearn for democracy rather than Marxist utopia, as in Venezuela, are ruthlessly attacked and smeared.

“A conservative is a fellow who stands athwart history yelling stop,” the American author and commentator William Buckley Jr once said. Today this applies just as well to the socialist Left – for wherever you look, the more an individual styles themselves as a revolutionary, the more terrified they are when a genuine democratic revolution comes along.

As the disaster – and disgrace – of the ‘bolivarian revolution’ becomes ever more apparent, one might ask what else can be said about it (apart from a sincere ‘sorry’ from you-know-who).

Well, we could hear from from one of Venezuela’s leading thinkers – the economist Ricardo Hausmann who, fortunately for him, lives and works in America. Writing for Project Syndicate he describes the sheer extent of the damage done to his country:

“The most frequently used indicator to compare recessions is GDP. According to the International Monetary Fund, Venezuela’s GDP in 2017 is 35% below 2013 levels, or 40% in per capita terms…

“Put another way, Venezuela’s economic catastrophe dwarfs any in the history of the US, Western Europe, or the rest of Latin America.”

Apologists for the Maduro regime blame Venezuela’s problem on the fall in the price of the country’s biggest export – oil; but this is no excuse:

“Countries typically cushion such negative price shocks by putting aside some money in good times and borrowing or using those savings in bad times, so that imports need not decline by as much as exports. But Venezuela could not do that, because it had used the oil boom to sextuple the foreign debt. Profligacy in good times left few assets to liquidate in bad times, and markets were unwilling to lend to an over-indebted borrower.”

Contrary to fashionable economic theory, it turns out that borrowed money isn’t free:

“Venezuela is now the world’s most indebted country. No country has a larger public external debt as a share of GDP or of exports, or faces higher debt service as a share of exports.

“But, like Romania under Nicolae Ceauşescu in the 1980s, the government decided to cut imports while remaining current on foreign-debt service, repeatedly surprising the market, which was expecting a restructuring. As a consequence, imports of goods and services per capita fell by 75% in real (inflation-adjusted) terms between 2012 and 2016, with a further decline in 2017.”

Much has been said about the huge cut to the Venezuelan minimum wage, but Hausmann really brings home what this means for ordinary people:

“Measured in the cheapest available calorie, the minimum wage declined from 52,854 calories per day to just 7,005 during the same period, a decline of 86.7% and insufficient to feed a family of five, assuming that all the income is spent to buy the cheapest calorie. With their minimum wage, Venezuelans could buy less than a fifth of the food that traditionally poorer Colombians could buy with theirs.”

In most countries, the human impact of economic mismanagement is measured in per capita income. But in Venezuela they also use bodyweight:

“Income poverty increased from 48% in 2014 to 82% in 2016, according to a survey conducted by Venezuela’s three most prestigious universities. The same study found that 74% of Venezuelans involuntarily lost an average of 8.6 kilos (19 pounds) in weight.”

In the absence of war or natural disaster, it takes a lot for a fertile country not to produce enough food to feed itself. Even when governments are corrupt and landlords are oppressive, people find of way of growing, storing and trading what they need to get by.

However, that is to reckon without socialism.