It all went off without a hitch. Donald Trump's huge, beautiful, helicopter coup of 2026. After two years of bungling pretty much everything from tariffs to the Epstein cover-up, our dayglow Caesar rolled the dice in Venezuela, and he appears to have pulled off a high-octane putsch straight out of a cheesy 80s action flick. After cutting the power to Caracas, over 200 US troops launched a fast and furious assault, riding in on a fleet of more than 150 aircraft and bombing scores of Venezuelan military facilities and air defense positions before Delta Force unleashed a Scarface-style full frontal assault on President Nicholas Madura's compound, wiping out his entire security detail before whisking the strongman and his wife away in a Blackhawk in the blink of an eye.
By the time the smoke settled, Caracas was in ashes, at least 100 people lay dead, and the President of Venezuela was locked up in a steel cell in Brooklyn, awaiting prosecution on a laundry list of charges ranging from drug trafficking to esoteric early 20th century American firearms violations.
It all went off without a hitch alright. The perfect war crime. The problem however, aside from the fact that all of this is totally fucking illegal in every court of law on the planet, is that we've seen this blockbuster before and it doesn't end the way it begins. Afterall, the Second Iraq War went off without a hitch too, until it didn't and then it was too late.
George W. Bush's brazen crusade to rid the world of Saddam Hussein had more than a few things in common with Donald Trump's triumphant conquest of the Cartel of the Suns. Both were blatantly unconstitutional adventures that sought to effortlessly hijack embargo decimated oil industries using almost obviously fictional conspiracies to justify the heist. Just like Maduro has his shadowy international drug cartel, Saddam had his equally fabricated arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. And just like Donald Trump had his hitch-less helicopter coup, Dubya had his camera-ready campaign of "shock and awe" that tore through Bagdad like a bullet through an oil drum.
In fact, just six weeks into his Babylonian adventure, George W. Bush was landing a fighter jet on the USS Abraham Lincoln and announcing that all "major combat operations in Iraq (had) ended" before a massive banner reading "Mission Accomplished!" It was a sparkling spectacle of high-powered American jingoism straight out of a Michael Bay movie. It was also a severely premature imperial victory lap that would become the casket that the entire Bush dynasty's reputation would be buried in.
The Iraq War would drag on for another 8 years with more than 4,500 US troops giving their lives for a campaign that would pave the Highway of Death for the rise of the Islamic State and the Axis of Resistance. All of which was part of a much larger but equally catastrophic scheme by neocon Sith lords like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to conquer the entire Middle East with America's still flailing War on Terror. The Results abroad would be the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War and somewhere between 4.5 and 4.7 million dead.
The results at home would be devastating in their own cruelly karmic way. The results at home would be the destruction of the neocon movement as anything but a universally despised bipartisan backroom cabal and the rise of Donald Trump, who ran multiple shockingly successful campaigns on being the solution to the neocon curse even while loading both of his cabinets with those same bloodied but unashamed scions of endless warfare.
Now, Trump has his own Iraq going in Venezuela and he isn't nearly as shy about his intentions to suck that milkshake dry of its oil reserves. While the Department of Justice is busy trying to manufacture a criminal case against the nation's rightful President, Donald Trump has openly announced that he has no intentions of even holding a sham election in the country before he gets his grubby little pussy grabbers on all that oil. After threatening a second wave of attacks if Venezuela's post-Maduro interim government resists his advances, Donald Trump announced a massive nation building project in Venezuela that would involve sending in US troops to secure the nation's natural resources and sticking US oil companies with the bill.
After meeting with a coterie of oil tycoons at the White House last week, Trump revealed his $100 billion-dollar 18-month plan to rebuild Venezuela into America's own private gas station, boasting that the captive nation would be "turning over" somewhere between 30 and 50 million barrels of oil to the United States and that "that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States."
Meanwhile, Generalissimo Trump's increasingly caudillo-like regime has made it blatantly clear that just like Iraq was part of a much larger imperial campaign in the Middle East, Venezuela will merely be the first domino to fall in a much larger campaign by the United States to reestablish its dominance over the Western Hemisphere. Secretary of State Marco Rubio spent the first Sunday after kidnapping another world leader on the cable news talk show circuit announcing that Cuba would be next as Trump simultaneously renewed his threats to annex Greenland from their current colonists in Copenhagen and refused to rule out the use of military force in doing so.
All of this is part of what has become known as the "Donroe Doctrine", a 21rst century plot to reignite 19th century style gunboat diplomacy and sell it to the isolationists of MAGA as a kind of Imperialism Lite, but in reality, this is all nothing more than neoconservativism in retreat. After failing miserably to remake the Middle East in Ronald Reagan's image, large sections of the American imperial elite have reluctantly thrown their weight behind bringing the troops back west to consolidate their holdings in the long-neglected Americas in preparation for the final showdown with their real target, China.
