This is not regime change as an accidental by-product of
policy failure. It is regime removal as method. The familiar language of
democracy, legality, and human rights is little more than ornamental cover.
Strip it away and the operating logic is brutally clear: discipline the
non-compliant, seize control, and reorder ownership. This is not the breakdown
of the international system; it is the system functioning precisely as
intended.
Venezuela was effectively subdued long before this moment.
Years of sanctions did not merely “pressure” the state; they systematically
dismantled its economic sovereignty. Revenues were strangled, institutions
hollowed out, and governance rendered structurally unworkable. This was not
unintended harm. It was preparation. Economic suffocation created the
conditions in which intervention could later be marketed as inevitable rather
than chosen.
When sanctions failed to produce surrender, political
fiction followed. The US-engineered experiment of Juan Guaidó was not diplomacy
but theater—an attempt to outsource sovereignty without tanks. When even that
farce collapsed, escalation became the only remaining option. Empires do not
retreat when resisted; they recalibrate.
The capture of a sitting president is not law enforcement—it
is a declaration of ownership. By asserting jurisdiction over a foreign head of
state, Washington is not upholding justice; it is asserting hierarchy.
Venezuela is no longer treated as a sovereign political subject but as a
managed space—its leadership provisional, its future externally arbitrated.
This is not international law stretched beyond recognition. It is international
law discarded outright.
Oil is not the subtext of this intervention; it is the text.
Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Governments that
privatize resources on Western terms are tolerated regardless of repression.
Governments that insist on national control are destabilized regardless of
elections. This is not hypocrisy. It is imperial consistency.
Dismissing Latin American resistance as “anti-Americanism”
is willful blindness. From Guatemala and Chile to Panama and Nicaragua, the
pattern is consistent: sanctions, destabilization, leadership removal, resource
realignment. Venezuela fits perfectly—except this time, the mask is off.
This moment should not be personalized. Trump is not the
cause; he is the instrument. The architecture of sanctions, energy interests,
and bipartisan hostility to Venezuelan sovereignty predates him and will
outlast him.
What is being normalized is more dangerous than Venezuela’s
immediate devastation: the idea that sovereignty exists only by imperial
permission, that sanctions are preparatory weapons, and that leaders may be
seized rather than negotiated with. This is colonialism without
occupation—domination without apology.
