In the early morning of Saturday, January 3rd, 2026, the
first sign that something unusual was going on in
Washington DC came from a surprising source, pizzerias.
Open source intelligence trackers noted a sudden spike in
late night pizza orders had occurred near the Pentagon and
this can be used as an informal indicator to predict major
events, crises or busy work days for defence personnel.
Shortly before 11:00 PM the prior evening, President Donald
Trump had issued the final command from his Mar A Lago
club. Good luck and godspeed.
Within hours, the leader of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, was
snatched from his compound in Caracas by a strike force of
over 150 aircraft launched from 20 different locations.
The assault, dubbed Operation Absolute Resolve, was a textbook
display of modern military prowess.
While US Space Force and Cyber Command effectively turned off
the lights of Caracas and disabled the nation's air
defenses, Delta Force operators were deployed via low flying
Night Stalker helicopters. Maduro, reportedly caught as he
tried to reach a steel safe room, was soon photographed
blindfolded and bound aboard EU s s Iwo Jima.
By late Saturday, he had been delivered to a New York jail to
face federal charges of narco terrorism.
There is a certain irony in the administration's sudden
enthusiasm for importing Venezuelans, especially ones
that it claims were involved in drug gangs.
Maduro may be the only Venezuelan in New York hoping
that ICE follows through on its promise of immediate removal
back to his home country. Maduro is being detained at the
Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn, joining a legendary
roster of high profile residents including the ghost of Jeffrey
Epstein and the rapper Sean Diddy Combs.
I imagine Maduro and Diddy are comparing notes in the exercise
yard over how much oil the US government took from them.
The military managed to hit all their targets, but unfortunately
the politicians couldn't even manage to hit the same talking
points. Secretary of State Marco Rubio
initially tried to frame the raid as primarily a law
enforcement operation, but the scale of the deployment, which
included an aircraft carrier and 14,000 troops, wasn't exactly a
traffic stop from Mar a Lago. The president was far more blunt
about what had just happened, announcing that the United
States would now run and be in charge of Venezuela.
This declaration left allies and observers surprised.
Critics argued that while the raid effectively decapitated the
regime, there was a conspicuous lack of next day planning.
Capturing a foreign leader and his wife does not mean that the
United States is suddenly in charge of a nation of 28 million
people twice the size of Germany.
When Saddam Hussein was pulled from a spider hole in 2003, it
didn't transform Iraq into a peaceful American asset.
It signaled the start of a bloody, decades long insurgency.
Similarly, the 2011 ousting of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya left
behind a fractured state-run by competing militias, not a stable
democracy. In Caracas, the regime was quick
to signal that it would not go quietly.
As news reported, the police and paramilitaries known as
Collectivos, took to the streets to reassert control in what was
suddenly a headless state. While the raid itself was
spectacular, it wasn't entirely a surprise.
It followed months of visible escalation, a massive military
buildup in the Caribbean, drone strikes on Venezuelan dock
facilities, and the seizure of at least 4 sanctioned oil
tankers. The real shock wasn't the
military incursion, but the total absence of any discussion
of a democratic transition or the installation of the
opposition leader who won the 2024 election with more than 2/3
of the vote. Instead of the messaging
focusing on a pivot towards liberty, the traditional
hallmark of American intervention, the rhetoric
focused almost entirely on the spoils of war.
President Trump announced that the regime authorities would
hand over between 30 million and 50 million barrels of crude
worth up to $3 billion to be sold at his personal discretion.
Early on, Trump had claimed that the military buildup related to
the illegal drug trade, but after the raid, there was no
pretense that this had been about anything other than the
capture of the oil wealth of a nation that claims to sit on 1/5
of the world's proven oil reserves.
By prioritizing resources over rights, the administration has
signalled a move towards a new coercive regional doctrine.
As a letter to the FT observed, the scandal is not that
Washington used force, but that it wielded it like a Raider
rather than a statesman, transforming what might have
been a stabilizing act of deterrence into a signal of
predation. The central justification for
this Raider strategy is the staggering promise of
Venezuelans natural resources. The country is frequently cited
as holding 303 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, which is
between 17 and 20% of the global total.
Among energy analysts and veteran investors, these numbers
are viewed with deep skepticism. High profile energy investors
like John Arnold have pointed out that this figure was
reported by Hugo Chavez to OPEC to bolster the regime's
international standing and has been uncritically repeated by
global bodies ever since. Some estimate that the reserves
may be exaggerated by as much as 220 billion barrels.
