Category: governance

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US and Israel gone rogue.

First the US kidnaps the president of a sovereign state after killing more than a score of civilians on the open seas without warrant or evidence of wrongdoing. Now it kills the head of state and supreme religious leader of another sovereign country, teaming up with a regime credibly accused of committing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank in order to do so. Whatever one may think of the individuals and regimes targeted (I happen to not be a fan of either) or the narrative spin given by Western governments and media, the selective unilateral application of force without international approval in the absence of imminent threat from either country demonstrates two things: 1) the US and Israel have gone rogue; and 2) in doing so they have set a dangerous precedent for others to follow suit (think China with regard to Taiwan).  That this act of belligerence is taken in part as a “wag the dog” diversion from Trump’s Epstein and domestic policy problems as well as Netanyahu’s legal troubles only makes the matter worse.

It also reinforces a core notion of nuclear deterrence theory: having nuclear weapons deters attacks. North Korea, China and Russia are all despotic but nuclear armed. They are not attacked by other nuclear states (and for those who might raise the issue, Ukrainian strikes on Russia are retaliatory and limited). Pakistan and India are nuclear armed but limit their military encounters vis a vis each other to conventional weapons. Same with Pakistan and Afghanistan–their conflict is limited to guerilla and conventional exchanges. Israel has nukes so is not subject to full scale attacks, again, just limited and often unconventional sporadic strikes by missiles and guerrillas/terrorists. 

But Venezuela and Iran are not nuclear armed (even if the latter is trying to develop that capability for the reasons described here), so they are attacked with impunity. This confirms the deterrent value of even a small number of deliverable nuclear weapons, including so-called “dirty” bombs. Even just having one any day will keep full scale aggressors away.

Whatever the outcome of the US/Israeli attacks on Iran both short- and long-term, and in spite of the Western media fascination with war and weapons porn, things seem poised to get worse as a result. Iran has limited experience with democracy (and the CIA helped orchestrate a coup against its last democratically-elected president in the early 1950s), so even if Mossad and the CIA are organizing post-conflict political forces to replace the theocratic regime, there is no guarantee that what follows will be democratic (and if people think that the Shah Reza Pahlavi’s son living in LA is the answer, they are sorely mistaken). Plus, Iran’s scattershot military response against Gulf States is designed to inflame the Sunni/Shiite divisions within them as well as anti-US and anti-Israel sentiment. That could spell trouble for the  Western-backed sultanistic dictatorships that control them (none of the Arab Gulf States are democratic, which makes the hypocrisy of US rhetoric justifying its aggression against Iran and Venezuela more obvious. Especially when Trump honors and does business with Saudi prince Mohammed bin-Salman, who ordered the murder of US citizen and Washington Post columnist Jamal Kashoggi in 2018 ). Moreover, Iran and its proxies have cells in many foreign countries, including the US, which will now be likely activated because of the egregious nature of the preventative and/or regime change-focused war of opportunity (as opposed to a war of necessity) unleashed upon it.

As for the response inside Iran, it is difficult to ascertain. Even with Mossad/CIA agitators in place, Persian nationalism and anti-interventionist sentiment against “the Great Satan” and “Zionist Entity” may prove a significant obstacle to installing a pro-Western regime. The Revolutionary Guards can clearly see that they have nothing left to lose by doubling down on their hardline response to the US and Israeli calls for an uprising and coup, and relying on airpower alone will not allow the US and Israel to impose their political will on Iranian society (which besides the usual rural-urban divides also includes religious hardline and moderate divisions, modern secular elements versus cultural traditionalists, educated versus uneducated sectors, gender divisions, etc.). In other words, while prudent from a US/Israeli perspective, the “no boots on the ground” approach may be insufficient to enforce regime change on Iranian society even if the new regime is autocratic as well. That leaves the field for other actors to get involved, even if in surreptitious ways.

In the previous KP post, I spoke of the death knell of liberal internationalism exemplified by the Epstein client list. Now, with the US and Israel having gone rogue, we witness the demise of Westphalian principles like respect for sovereignty amongst nation-states, to say nothing of concepts like jus ad bellum (reasons for war). On top of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, Israel’s scorched earth approach to its fight against Palestinians and unlawful aggression at home and abroad by a number of other regimes around the world, the package of precedents being opened up is ominous for world peace and international order.

Time to button up and batten down.

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Dark Parallels.

Here is a thought that I originally posted as social media commentary:

The Epstein client list epitomises the decline of liberal internationalism. The list is a who’s who of (mostly Western) liberal internationalist leaders: billionaires, bankers, Silicon Valley tech moguls, athletes, academics, royalty, fashion entrepreneurs, politicians, philanthropists, diplomats, former presidents and prime ministers, special envoys, international organization leaders, sundry oligarchs and industrial magnates, etc. Other than some decadent Arabs, no tin-pot Latin American, African or Asian dictators are to be found amongst them. They were/are a E Suite aggregation and living embodiment of the liberal international order taken to excess, a epiphenomenal reflection of the institutional decay that infected the entire postcolonial, post WW2 edifice once the Cold War ended.

