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Trump's Kidnapping of Maduro Is a Threat to Sovereignty Everywhere
The response to this act, regardless of one’s political orientation or views on the Maduro government, will determine whether the concepts of international law, multilateralism, and the self-determination of peoples retain any meaning in the 21st century.
Jan 15, 2026
On January 3, 2026, the United States did not merely bomb a sovereign country and capture its president. It displayed, in the most unambiguous terms, a total defiance of the post-war international order that it helped create. When US special forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and National Assembly Deputy Cilia Flores from Caracas and transported them to a Brooklyn jail, they did not simply violate Venezuelan sovereignty. They declared that sovereignty itself, for any nation that refuses subordination to US imperialism, holds no weight.
As Nicolás Maduro Guerra, the president’s son, stated before Venezuela’s National Assembly: “If we normalize the kidnapping of a head of state, no country is safe. Today it’s Venezuela. Tomorrow, it could be any nation that refuses to submit.”
The response to this act, regardless of one’s political orientation or views on the Maduro government, will determine whether the concepts of international law, multilateralism, and the self-determination of peoples retain any meaning in the 21st century. This is not a question for the left alone. It is a question for every nation, every government, and every citizen who believes that the world should not be governed by the principle that might makes right.
The Logic of Hyper-Imperialism Unveiled
What distinguishes the current phase of US foreign policy from earlier periods of intervention is its brazenness. When the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, Washington maintained the pretense of responding to communist subversion. When American forces invaded Panama in 1989 to capture Manuel Noriega, the justification was framed within a discourse of law enforcement. The history of US intervention in Latin America spans over 40 successful regime changes in slightly less than a century, according to Harvard scholar John Coatsworth.
Every government that has sought to develop independently, that has attempted to control its own natural resources, that has resisted subordination to Washington, must recognize that what has happened in Venezuela could happen to them.
But President Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States would “run” Venezuela represents something qualitatively different. Here there is no pretense. When asked about the operation, Trump invoked the Monroe Doctrine and said that these are called “Donroe Doctrine,” signaling that the Western Hemisphere remains a zone of US dominion—an assertion clearly made in the National Security Strategy launched in November 2025. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s subsequent clarification that the US would merely extract policy changes and oil access did nothing to soften the nakedness of the imperial project.
This represents what we at the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research have identified as “hyper-imperialism,” a dangerous and decadent stage of imperialism. Facing the erosion of its economic and political dominance and the rise of alternative centers of power (mainly in Asia) US imperialism increasingly relies on its uncontested military strength. The Chatham House analysis is unequivocal: This constitutes a significant violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and the United Nations Charter. There was no Security Council mandate, nor any claims to self-defense.
The post-1945 international order established the formal principle that states possess sovereign equality and that force against another state’s territorial integrity is prohibited. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter was designed precisely to prevent the powerful from treating the world as their domain, which the US has now blatantly ignored.
The Test for Global South Solidarity
The kidnapping of President Maduro poses an existential question to the discourse of “multipolarity.” While the seeds of a multipolar world order may exist (China’s economic rise, the increasing political assertiveness of Global South countries, BRICS and its expansion, the increasing trade in local currencies) they have proven to be extremely limited in the face of the US unilateral use of force. This is an uncomfortable truth.
The initial responses from governments suggest the difficulty of moving from rhetorical condemnation to material constraint. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva correctly identified the stakes when he condemned the capture as crossing “an unacceptable line” and warned that “attacking countries, in flagrant violation of international law, is the first step toward a world of violence, chaos, and instability.” Colombian President Gustavo Petro rejected “the aggression against the sovereignty of Venezuela and of Latin America.” Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum declared that “the Americas do not belong to any doctrine or any power.” China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi condemned US military intervention and called for the release of President Maduro, saying, “We don’t believe that any country can act as the world’s police.”
The groundswell of opposition confronts a structural problem: The institutions designed to prevent such actions are incapable of constraining the permanent members of the Security Council. The United States can veto any resolution condemning its behavior. The emergency Security Council meeting convened at the request of Venezuela and Colombia produced denunciations but no enforcement mechanism.
Every government that has sought to develop independently, that has attempted to control its own natural resources, that has resisted subordination to Washington, must recognize that what has happened in Venezuela could happen to them. Trump’s threats against Cuba and Colombia underscore this point.