Even if this huge reserve figure was accurate, Venezuelan oil is
not the high quality, light, sweet crude found in the US
Permian Basin. Venezuelan oil is heavy and
sour, with the consistency of molasses and a high sulfur
content. It's quite similar to the oil
extracted in Canada, which is trading at around $43 per
barrel. Extracting Venezuelan oil is
technically difficult, and for transport it has to be blended
with dilutants like NAFTA, which Venezuela imports from Russia.
The high sulfur and CO2 content means that stainless steel pipe
and vessels are needed, which are both expensive and
challenging to maintain. The existing Chevron operations
in Venezuela are likely profitable at current market
prices, but new or regenerated operations in Venezuela would
probably not be. Rysted Energy estimates that new
projects in Venezuela would require an oil price of at least
$80 per barrel to break Even. So with global crude prices
hovering at around $60.00, a lot of the wealth the US
administration hopes to extract is currently worth less than the
cost of getting it out of the ground.
On top of this, the industry that Trump intends to reboot has
been hollowed out by decades of cannibalization and neglect.
Under Chavez and then Maduro, Pedaveasa was transformed from a
world class energy giant into a cash machine for the military,
leading to a catastrophic state of infrastructure where
refineries currently run at 20% of their original capacity and
pipelines are over 50 years old. The human capital required has
also evaporated. Most skilled engineers and
geologists have fled the country a long time ago, leaving the oil
fields to be managed by soldiers with no technical expertise.
For American oil majors, this is not the gold rush that
politicians are pretending it is.
While the president speaks of billions in imminent investment,
industry giants are more focused on being paid the money they won
in legal settlements after their assets were nationalized under
Hugo Chavez. Exxon Mobil and Conoco Phillips
are still chasing over $10 billion in unpaid compensation
for assets seized decades ago. This reluctance was made
explicitly clear yesterday evening by ExxonMobil CEO Darren
Woods. Striking A skeptical tone at a
White House meeting, Woods described Venezuela as
uninvestable without significant changes to the legal system and
commercial frameworks. Noting that Exxon had had its
assets seized twice before, he warned that a third entry would
require durable investment protections that simply do not
exist today. Why would a public company
commit billions to a region defined by such a high break
even price and massive political risk?
Beyond the economics, there's a substantial reputational risk in
being attached to an imperial venture that lacks clear legal
standing or democratic support. It makes far more sense for
these companies to invest in drilling onshore in the United
States or in Guyana, where extraction costs are near $35 a
barrel and the rule of law is far more predictable.
While Chevron, the last US major on the ground, may expand at the
margins, most executives are reluctant to commit fresh
capital to a country where a presidential tweet can upend
foreign policy overnight. Chevron recently completed a $53
billion acquisition of Hess, which gives the US super major a
30% stake in Guyana's rapidly expanding offshore sector, where
the break even price of extraction is half what it is in
Venezuela. And without the political risk,
the Venezuelan plan looks less like a strategic masterstroke
and more like an expensive exercise in resource
imperialism. While the economic rationale of
this incursion rests unquestionable geology, the
political plan for governing Venezuela appears even more
tenuous. In the vacuum left after
Maduro's capture, the Trump administration has not turned to
the democratic opposition. Instead, it has signalled its
intent to work with the very figures who served as the
backbone of the existing oppressive regime.
The Rodriguez siblings, Delsey and George, rose to power as
loyalists to Hugo Chavez and then Maduro, who succeeded him.
George Rodriguez, a trained psychiatrist, serves as the
National Assemblies president and chief political strategist.
Delsi, his sister, who served as both vice president and oil
minister, is now the acting president of Venezuela.
She is often described as the pragmatic face of the regime,
but she remains deeply implicated in its most brutal
misdeeds, from the systematic repression of dissidents to the
blatant 2024 election fraud. The decision to sideline Maria
Carina Machado, the Nobel Prize winning leader of the
opposition, has stunned the Venezuelan diaspora.
