On the third day of the new year 2026, the United States carried out an efficient and media-spectacular police-intelligence operation: the abduction of Venezuela’s sitting president, Nicolás Maduro. In this text, I will not enter into an analysis of how the operation was carried out, since available information is still scarce and the author of these lines is not a security expert. What is relevant for the geopolitical assessment of this act— to which this article is devoted—are the facts that already clearly show that the success of the operation was facilitated not only by effective CIA intelligence work, made possible primarily by the use of the most modern digital and communication technologies, but also, and perhaps even more so, by betrayal within the president of Venezuela’s closest circle.
HIGH TREASON AT THE TOP OF THE BOLIVARIAN REGIME
The content of the latest decree—approved on January 5 by Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, under conditions of a 90-day state of emergency and general mobilization—clearly points to betrayal within the upper ranks of the Bolivarian regime. Namely, this decree orders national, regional, and local police forces to immediately begin searching for and detaining all individuals who were accomplices in the United States’ armed attack on Venezuela. This is nothing less than an admission from the very top of the Bolivarian leadership that an act of high treason has been committed.
Whether the traitors—who can, with good reason, be assumed to belong to the highest military and civilian structures of the regime—will be identified and arrested depends on the course Maduro’s successors ultimately take toward the United States. From the statement delivered by Venezuela’s ambassador at the UN Security Council session on January 5—where he unequivocally qualified the January 3 U.S. action as an act of aggression against a sovereign state—it could be inferred that large-scale arrests of U.S. collaborators in Venezuela may follow.
On the other hand, given the circumstances in which the country now finds itself, the ambassador’s statement at the Security Council does not necessarily imply that all actors who make up the national leadership are in consensus about this position.
THE DECISION WAS MADE BEFORE THE ALASKA MEETING
If it is still too early to assess the future political course of the Venezuelan authorities, it does not seem too early to assess certain aspects of Trump’s decision to carry out aggression against Venezuela.
The latest decision to forcibly remove Maduro was, by all indications, made in July 2025. On July 25, the U.S. OFAC added the alleged Cartel de los Soles to its list of terrorist organizations and officially designated Maduro as the leader of that narcotics cartel—whose very existence had been disputed even by former senior White House officials and researchers from the International Crisis Group. Shortly thereafter, on August 8, the U.S. Attorney General doubled the reward for information leading to the arrest of Venezuela’s president—from 25 to 50 million dollars.
Since these decisions by U.S. authorities were made before the Trump–Putin meeting in Anchorage on August 15, 2025, it is clear that there was no agreement between the two leaders on dividing spheres of influence—something suggested by a recent Reuters analysis, evidently aimed at sending a message of Russian “treachery” to the Kremlin’s close foreign policy partners. Instead, it has become clear that Washington, on the one hand, conducts negotiations about an alleged relaxation of relations with Moscow, while on the other hand simultaneously seeks to expand its influence at the expense of both Russia and China.
A CINEMATIC KIDNAPPING AHEAD OF THE 2026 ELECTIONS
Although the decision for a final violent showdown with Maduro was, by all indications, made within Trump’s team before launching the negotiation process with Russia—as part of a broader American plan to use the war in Ukraine to push Russia and China out of key global geostrategic points—the timing of the spectacular final phase of its execution was certainly influenced by Trump’s most recent failure to persuade Putin to accept a version of the peace agreement that, in strategic terms, would have amounted to a defeat for Russia.
For while Trump boasted about allegedly ending eight wars successfully, his main foreign-policy campaign promise was to bring about an astonishingly rapid end to the war in Ukraine—a war “inherited,” as he liked to claim, from the unreasonable Biden. When, in November 2025, it became clear that there would be no quick peace in Ukraine, something was needed to boost his rapidly collapsing approval rating ahead of the 2026 midterm congressional elections.
A cinematic-style operation—the kidnapping of the “notorious” Maduro—was tailor-made for such a purpose. Of course, beyond appealing to voters, Trump had an even stronger motive: to draw powerful U.S. energy companies more firmly to his side by opening their access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.
SAVING THE REPUTATION OF AMERICAN MILITARY POWER
By the end of 2025, the United States’ global reputation was no better than Trump’s domestic approval rating. The attempt at revenge in Syria—for the blows that Russia delivered to the former world hegemon in 2008 (Abkhazia and South Ossetia), 2014 (Crimea), and 2022 (the Special Military Operation)—was only partially successful, since the Kremlin managed to establish relations with the new Syrian regime and preserve its military bases in this strategically important Mediterranean country. The humiliation of the U.S. Army after its withdrawal from Afghanistan was further compounded during almost two years of operations in the Red Sea against Iran-aligned Houthis in Yemen. Between 2023 and 2025, the Americans lost three naval fighter jets launched from the aircraft carrier Truman.