Sovereignty, Resources, and the Right to Self-Determination
The pattern is well established with the successive overthrowing of heads of states when they tried to implement land reform like Árbenz in Guatemala, nationalize national resources under Salvador Allende in Chile and Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran. The thread continues to the present situation in Venezuela.
While the real limits of “multipolarity” in this stage of US hyper-imperialism have been laid bare, we must continue building our collective capacity to resist.
Venezuela possesses the world’s largest proven oil reserves, estimated at 303 billion barrels. Trump made no effort to disguise the centrality of oil, announcing that American companies would rebuild Venezuela’s oil industry and the US would be “selling oil, probably in much larger doses.” The maritime blockade preceding the military operation served the explicit purpose of strangling the country economically.
Yet the entire trajectory of the US Venezuela policy since 2001, from funding opposition groups to the 2002 coup attempt, to Operation Gideon in 2020, to the “maximum pressure” sanctions, has been designed to prevent Venezuela from making free choices. The assault accelerated after Venezuela enacted its 2001 Hydrocarbons Law asserting sovereign control over oil resources.
Conclusion
The kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and National Assembly deputy Cilia Flores should compel a fundamental reassessment of the state of the international order. The formal institutions and legal frameworks that were supposed to prevent great power aggression have failed to constrain Washington’s imperialist aggressions. This places an enormous responsibility on the governments and peoples of the Global South. The debates around multipolarity, BRICS, South-South cooperation, and de-dollarization are rendered academic if they do not translate into the practical capacity to impose costs on actions like the invasion of Venezuela. Ultimately, the imperialist aggression against Venezuela has repercussions for governments and peoples around the world, regardless of their ideological orientation or views on the Maduro government. While the real limits of “multipolarity” in this stage of US hyper-imperialism have been laid bare, we must continue building our collective capacity to resist. The defense of Venezuelan people’s sovereignty, after all, is a defense of the sovereignty of all our nations.
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Venezuela and the Return of Empire
The global rallying cry of the Global South should, by now, be unmistakable. Down with imperialism: not as a slogan of nostalgia, but as a political necessity.
Jan 08, 2026
The seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by the United States marks a dangerous moment in international politics. A sitting head of state was forcibly removed from his country, flown to the United States, and placed on trial under American law. Washington has described this as justice. Under international law, it is an abduction.
President Donald Trump openly justified the attack by invoking the Monroe Doctrine, a 19th-century policy that treats Latin America as the United States’ exclusive sphere of influence. Trump went further, saying the doctrine had been “updated” and renamed, declaring that the United States would “run” Venezuela until it approved a political transition. He also made clear that American oil companies would move in to control Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest in the world.
This was not hidden. It was stated plainly.
What is happening in Venezuela is not new. It follows a long and well-documented pattern. Latin America has repeatedly been subjected to US-backed coups, regime change operations, and military interventions, all justified under shifting narratives of freedom, security, or democracy.
Without unified voices of resistance, the unshackled advance of empire will continue, reshaping borders, governments, and lives at will.
From the overthrow of Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 to the CIA-backed coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973, the region carries the weight of this history. The United States supported military dictatorships across Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, and Guatemala, governments responsible for mass killings, torture, and disappearances. It trained and funded armed groups like the Contras in Nicaragua, whose violence devastated civilian populations. The Monroe Doctrine has always meant one thing in practice: Latin America’s sovereignty is conditional.
Trump’s actions in Venezuela are simply a continuation of this logic.
As expected, Venezuela has now faced the full might of imperial power. Maduro sits in a US courtroom, while American oil companies prepare to rake in profits from the largest proven oil reserves on the planet. And the Global South remains divided and fragmented, offering no unequivocal, unified defense of Venezuelan sovereignty.
We have seen this paralysis before. We have been watching it unfold in Gaza for the past three years. There, too, a neocolonial imperialist order operates with impunity—bombing hospitals, leveling neighborhoods, killing thousands of children while invoking the rhetoric of security and self-defense. And there, too, the response has been fractured. Murmurs of resistance emerge, fragile and disconnected: a statement here, a protest there. Meanwhile, the so-called civilized West offers apathy at best. Even the peoples of the Global South, themselves shaped by histories of colonization and plunder, often look on in exhausted silence.