Despite Machado winning a landslide opposition primary and
her hand picked candidate Edmundo Gonzalez securing 2/3 of
the vote in 2020, four Trump has dismissed her role, claiming
that she doesn't have the support or respect within the
country. This frostiness appears rooted
in Trump's long standing desire for the Nobel Peace Prize
himself. Sources close to the White House
indicate that Trump viewed Machado's acceptance of the
award as an ultimate sin. 1 Insider noted that if she had
turned it down and stated it belonged to Trump, she'd be
president of Venezuela today. In a bizarre turn of events
reported yesterday, Trump told Sean Hannity he would accept the
prize if Mikado offered it to him during their meeting next
week, prompting an immediate clarification from the Norwegian
Nobel Committee that the award is final and cannot be revoked,
shared, or transferred. Now I don't know how it works
with the FIFA prize. Maybe he'll offer that to her.
This unusual alignment has LED observers like former UN
ambassador Louise Blas to conclude that what occurred in
Venezuela was not a traditional regime change, but a negotiated
extraction. In this view, Maduro was
sacrificed by elements of his own governing apparatus, led by
the Rodriguez siblings, to preserve the existing power
structure in exchange for a deal with Washington.
This arrangement allows the US to claim the high profile
symbolic victory of Maduro's capture while the Rodriguez
faction maintains control over the internal state machinery.
The result is a cynical oil for cash pathway, a strategy
intended to secure resource extraction while avoiding the
quagmire of a direct long term American occupation.
The idea that Delci Rodriguez could run Venezuela on behalf of
the White House is a massive gamble that overlooks the
internal architecture of the Chavista state.
While Rodriguez may be economically literate, she and
her brother represent the civilian wing of a regime that's
fundamentally held together by the security services.
It's unclear why high-ranking generals or other senior party
officials would agree to take orders from a leader who appears
to be taking direction from Washington, the very imperialist
enemy that Hugo Chavez spent decades framing as an
existential threat to his Bolivarian Revolution.
Peda Vesa itself is run by the military, and asking these
officers to flip their loyalty to AUS puppet administrator is a
direct challenge to their ideological and financial
interests. Furthermore, Delci lacks direct
command over the colectivos, the armed militias who are roaming
the streets hunting traders. These militias remain loyal to
hardline ideologues, not pragmatic negotiators.
If the security services refuse to follow her, the US may find
that maintaining its proxy regime requires the very boots
on the ground that Trump has spent years promising to avoid.
The Caracas incursion has sent shock waves far beyond Latin
America, signaling A dramatic pivot in US foreign policy
towards what's being termed the Don Roe doctrine.
While the term originated a year ago as a tongue in cheek New
York Post headline describing the president's aspirations for
regional dominance, the president officially embraced
the label during his press conference at Mar a Lago last
weekend. Boasting that his administration
has superseded the 1823 original by a real lot, He signalled A
fundamental transition away from President Monroe's defensive
warning against foreign interference issued when Latin
American nations were first breaking away from European
colonizers. This new Trump corollary moves
beyond mere protection. This new framework claims the
right to effectively own and manage the hemisphere's most
vital resources. The immediate fallout is felt
most acutely in Cuba, which depends heavily on Venezuela for
a significant portion of its oil imports.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a hardliner of Cuban descent,
appears to view the fall of Maduro as the catalyst for the
ultimate collapse of the Cuban regime, with President Trump
explicitly stating that the island's economy is now going
down for the count. Further afield, Iran and Russia
have condemned the raid as state terrorism, with Tehran watching
an alarm as the US implements a maximum pressure model that
could easily be turned toward them.
Next, the Chinese Foreign Ministry immediately condemned
the operation as a blatant use of force against a sovereign
state. Analysts at the Brookings
Institution and elsewhere worry that this early win in Caracas
serves as a dangerous template for adversaries.
Observers fear that if the international community accepts
a might equals right philosophy in the Western Hemisphere,
Beijing may see a clear green light for its own designs on
Taiwan. This philosophy was explicitly
defended by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller,
who argued in a recent television interview that the
world is governed by the iron laws of strength rather than
international law illusions. This aggressive posture marks a
startling U-turn for a president who campaigned on a promise of
MAGA isolationism and avoiding fruitless foreign entanglements.
Despite that rhetoric, the appetite for further adventures
was perhaps most provocatively captured by Katie Miller,
Stephen Miller's wife, who right after the Maduro capture posted
a map of Greenland on social media coloured in the Stars and
Stripes with the caption soon. The question remains whether
this is a coherent long term strategy or a high stakes
diversion. Critics point to the timing.
Trump is currently struggling in domestic polls and the Epstein
scandal remains A persistent headline.