Trump wants to do this by removing China's biggest western allies in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba. He wants to do this by using the War on Drugs to increase America's military presence in the newly gas-rich nation of Mexico. He wants to do this by retaking the Panama Canal and Greenland. And he wants to do this by turning the United States into a fully militarized and automated police state by joining the War on Drugs and the War on Terror in an unholy marriage of domestic drone strikes and offshore prison colonies.
That's the new American nightmare at least, but it all hinges upon Donald Trump maintaining a war weary base by selling the Donroe Doctrine as a kinder, gentler, neocon hand, and all of this hinges upon Venezuela. While removing Maduro from the picture may have been a snap, so was removing Saddam. The problem comes with the inevitable occupation and the longer a military occupation lasts, the bloodier it gets. Dubya's plans for Iraq weren't done in by any state but rather the forces loosed across the desert plains by the dissolution of a state, and his biggest obstacle wasn't the Baathists, but their longtime Shia rivals united under a Saddam-era opposition figure named Muqtada al-Sadr.
Venezuela could be a recipe for something far worse. This is a nation twice the size of Iraq with half of that terrain covered in dense jungle. A nation with a 1,378-mile border with Colombia defined by longstanding issues with smuggling, undocumented migration, and general ungovernableness. Even if Maduro's interim government folds like a deck of cards, Venezuela is still teeming with Colectivos, a loosely organized but heavily armed collection of motorcycle riding paramilitaries organized around barrio councils that predate Hugo Chavez and number as high as 8,000, operating in 16 of Venezuela's 23 states.
You also have Venezuela's 4.5 million strong Bolivarian Militias now activated by a deposed leader, not to mention somewhere in the ballpark of 20,000 armed guerillas just across that porous border with Colombia, most of them unemployed and impoverished since the 2016 peace deal Venezuela helped broker there. And all just a three-day train ride away from the Rio Grande.
This is the real reason why the Donald isn't so quick to shove a Washington snitch like Maria Machado into the presidential palace. He's gaming on making another one of his infamous scumfuck deals with the same military brass he calls a cartel in hopes that they can convince the lower ranks to put down their gats while he siphons off the gas supply. It's a big fucking gamble and he better pray it pays off because otherwise he has painted his ass into a corner with more than just Venezuelan crude. Latin America is one big Molotov cocktail that's been ready to blow since the Conquistadors lit it to fire the rise the First World with the fuel of the Third and I'm not the first lunatic to eyeball that flame with a flicker of rambunctious hope either.
Way back in 1967, Latin America's native guerrilla laureate, Che Guevara, penned an essay calling on revolutionary movements across the Global South to "create two, three... many Vietnams." as part of a recklessly passionate fever dream about swarming Pax Americana's outer colonies with Vietcong style guerrilla campaigns that would stretch the Empire's recourses across a vast theater of territory in order to precipitate the kind of global collapse that brought the Romans to their knees.
Che would launch his failed Bolivian Campaign later that year, a quixotic conspiracy to foment this revolution amidst the colliding borders of Latin America's heartland that would ultimately end in Che's death at the barrel of a CIA pistol. But Che's spirit never left that wild country. In fact, his ghost spread to every corner of Latin America, inspiring generations of disgruntled anti-imperialists from FARC and Hugo Chavez to the Zapatistas and Oscar Zeta Acosta.
Now, Donald Trump wants to bring the War on Terror home to this flaming bush of ghosts. What could possibly go wrong?
Then again, she said with a devilish grin, what could go right?
Cartels, Colectivos, street gangs, refugees, militias, pacifists with iPhones, white women in SUVs, Black boys on mopeds, transgender antifascists, mouthy Muslim women and anti-Zionist Jews, all lumped into the same category of "terrorist" by a modern-day Caligula on a bender... Maybe, just maybe, we should all just come together and change that category back to "freedom fighter" so we can turn this American nightmare into two, three... many Iraqs.
I know, I know, I'm a fucking whack job, I've heard. But at this point, what do we have to lose another ton of chains?
Dream the dangerous dream, dearest motherfuckers. Dream the dangerous dream.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* Firestarter by the Prodigy
* Rockin' in the Free World by Neil Young
* Kerosene by Big Black
* Song for Zula by Phosphorescent
* The Money Will Roll Right In by Fang
* Cochise by Audioslave
* Anaconda by the Melvins
* Burning by Fugazi
* Floyd the Barber by Nirvana
* New Pollution by Beck
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