The reputation of American military power was finally improved in June 2025 during the “Midnight Hammer” airstrike campaign against Iran. Yet because this attack did not result in the fall of the regime in Tehran, the demonstration of U.S. force ultimately had only a limited effect. Meanwhile, the refusal of America’s chief rival—China—as well as India, Turkey, and numerous Arab, Asian, and African states to join the sanctions against Russia further eroded the standing of the former global hegemon. After all this, the Kremlin made it clear to the White House at the end of 2025 that Russia would accept only a peace agreement that established a firm international-legal foundation for changing the very paradigm on which global relations had rested since the early 1990s.
MADURO ASSIGNED THE ROLE OF MANUEL NORIEGA
The American response to such a Russian position—along with the accelerated erosion of Washington’s own foreign-policy and military authority—arrived on January 3 in the form of a remake in which Trump assumed the former role of George H. W. Bush, while Nicolás Maduro was cast in the former role of Panamanian military junta leader Manuel Noriega.
Not only was Noriega captured by U.S. soldiers on January 3, 1990, and taken to the United States, where he was sentenced to 40 years in prison—among other things, for drug trafficking (while the Nicaraguan dictator and drug trafficker Anastasio Somoza enjoyed U.S. protection)—but the American aggression against Panama (“Operation Just Cause”) began barely fifteen days after the well-known Malta summit between Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush.
The Malta summit (December 2–3, 1989) will be remembered as the event that dismantled the post-war Yalta–Potsdam order in Europe and the Soviet Union’s place within it. During the two-day summit, the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee unilaterally renounced all geopolitical influence in the countries of Eastern Europe—after which West and East Germany united—all in exchange for the USSR’s entry into GATT, the precursor of the World Trade Organization, and for concluding the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the United States.
PUTIN IS NOT GORBACHEV
What makes Trump’s abduction of Maduro fundamentally different, from a geopolitical standpoint, from Bush’s capture of Noriega is the fact that in December 2025 Putin did not agree to a “peaceful” relaxation with the United States of the kind Mikhail Gorbachev accepted in December 1989.
Given the current global geopolitical context, it would be more accurate to say that Trump’s spectacular abduction of Maduro and his attempt to install a puppet regime in Venezuela—aimed primarily at expelling Chinese and, subsequently, Russian and Iranian investments and political presence from this South American country—strongly resembles the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. That intervention began in December 1979 with a highly spectacular 40-minute KGB special-forces operation during which the residence of the then pro-American Afghan president Hafizullah Amin was seized and Amin himself was killed.
Today, Trump is attempting to push China, Russia, and Iran out of the jungles and oil fields of Venezuela, whereas in 1979—when the USSR launched its invasion of Afghanistan—Iran and China were aligned with the United States. One of the main reasons for the failure of the Soviet Union’s ten-year military intervention in Afghanistan was precisely Moscow’s attempt to arbitrate in a deeply divided Afghan society, fractured along ethnic and social lines, and simultaneously subjected to numerous foreign influences.
THE AMERICAN GAME — THE CHINESE TRUMP CARD
And in its latest analysis, Foreign Affairs warns Washington about the very same trap: taking responsibility for arbitrating among rival factions within a deeply divided and heavily criminalized Venezuelan society. On the other hand, without a constant threat of force—and the actual use of force—Washington can hardly maintain its influence in Venezuela.
However, in circumstances where major Latin American states such as Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico are condemning the American aggression against Caracas, Washington’s reliance on military power, according to the Foreign Affairs analysis, may end up becoming China’s trump card across the entire continent. For China, which plays long-term strategic games, will increasingly be perceived by the local population as the country that “offers development,” while “Washington offers only coercion.”
A WARNING TO THE WESTERN PUBLIC
However, can the White House—given that the United States has no state-owned oil company—actually motivate private corporations to invest, under Venezuelan conditions of legal instability and a lack of reliable security guarantees, $143.7 billion over the next five to seven years into the country’s oil sector, so that production could rise from the current 1.1 million barrels per day (about 1% of global output) to 3.5 million barrels per day, which is how much was extracted in the 1970s? Moreover, the production cost of Venezuelan heavy crude is estimated at $37 to $40 per barrel, roughly the same as the recent market price of light crude on international exchanges. Taking all this into account, Foreign Affairs is not warning the Western public—and especially the American establishment—by accident when it says that “it would be a mistake to confuse drama with resolution,” and that “images of Maduro in U.S. custody create the impression of an ending,” while in reality they mark “the beginning of a much more difficult and dangerous period.”