This has led to wag the dog accusations that the
administration is manufacturing foreign crises to distract from
an affordability crisis at home. While polling shows that many
Americans support a democratic transition in Venezuela, there's
significant disapproval when the mission is perceived as an
attempt to plunder resources or expand imperial power.
As the administration celebrates its tactical success, it is yet
to explain how it intends to govern a nation it has
effectively annexed, or what it will do when the rule of law is
finally replaced by the rule of force.
Operation Absolute Resolve was executed without a single
reference to conventional democratic oversight.
While the president claimed to have spent months consulting
with U.S. oil majors on the day after scenario, executives at
ExxonMobil and Conoco Phillips have since denied any prior
knowledge of the raid or it's aftermath.
By failing to seek a formal authorization for use of
military force, the administration has ignited A
constitutional crisis that many lawmakers view as a dangerous
expansion of executive power. Very few will mourn the end of
Nicolas Maduro's rule. Over 13 years, he presided over
a spectacular national collapse, overseeing the exodus of eight
million citizens and the enrichment of a narrow military
clique. His tenure was defined by
systematic human rights abuses, including the imprisonment of
thousands of dissidents and the deployment of armed collectivos
to suppress any whisper of opposition.
However, the tactical success of his capture does not resolve the
question of its legality under international law.
Experts point to Article 2, paragraph four of the UN
Charter, which prohibits the use of force against a sovereign
state, a rule with no narco terrorism carve out for
kidnapping a foreign leader. The administration's selective
application of justice is further complicated by the
president's recent pardon of Juan Orlando Hernandez, the
former president of Honduras. Hernandez was sentenced to 45
years in prison for managing a cocaine superhighway that moved
400 tons of the drug, a scale that dwarfs the specific charges
currently levelled against Maduro.
Overriding such a conviction suggests that drug indictments
are now being used as a tactical tool for regime stabilization
rather than a consistent law enforcement priority.
The Trump administration's hostility towards international
law is felt most acutely at the International Criminal Court in
The Hague. Judge Kimberly Prost, who
overseas cases of genocide and war crimes along with eleven
other ICC officials, were sanctioned by the US government
in August. Prost was targeted for her role
in authorizing an investigation into alleged war crimes by US
personnel and the CIA in Afghanistan.
The impact on Prost has been profound.
U.S. companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, cancelled her
accounts, meaning that she can no longer shop online and use US
based e-mail services. With her bank accounts frozen
and credit cards cancelled, she describes A paralyzing existence
where she's on the same list as international terrorists,
organized crime bosses and Russian oligarchs, A surreal
consequence for a judge dedicated to global
accountability. This targeting of international
courts coincides with a massive shift in domestic priorities in
the United States. Just days after the Caracas
raid, the president proposed A historic $1.5 trillion military
budget for 2027, a nearly 50% increase from the prior year.
Billed as the creation of a dream military, this war chest
expansion during a time of nominal peace signals an intent
to normalize the kind of military assertiveness seen in
Venezuela. The Donro Doctrine reached its
most transactional expression on Tuesday when the president
announced the seizure of $3 billion worth of oil, which he
said was being transported by US charter tankers directly to
American unloading docks. In a post on his version of
Twitter, he announced that he would personally control the
money made from this oil to ensure that it's used to benefit
the US and Venezuela, with the caveat that Caracas may only
purchase American made products with the proceeds.
This model allows Washington to extract the spoils of the
incursion while bypassing the US Treasury and the
responsibilities of a formal occupation.
By forcing the interim government into a lopsided
partnership that prioritizes US commercial rents, the
administration has fundamentally redefined the role of American
power in the hemisphere. Despite the legal controversy
surrounding his capture, Nicolas Maduro faces a daunting path in
the US courts. Legal analysts and recent
commentary in The Economist suggests that Maduro is unlikely
to beat his rap, primarily because US domestic law is
remarkably indifferent to the methods by which a defendant is
brought to justice under the Cur Frisbee doctrine, A 19th century
ruling that essentially says we don't care how you got here,
we're just glad you could make it.
US courts have repeatedly held that the power to try a person
is not impaired by the fact that they were brought into the
jurisdiction via forcible abduction.
Furthermore, Maduro's primary defense, head of state immunity,
rests on a thin Reed. Since the United States has not
recognized him as Venezuela's legitimate leader since 2019,
the State Department will likely issue an immunity determination
that denies him the person of the sovereign protections
typically afforded to world leaders.