But is there anything truly new about Venezuela? Have we forgotten Iraq and Afghanistan—empire’s forever wars, launched on lies? Have we forgotten Libya, Syria, or the endless cycle of coups and regime-change operations that have defined Washington’s relationship with Latin America, its so-called backyard? The method remains the same: Violence exercised without consequence, legality bent to power, sovereignty treated as conditional.
What has changed is not the Empire but the resistance. There are no Che Guevaras, no Castros, no Chávezes today with the moral gravity to name imperialism for what it is, without apology or ambiguity. There are no leaders alive who dare to raise, unfiltered, the cry of resistance against empire. Instead, what we increasingly see are local elites who serve as intermediaries of domination, eager to trade sovereignty for approval, legitimacy, or personal gain. Nations are bartered away for access, status, and survival within an imperial order they dare not challenge.
Those who still speak out are swiftly disciplined. The Empire’s media brands them radicals, extremists, pariahs unfit for polite conversation, unworthy of seats at the tables of “civilization” and “progress.” They are sanctioned, silenced, or erased. And the rest? Hollowed out by petty self-interest and political cowardice.
In my own country, we carry a long and inglorious tradition of Napoleonic generals and compliant elites serving foreign empires—a tradition that has not ended, only adapted.
Today it is Gaza and Venezuela. Tomorrow it may be Iran. And one day, inevitably, it will be someone else—perhaps even us. This is how empire advances. Each violation normalizes the next. Each kidnapping, bombing, or occupation becomes the justification for another.
The global rallying cry of the Global South should, by now, be unmistakable. Down with imperialism: not as a slogan of nostalgia, but as a political necessity. Without unified voices of resistance, the unshackled advance of empire will continue, reshaping borders, governments, and lives at will.
The question is no longer whether the imperial order is collapsing. It is whether, in a fractured and conflict-ridden multipolar world, the victims of empire can overcome their divisions long enough to build something better.
And that question remains unanswered.
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US Starts 2026 by Bombing Venezuela and Kidnapping Its President
The intervention machine is rigging the world for US big business interests, at the price of Global South dignity and agency.
Jan 04, 2026
With its violent military intervention into Venezuela—a country where I once lived—the US has begun this year with entitled and undisguised imperialism. The unapologetic kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and of Celia Flores (not just a wife as the media refers to her, but also former head of the National Assembly) and killing of at least 40 Venezuelans aims to cement and normalize the US standard operating procedure for international relations as violence and control. It will take Venezuela's oil and other crucial minerals, and to hell with Global South self-determination, agency, and ownership.
I remember when I lived in Venezuela, and we talked about what we would do if the US attacked. We were already facing other kinds of attacks, including basic food shortages orchestrated by private companies, destabilization attempts, right-wing violence, and English-language mainstream media lies. The conversation particularly came up around elections, when the shortages and destabilization typically increased, and US attacks felt less hypothetical.
Even then, though, we would balance the very real and long history of violent US interventions in Latin America with skepticism. How could they kill innocent people and bomb what felt like to me the closest thing to paradise? Venezuela was never a utopia; there were mistakes and much work to do, but the Andean mountains were intensely green, the coastal waters a peaceful turquoise, the nights full of fairy fog that you could see drifting down the streets. The days were full of the laughter of the tiny children I taught through our participatory education project. We solved our own local problems as an organized community, turned empty lots into community gardens, and there was always political debate and high levels of political literacy. People knew their constitution, often by heart, knew the laws, and the news. Venezuelans had an infinite urge to dance, even on moving buses or after two-day long meetings. How could anyone consider destroying that world? It felt inconceivable. It didn't make sense, and it still doesn't.
Yet we all know that beautiful Gaza, with its beaches, shops, delicious zaatar bread, hospitals, books, and resilient people, has been turned into rubble and whole families wiped out. The US-led destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq ruined people, communities and saw key cultural and archaeological sites irreparably damaged, and artifacts looted. I live in Mexico now, and here alone, the US has used NAFTA and the so-called "War on Drugs" to militarize this beautiful country and systematically turn it into a vast grave (with 131,000 forced disappearances) and into an obedient neoliberal production line for nearshoring US companies. So, in Venezuela, I guess we should have been less skeptical. Friends there messaged me on Saturday in shock, their ears ringing from the sounds of bombs. New Year's weekend wasn't meant to be this.
