Pepe Escobar
Still, neo-Caligula won't stop - mimicking his motormouth. The Empire of Chaos under the Donroe Doctrine is about strategic dominance, at all costs, over energy and trade corridors.
Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the 'new, wonderful good society' which shall now be Rome, interpreted to mean 'more money, more ease, more security, more living flatly at the expense of the industrious'.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
The Raging Twenties started with a murder: Gen. Soleimani, Baghdad, January 3, 2020. Ordered by Trump 1.0.
The second part of the Raging Twenties starts with a bombing/kidnapping. Mini-Shock'n Awe on Caracas, Delta Force raid. January 3, 2026. Ordered by Trump 2.0.
Raging Donald Trump said he will run Venezuela.
This trashy neo-Caligula, self-proclaimed Emperor of Barbaria, in the end may not run anything, starting with his own motormouth.
The Venezuela op unrolled via a classic imperial playbook. Murderous sanctions for years blocking trade and capital movement, causing hyperinflation and an out-of-control humanitarian crisis. The target: to cause so much suffering to Venezuelans that a military coup would be inevitable.
The Venezuela kidnapping of a President in his bedroom deep into the night unrolled via a classic CIA playbook. They managed to bribe the head of Maduro's security detail and his close circle, but not (italics mine) the Venezuelan military.
Maduro was protected only by Venezuelan forces, not Russians, as confirmed by independent Caracas sources. When a Russian command got to Maduro's residence, at first they met resistance by some of Maduro's own corrupt security.
When they were neutralized and the Russians got inside the residence, Maduro had already been extracted by the Delta Force, with key internal help. The chief of Maduro's security detail was then apprehended - and duly executed.
The day after the kidnapping, Venezuelan soldiers revealed how Delta Force wanted to establish a beachhead at one of their units in Caracas as an operational base for a Bay of Pigs-style ground invasion. But in the words of a soldier, "We fought, we opened fire, and we forced the helicopter to leave without taking the military unit."
The Venezuelan Defense Ministry then stated that most of Maduro's security detail was actually killed during the operation, not specifying by whom. And Cuba announced the deaths of 32 of its fighters - certainly not among those in the compromised security detail.
The Chavista government remains in power - led by the formidable Delcy Rodriguez, constitutionally appointed as interim President. No Fifth Columnists inside the government have been unmasked so far.
An article on the propaganda rag Miami Herald, using as the single source a dodgy former vice-President of Colombia, Santos Calderon, and no evidence whatsoever from Venezuela, spread the fiction that Delcy Rodriguez made a pact with Trump 2.0 to hand Maduro over.
It took less than 48 hours for the bombastic Caligula White House narrative to start falling apart. Investigative journalist Diego Sequera, on the ground in Venezuela, has already largely debunked the tsunami of nonsense drowning mainstream and social media.
Additionally, forget about 28 million Venezuelans cheering a loudmouth neo-Caligula gringo as "liberator". He's now forced to issue personal threats against Delcy Rodriguez and - what else is new - promise that the Empire of Chaos may bomb Venezuela again.
The Donroe Doctrine, decoded
Let's cut to the chase. Apart from the notorious "largest oil reserves on the planet", essential for an Empire in financial trouble to build collateral, there are several main rasons for the Venezuela hit.
1. Bellum Judaica. Apart from developing close relations with BRICS members Russia, China and Iran, Caracas unmistakably sided with Palestine and called out the Zionist plague. So in one swoop, we have not only the practical application of the "corollary to the Monroe Doctrine", explicit in the new National Security Strategy, but most of all the "Donroe Doctrine" deployed as the "Zionroe Doctrine" by a Zionist court jester, who happens to be the neo-Caligula.
What better way to teach yet another lesson to the whole Global South on the limitless Pax Judaica - actually Bellum Judaica, because they are now on non-stop Forever War mode against all "amalek": and everybody not genuflecting in their altar may be branded "amalek". It's no wonder Delcy Rodriguez went straight to the point, qualifying in her first speech the "Zionist tinge" of neo-Caligula's kidnapping operation.
2. Heavy metal thunder. Only less than 24 hours after the bombing/mini-Shock'n Awe/kidnapping, and for a mere $8 billion, Washington wrapped up a massive smelter deal to process no less than $1 trillion of Venezuelan precious metals.