The prosecution's case reveals A striking gap between political
branding and legal reality. For years, the administration
characterized Maduro as the kingpin of the Cartel of the
Sons, a group that the State Department designated as a
foreign terrorist organization. Yet the indictment largely
abandons the claim that any such organization exists.
Instead, it portrays the cartel as an abstraction, a convenient
shorthand for a decentralized system of institutionalized
corruption and a patronage network managed by Venezuelans,
military and political elite. Critics point out that the DEA's
National Drug Threat Assessment has never officially mentioned
the Cartel of the Suns as a major trafficking organization,
leading to accusations that the administration may have oversold
its case to provide a legal rationale for the incursion.
These gaps highlight the paradoxical nature of the trial.
While Maduro may have a credible argument that the charges are
politically motivated or that that the Cartel of the Suns is a
fantasy cooked up by U.S. politicians, his attempts to
dismiss the charges will most likely fail.
When the trial gets going, it'll look like any other narco case,
meaning that it will rest on the strength of the evidence.
According to the legal experts interviewed by The Economist,
the bar to show participation in a criminal narcotics conspiracy
like this is quite low. They say that it won't be hard
for jurors to grasp that Venezuela is a weigh station for
Colombian drugs and that its most senior officials knowingly
enabled their transit. They argue that there could be a
diplomatic off run for Maduro where if he offers enough value
to America, there is a version of the world where he could
negotiate his own release. The capture of Nicolas Maduro
has delivered the US president a high profile victory, but it
leaves the Western Hemisphere in a state of profound uncertainty.
The emergence of the Donro doctrine signals a world where
the US acts as an apex predator, trading the post 1945 rules
based order for a coercive model of resource extraction.
We live in a world in which you can, you can talk all you want
about international niceties and everything else, but we live in
a world in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength,
that is governed by force, that is governed by power.
These are the iron laws of the world.
But are you saying that the beginning of time?
But while the immediate win may provide a temporary distraction
from domestic affordability crises and other scandals, the
long term project of running a nation of 28 million people
remains a high stakes gamble. Analysts at the Cato Institute,
a conservative think tank, warn that by ignoring its stated
antiwar principles, the administration risks a Middle
East style quagmire that effectively puts America last.
This strategic drift is most evident in the decision to Co
govern Venezuela, with Delci Rodriguez, a socialist fanatic
and core member of the existing regime.
Rather than supporting the victors of the 2024 election by
opting for a repackaged version of the Chavista status quo,
Washington is choosing stability over the type of democratic
transition that it has championed in the past.
The economic promise of Venezuelan oil is increasingly
viewed as a mirage by industry veterans.
With Venezuelan oil infrastructure in a state of
catastrophic decay and the global market already awash in
cheaper crude, the billions in investment the present demands
are unlikely to materialize, especially as his administration
continues to bypass the very rule of law that investors
require for security. Legal experts point out that the
Controlled by ME plan for oil revenue likely violates the
Miscellaneous Receipts Act and the Anti Deficiency Act,
creating a quasi budget process that bypasses congressional
appropriations and transparency. This radar logic has already
pivoted from the Caribbean to the Arctic.
On Friday, the President escalated his rhetoric regarding
Greenland, dismissing Denmark's 500 year old territorial claim
as irrelevant and warning that the US would acquire the island
the easy way or the hard way possible.
US, I'm not talking about money for Greenland yet.
I might talk about that, but right now we are going to do
something on Greenland whether they like it or not by.
Characterizing long standing defense treaties as mere leases
that the US no longer intends to honor, the White House has
signaled that even NATO allies are not immune to the
transactional logic of the Donro Doctrine.
The Danish Prime Minister has already warned that any military
move on Greenland would spell the end of NATO.
Yet the administration seems undeterred, even floating plans
for correct cash payments of up to $100,000 to individual
Greenlanders to encourage secession.
Ultimately, the Caracas incursion will be judged by its
global ripple effects. As the President proposes a
record 1.5 trillion dream military budget to fund these
territorial ambitions, adversaries in Moscow and
Beijing are watching with interest, seeing a template for
their own regional designs on Taiwan and beyond. the United
States has proven that it has the military might to decapitate
a regime in a single night, but it is yet to prove that it has
the statesmanship to build a lasting peace from the spoils.
Thanks again for tuning into this week's podcast.
With special thanks to my supporters on Patreon whose
support makes this podcast possible.
Have a great day and talk to you again soon.
Bye. Don't worry.