By John Kennedy
January 7, 2026
Introduction
What is the next step for the United States after kidnapping the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro ? President Trump has stated that the United States government plans to "run" Venezuela but has not made any comment as to how this will be done. The president in the days after the military operation has threatened to take Greenland for "national security" reasons, and Senator Lindsay Graham, while standing next to Trump, stated that "Cuba's days are numbered." Trump has been fairly consistent in fulfilling the needs of the American establishment; this includes the technocrats at Silicon Valley, the oil conglomerates, Wall Street, the security state, and the Zionist lobby. It seems apparent that the American establishments have banded together under Trump to use him to further their goals and to consolidate power in the Western Hemisphere. But this still begs the question that the Trump Administration has failed, or just refuses, to answer: how will America run Venezuela ? Marco Rubio was on Face the Nation and refused to answer the question and just insisted that this operation is totally different from the wars in the Middle East. He said:
"The whole, you know, foreign policy apparatus thinks everything is Libya, everything is Iraq, everything is Afghanistan. This is not the Middle East. And our mission here is very different. This is the Western Hemisphere."
Despite the government's refusal to give a sensible explanation of their actions and a reasonable plan for the future, past history can give hints to the possible future of Venezuela, the United States, and the Western Hemisphere.
The Technical State
When conducting an insurrection of a regime, the head of state and his legislative buildings do not matter. In the history of successful revolutions, as well as failed revolutions, the technical structure of the country is the key. The American military can capture the president, but when the power, energy, transport, internet, telephone, and other technical structures and industries remain in the hands of the state, then regime change is impossible. When the FBI accused the January 6th protestors of being"insurrectionists," it should be asked what they were trying to coup. The capitol building is just that, a building, with little more than symbolic value. If they had decided to capture and occupy the building, the outside regime would've just surrounded the building and turned off the power and water until their surrender. To conduct a coup, you must not capture the government; you must capture the state. In his 1931 book, "Coup d'Etat," Curzio Malaparte wrote extensively on how to conduct a real insurrection, having been involved in Mussolini's rise to power, witnessing the Russian revolutions, and being a part of the Italian delegation to Warsaw during the Soviet-Polish war of 1920. He quoted Leon Trotsky extensively, the true mind behind the revolution that overthrew Kerenski's provisional government. In "Coup d'Etat" (p.30) a conversation between Trotsky and the revolutionary Dzerjinsky was outlined, which explains the process that led to the regime change of Kerenski:
"On the eve of the Coup d'Etat, Trotsky told Dzerjinsky that Kerenski's government must be completely ignored by the Red Guards; that the chief thing was to capture the State and not to fight the government with machine-guns; that the Republican Council, the Ministries and the Duma played an unimportant part in the tactics of insurrection and should not be the objective of armed rebellion; that the key to the State lay, not in its political and secretarial organizations, nor yet in the Tauride, Maria, or Winter Palaces, but in its technical services, such as the electric stations, the telephone and telegraph offices, the port, gasworks and water mains."
Despite Maduro being captured, the regime is still in place. Venezuela's Interior Minister Rondon, Defense Minister Lopez, and all other ministers and generals still maintain control over the state despite Maduro being gone. This is the exact opposite of what happened in Syria, when HTS rebels swiftly and bloodlessly took major cities and points from Bashar al-Assad like Homs, Aleppo, and Hama, which caused Assad to flee and the regime to fall, just as Trotsky had swiftly overthrown Kerenski with his invisible maneuvers, and had caused government to sheltered in the Winter Palace (p.33):
"Kerenski had fled. They said he was at the front to collect troops and march on Petrograd, The entire population poured into the streets anxious for news. Everyone was talking, discussing, and cursing either the government or the Bolsheviks. The wildest rumors spread from group to group: Kerenski dead, the heads of the Menshevik minority shot in front of Tauride Palace; Lenin sitting in the Tsar's room in the Winter Palace."
This did not happen in Venezuela; the regime is still in power. Only the wild rumors and disinformation on social media spreading establishment talking points remain the only consistent factor in this operation. Was this operation then a failure ? It's important to realize that during the Cold War, America had used different means to overthrow and control countries in order to fight Communist forces and control the natural resources that lay within them.
Economic Hitmen
Much has changed since the years of 1917, when Trotsky plotted the regime change of Kerenski, new technology has been created, which eases the process for great powers to turn nations into satraps. Although the technology has advanced, the tactics remain the same, and President Trump had inadvertently exposed one of the ways America had used Trotsky's tactics while giving a press conference on the Maduro capture, saying:
"It was dark. The lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have. It was dark and it was deadly."
During the Cold War, businesses venturing into Latin America had sought out the country's energy grid as well as its natural resources; this allowed full control over the country's state apparatus, which in turn handed over its government. In John Perkins book "Confessions of an Economic Hitman," he admitted that America, as well as China, had a deep-seated interest in the energy grids of the countries it did business in, He said:
"The Pentagon understood, as we economic hitmen had in my day, that the key to dominating a country's economy is controlling its electrical systems."
If America's cyberattack on Venezuela's electrical grid had compromised it to such an extent as new ownership, the regime's new leader could be persuaded into giving concessions to American businesses of the country's vast and lucrative natural resources.