They traded in money, power, status, influence and darker things. It was their step into darkness that toppled them. Otherwise they would still be networking as usual and their sordid hypocrisy–enlightened and rationalist on the outside, greedy, privileged and perverted on the inside– continue unabated. Theirs was a culture of impunity destroyed by venal over-reach.

Likewise, liberal internationalism as a global ordering device fell due to its own internal decay, corruption, sclerosis and contradictions, not from the actions of external actors (although some may have pushed from the margins). The behaviour of liberal institutions like the World Bank, IMF, WEF and assorted subject and regionally focused agencies belied their ostensible universalist and humanitarian goals. In other words, the downfall of liberal internationalism is self-induced. That includes democratic governance in the West, which has been in decline for well over a decade due to its lack of responsiveness to public demands and capture by elite-driven special interests.

Like the Epstein investigation, the post-liberal international order must begin with an evaluation of its institutional architecture and the flaws inherent in it. From that can come an improved edifice better prepared to confront the global challenges that lie ahead in a more equitable and inclusive fashion. Because in an age of AI, robotics and nanotechnological crossover that knows no national borders and where post-industrial knowledge economies are the wave of the future where the privilege of Empire no longer applies, an International system made for and by Anglo-Saxon white males no longer is suited for, much less capable of dominating, the demands and pressures emanating from those who are not part of that demographic. In a time in history where things like climate change impacts and commercial and military use of space and deep sea environments are tangible and real, there is urgency to the needs for institutional transition.

Hint: the interests of the Global South (understood as a post-colonial ideological construct, not a geographic designation) need to be accommodated in a more equitable honest way.

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Veil of hypocrisy, lifted.

As I think about how to frame the opening episode of the relaunched “A View from Afar” podcast next week, I find myself wondering about silver linings. The current international moment is very dark and the end of the liberal order is nearing, but surely there must be some good shining amid the gloom. I think I have found one such glimmer, perhaps not of hope but of honesty in how one country represents itself before the world–and perhaps by extension, how the West sees or should see itself.

Readers may remember that last year I wrote about Trump believing himself to be the “Great Disruptor” and agent of change in the world. His advisors and acolytes seized on this self-perception to whisper chaos theory-based sweet nothings into his ears about carving out spheres of influence (for the US, in a Western Hemisphere that extends to Greenland) that he is willing to divide up with Russia and the PRC. He believes in annexing the sovereign territory of other states (including Canada), renaming international geographic landmarks (like the Gulf of Mexico), authorising the murder of civilians on the high seas and kidnapping of the authoritarian president of a foreign state on trumped up drug charges while leaving even worse dictators unscathed because they are “friendly,” blockading an island State out of ideological spite, and interfering in the elections of foreign countries by using direct foreign aid as a weapon of reward or retaliation. It does not matter if the view is simplistic, wrong in its theoretical grounding and practical application, and ultimately more of a fever dream than a practicable reality when extended over time, but however deluded it is his belief system and he acts upon it with the complicity of the MAGA/GOP establishment currently in control of the US government. And because the US government wields extraordinary coercive powers, both economic and military, it is dangerous.

It is apparent that Trump’s mental abilities have diminished considerably in recent times, but his advisors continue to blow sunshine up his skirt and oil him with grandiose ideas that are designed to stroke his ego, promote his brand and enlarge his bank accounts while serving their overlapped agendas (Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and Peter Navarro are notable in this regard). From what I can discern, they encourage him to free range when it comes to speaking at domestic political rallies and campaign events, but then urge his caregivers to lace him up with the mother of all pharmaceutical cocktails when he has to give speeches to serious audiences such as foreign diplomats, business magnates and international statesmen in global fora. When compared with the stream of consciousness rants that he uses on domestic partisan audiences, with some exceptions his tone at these international meetings becomes more subdued, he speaks in a monotone, behaves semi-civilly and generally gives the appearance of situational detachment from the realities of the moment and consequences of what he is saying. If only we were to have access to his medication list and schedule!

Returning to the glimmer of light, it begins in darkness. It turns out that the US is indeed the core of the international system and Trump is the vortex that is drawing the old order into the black hole of systemic dissolution. One only needs to see the Trump ripple effects–he is the rock thrown into the centre of the global pond–to acknowledge his impact on domestic politics and international relations across the world. He is a malignant, evil force but he is also an irresistible object, a rip tide of ignorance, banality, self-interested corruption and narcissism using US power as the current against which all other global actors must now sink or swim. Fortunately, although undeniably strong, his hubristic ignorance weakens the US gravitational pull on the world scene.