The deal was financed by J.P.Morgan - which happens to be in big trouble because of the their massive physical silver short position. The beauty is that Venezuela happens to be smack in the middle of the Arco Minero ("The Mineral Arc") which concentrates untold trillions in still unmined gold and silver.
3. The petrodollar angle. The heart of the matter is not Venezuela's humongous - untapped - oil reserves per se, complete with neo-Caligula salivation. The key is petrodollar-denominated oil. Printing endless - intrinsically worthless - green toilet paper to finance the industrial-military complex implies the US dollar as the global reserve currency, petrodollar included.
The Empire of Plunder simply could not allow Venezuela's oil to be sold in yuan, ruble, rupee or a basket of currencies, or in the near future, a BRICS-sanctioned mechanism backed by oil and gold. Red alert was already on as Venezuela integrated into China's CIPS cross-border payment system.
Then, on the oil front, there's the matter of stealing Venezuelan oil from Citgo - the Hudson-based subsidiary of PDVSA - to profit Zionist billionaire Paul Singer and his hedge fund, Elliot Investment Management. A "proud Zionist" and AIPAC board member, Robert Pincus, was court-appointed to facilitate the scam, derived from Citgo owing over $20 billion to creditors: another toxic effect of years of sanctions.
Additionally, and contrary to neo-Caligula's fiction that "this is our oil", Venezuelan historian Miguel Tinker Salas conclusively proved how the country nationalized the oil industry in 1976: "It was controlled by Venezuelans. It was run by Venezuelans". Foreign companies, including ExxonMobil's "most profitable subsidiary" were fully compensated, "much above and beyond what they had already extracted".
Then there's the crucial Chinese angle.
There has been a tsunami of splendidly stupid speculation that China did not do anything to "save" Venezuela. China is way too sophisticated to engage in brawls. Beijing will fight the Empire of Chaos in court.
Silently, with no fanfarre, Beijing has made it very clear that any American attack on Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects sealed by contract around the Global South - 150 participating nations at least - will be met with international arbitration in every court from Caracas to Jakarta. Translation - in the only way Western barbarians understand: the legal cost of American regime change operations will become prohibitive.
A test may be coming pretty soon. Assuming neo-Caligula "runs" Venezuela - and that's a major "if" - all that Beijing needs is to successfully enforce a single contract claim against a Trump-run Venezuela. Let's see whether neo-Caligula would have the balls to stop Venezuelan oil being sold to China. Good luck on imposing regime change after that.
My Might is Right
Still, neo-Caligula won't stop - mimicking his motormouth. The Empire of Chaos under the Donroe Doctrine is about strategic dominance, at all costs, over energy and trade corridors. There's no way neo-Caligula can be forced to cease and desist about Venezuela's oil. Because that will be the supreme strategic precedent of the new paradigm: My Might is Right rules the new international disorder based on no rules whatsoever.
So whatever happens next in Venezuela directly concerns the whole Global South/Global Majority.
At least now things are crystal clear. International law is for suckers. We search and destroy, bomb, kidnap, whatever - because we can. There are no limits for the Barbaria/ Bellum Judaica combo.
What's next?
Iran. The war criminal in Tel Aviv has already issued the Bellum Judaica orders. Even if the only "war" Trump 2.0 and his Secretary of Forever Wars can conduct amounts to a bunch of Special Forces trying to get a "beachhead" and indiscriminately hurling loads of stand-off weapons. Washington is woefully incapable of launching a large-scale combined arms operation anywhere.
Greenland. Not for "defense reasons", as neo-Caligula boasted, but for plunder of natural resources in imperial lebensraum mode and War for the Arctic reasons. Trump has given puny Denmark just enough time to digest it: "We will worry about Greenland in two months."
Then there's Cuba - the pet project of gusano Marco Rubio, who in his shady past was quite close to narco-terrorist elites.
Several extra nodes of the Global South - Colombia, Mexico. And if they don't "behave", several nodes of BRICS. It's now Totalen Krieg. And the Empire of Chaos/Bellum Judaica combo "will be watching it like a TV show". The Global South better get their act together - fast.