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.