Drug Control
Drugs are the building blocks of empires. This was true for the British, French, and Dutch empires when they were pushing opium into China, even fighting two wars with the Chinese in order to keep the drug legal; the French had further used the sale of opium and opium products like heroin to fund their colonial war in Indochina during the 1950s. This allowed the military and security services secretive funds to continue fighting the war and funding new special programs even if their publicly allocated funds from the parliaments and congresses dry up. America is no exception to these activities and has been actively involved in the drug trade for decades, most famously the "French Connection," where opium cut by the Chinese nationalists and supported by the OSS was sent to be synthesized in Sicilian drug labs and later by the Corsican mob in the Southern French town of Marseille. All of this was then sent to Cuban labs run by the mob and later sent to America for distribution, and then the funds later distributed in CIA operations against the Communist parties in Western Europe. Later, of course, these operations would expand into South America, most famously the Contras pushing cocaine in order to fund its fight against the Sandinistas. This is important because one of the main accusations and reasons given by the Trump administration for the military operation was that Maduro was a narcoterrorist running a large cartel.
The American government claims that Maduro and other senior military and political officials run a drug trafficking network and gang called the "Cartel of the Suns." This cartel is not even close to being the biggest cocaine trafficking country to the USA; a France24 report stated that Panama, Ecuador, and Columbia were the biggest exporters of cocaine by boat to the United States, with Columbia responsible for two-thirds of coca leaf cultivation. Even fentanyl, the leading cause of overdose in America, comes from Mexico and China. While the rhetoric of narcoterrorism could be seen as simple propaganda and an excuse to conduct a military operation, the control of Venezuela's drug trade could be a very important reality. It was in Venezuela that the first American federal official directly accused the CIA of trafficking cocaine into the United States with the help of the Venezuelan National Guard.
But that was before Hugo Chavez took power, the socialist leader who, according to FEE, had commenced a runoff nationalization program, stripping private property rights; this is similar to how Castro had expelled the Italian-American gangsters like Santo Traficante and Meyer Lansky along with their drug labs and casinos. Unlike in Mexico or Colombia, where private cartels compete with one another over territory and trafficking routes and use private property as a means to protect their assets from the public and government searches, the Venezuelan government has monopolized the drug trade in their own country. Just as Mises had explained, a government-run industry does not run on profit and loss; its taxpayers support it, and its military and police protect it, power other cartels elsewhere pay lucratively to obtain. Going back to John Perkins book, he claimed that the Chinese have made bold economic moves in Latin America as part of their Belt and Road Initiative, but the Chinese projects have been met with repeated failures, shoddy construction, ecological disasters, and debt entrapment. Perkins explains (p.27):
"China was rapidly engulfing one country after another, in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, as well as Latin America. I had to wonder why these countries so enthusiastically accepted China, despite the mistakes it made developing projects in Ecuador and a dozen other countries. It seemed to me that the hydroelectric dams and power systems US companies built in my day had been well engineered and were still producing electricity. By comparison, Chinese engineering was abysmal."
So as America seeks to secure the Western Hemisphere as Marco Rubio claimed, it's odd that the major cartels in Mexico and Columbia have been left untouched. Perhaps the cartels in Latin America and the American security state have a vested interest against the shoddy Chinese infrastructure and socialist dictators stripping private property rights.
Wag the Dog
Finally, there is the propaganda effect the military operation has had on the American population. From Ben Shapiro to Nick Fuentes, young conservatives and the Latin American diasporas looked on in awe as the American military bombed Caracas and special forces kidnapped the dictator. Jokes circulated online about how Russia just saw what a real special operation looks like; it's supposed to take an hour, not three years. Of course, America had just gotten out of a twenty-year conflict in Afghanistan and a shorter but bloodier one in Iraq. The rhetoric that surrounds this operation is a tactic to try and beat the "Vietnam syndrome." After the Vietnam War, America had conducted small but successful wars around the world, such as in Grenada and Panama, until finally, America had swept Iraq in a resounding victory against the Iraqis in 1991, ending what Bush called "the Vietnam syndrome." The Trump Administration is conducting theater in order to restore faith in the competency in the American military.
Tying up Loose Ends
JD Vance had stated that the attack on Venezuela was in response to its narcoterrorism and the theft of American property; he asked if we should "just let Communists steal our stuff?" With him adding that "Great powers don't act like that." The United States is retreating back into its hemisphere; it is losing Europe to the war in Ukraine. Every time America seems to teeter towards a peace agreement with Putin that isn't unconditional surrender, European leaders threaten to "gain independence" from America. Now Trump has threatened to take Greenland from Denmark, a land that he claims is a vital point in national security; afterall, Russia and China are increasing their military and economic presence in the area. As the relationship between Europe and America continues to sour over the war, and the Middle East becomes more unstable due to the Israelis, America is finding itself securing its north and south, securing one of the most resource-rich countries in the world. This strategy includes Cuba as well, a Chinese and Russian ally and a country that the Cuban Rubio would no doubt take interest in.
The United States doesn't just seek to run Venezuela; it seeks to run the Western Hemisphere. The State is tying up its loose ends in order to secure itself. It won't be Trump running this new operation either; it will be his backers, the men who sat behind him at his inauguration, the men who have been in positions of power before Trump and will be there after Trump is gone. They're just using Trump to further their goals in a now multipolar world. The bombing of Iran and the kidnapping of Maduro all violate international law and give other countries an excuse to do the same, but international law never mattered, and the United States no longer cares.