However, throughout 2025, the US had asserted itself more openly as global police chief at the service of big business. It "negotiated" (aka pressured) a "ceasefire" in the Democratic Republic of Congo which would give it access to the country's highly sought-after tech minerals and metals. It has supported Israel's genocide in Gaza, bombed Nigeria, and killed Venezuelans with complete impunity. It closed its borders to refugees in violation of international law, and breached migrant and human rights within its own borders. It also bombed Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and Somalia. It carried out or was partner to 622 overseas bombings in total, and also intervened in manipulative ways, such as Trump's comments days before the Honduran election in November that led to the victory of the right-wing candidate he backed, or the US role in the international "Gang Suppression Force" in Haiti.
While global institutions like the International Criminal Court and the United Nations have demonstrated their ineffectiveness at doing anything at all about the illegal US sanctions against Cuba, the genocide in Gaza, or climate destruction, Trump has been able to fortify the US as a force that actually decides international affairs.
In his press conference Saturday, Trump said the US would be selling Venezuelan oil. Though he laid the groundwork for the military intervention into Venezuela with evidence-free talk of drug cartels and "narcoterrorists"—murdering more than 100 people in cold blood on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific—most people knew this was always about regaining control over the country with the largest known oil reserves. However, Venezuela also represents defiance. The US has sanctioned the country for such behavior for over a decade, killing or contributing to the deaths of over 40,000 people in 2017–18 alone.
The US doesn't just treat the Global South as a resource buffet. In order to secure its access to natural resources, it wants the governments of less powerful nations at its beck and call. Venezuela, especially during the 2010s and through initiatives like CELAC, was playing a role of uniting Latin America against such dominance and towards independence and social and economic alternatives.
The bombing of Venezuela, beyond the oil itself, is about US control over Latin America and part of a right-wing pushback against social movements, grassroots empowerment, and alternatives to violent capitalism. Beyond Bukele in El Salvador and Milei in Argentina, in 2025 the right wing also won in Bolivia, Honduras, and Chile. With Trump's backing, these "leaders" are furthering racist, homophobic, sexist, and privatization agendas.
Normalizing empire and global human rights violations
Beyond the horrific event itself, the events of January 3 are part of a move towards normalizing a global state of danger, insecurity, human rights abuses, and disregard for international law. It does not matter what anyone thinks of Maduro; whether he won the 2025 election is an important discussion for another place and time. The US has no right to determine the heads of other countries. It wants to be, but is not the world boss, and beyond that, has no moral standing to decide or control anything.
But Saturday's move, as a continuation of US policy in 2025, upholds military intervention as a solution to problems. It is a signal to wayward countries to obey. Such imperialism not only kills people, in the long term it perpetuates racist tropes of Global South countries that can't run themselves, while legitimizing US- and Euro-centrisim that stipulates their monopoly on wisdom and democracy. Imperialism scares its victims into silence and submission and cements a global apartheid dynamic where some regions are politically and financially controlled, subjected to unlivable wages and to resource robbery. Through debt systems and trade and income inequalities, rich countries have drained $152 trillion from the Global South since 1960.
The intervention machine is rigging the world for US big business interests, at the price of Global South dignity and agency. For invaded and intervened countries, there are hidden impacts as well; lower self-worth and an unsubstantiated belief that one's education, art, and inventions are inferior, disillusion with organizing and movements, and often, a need to migrate that is then met with rejection by those forces causing that need—as of course is the case with the US and Venezuela.
The Venezuelan people are not a threat. The country doesn't even produce or traffic significant amounts of illicit drugs. In reality, much of the cruelty and harm globally is coming from the US. The Trump government and the US elites are the ones committing human rights violations, shirking democracy by orchestrating coups like the one on Saturday morning, violating international law and destroying moral decency with the extrajudicial killing of people in Venezuelan boats under the pretext of opposing drug trafficking. With Saturday's attack, the US furthers its and Israel's impunity for war crimes, abuses, and violations.Keep ReadingShow Less
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