There is good in this. For nearly a century the US has claimed to be the leader of the “free” world, the champion of democracy, upholder of human rights and defender of the innocent, weak and powerless. The reality is that it is a nation-state founded on racist beliefs standing on stolen lands by white property (and slave) owning men, using laws and institutions that promoted patriarchical heterosexist privilege over everything else. It took a civil war to abolish slavery and then another century to enact the Civil Rights Act that granted “equal” status to African Americans. It took over fifty years before females of age earned the right to vote, and long after that restrictions on the franchise remained in place (like poll taxes, residency and language requirements, forfeiture of voting rights due to criminal convictions even if for minor offences, etc. ). It systematically discriminated against waves of immigrants, be the Italian, Irish, Asian, Mexican and now those coming from the African and Latin American diaspora. It pushed indigenous tribes off their lands and onto reservations. Forced segregation was replaced by self-segregation, which is still a thing in many places. So is socioeconomic class stratification, gerrymandering, voter suppression (much more than fraud) and deliberate dumbing down of and distraction from obvious social contradictions on the part of the public majority. One percent of the population control eighty percent of the wealth. Christian nationalist-fascism, long thought to be on the wane, has a stranglehold on one side of the US ideological divide and skews public debates about cultural mores and social ethics. And yet the US public still believes, or at least until Trump entered office, to be living in the land of the free and home of the brave.

What is good is that Trump has ripped the veil off of that foundational myth. He has revealed the US for what it is even if he and others do not want to admit it: a venal, bloated, self-absorbed authoritarian husk of a democratic Great Power. It never was any of things that it claimed to be but for a while it at least tried to improve or pretended to be better than it was, harking to the idealism of some of its founders who held a belief in the perfectibility of humankind. It took time and struggle, but the myth tells us that the US was getting better as a society and as a political construct. But it never was and now certainly is not a truly liberal democracy. Yet it took Trump to debunk the myth.

The myth was, if not a lie, more of a pipe dream than an achievable reality. So it is good that Trump has exposed the true nature of US society and better yet, rendered transparent the contradictions and fractures that undermine its increasingly brittle institutional edifice. Or to paraphrase my father, “when the wanna-be dictator starts naming everything after himself and painting everything in gold leaf, he reveals his true intent.”

The same applies to US foreign relations. It is the core of the international system, but that was the OLD liberal internationalist order that is currently being destroyed by the gravitational pull of the Trump dark hole. Again, the US used to claim that it was the “leader of the free world” etc., but today it is anything but. It is a neo-imperialist declining Great Power, once hegemonic after the Cold War but now more like an old athlete shouting “I used to be somebody” into the winds of time. The US has broken the global order but it is incapable of dominating what comes next. It is more akin to the death grasp of a drowning man, locked into a hopeless situation beyond its control and overcome by circumstance of its own and other’s making. So it thrashes about as it slips under, pulling anything it can get a hold of down with it. It now has the liberal internationalist order in its grasp.

Over the short term, as I have written at some length before, a declining Great Power is dangerous. It is more likely to start wars in order to preserve its position in the global status quo. But declining powers may be able to start wars but then are unable to finish them on their preferred terms. Instead, they are defeated by rising powers or, in what appears to be crystallising at the moment in response to Trump’s foreign policy adventurism, a polycentric constellation of established and emerging technopoles rooted in the Global South that use soft power as a counter-weight to US bullying. This is more than the BRICS and although critical minerals are the new gold of world technological economies, it is knowledge economies, knowledge production and commodified knowledge accumulation that will fuel the growth of the Global South and the ascendent Great Powers coming from within it.

The US is too socially divided, too inward-looking, too partisanly governed, too corrupt and too incompetent as political managers to meet the challenges of the emerging polycentric technopolar world. It lives on grievance, internal culture wars, fabricated problems, selectively applied situational ethics, denial of responsibility, contrived outrage and clickbait self-absorption in a culture where “influencers” are given more respect than neuroscientists and astrophysicists, and where modern bread and circus acts have replaced the fine arts as the currency of popular culture. All of this is epitomised by the MAGA regime.

Thanks to Trump, all of that is now made transparent. There is no pretence of “public interest” or “commonweal,” just naked self-interest, transactional bartering, bullying and opportunism posing as government for both domestic and foreign audiences. We finally see the US, or at least that part that is MAGA in orientation, for what it really is.

So it is that with Trump lifting the veil of hypocrisy from the self-proclaimed US position, we can now fully see that it is a two sided coin where the domestic side is marked by increased prejudice and avaricious authoritarianism and the foreign side is overtly neo- imperialist. There are certainly many decent people fighting against this in the US, but the dye has been cast and neither the US or the international system will be the same once Trump has left the scene. That should give the rest of the world pause to reflect on what might constitute a post-liberal world order and perhaps for some in the post-imperial West to draw parallels between themselves and the giant in its decline.

“A View from Afar” podcast relaunch: Monday February 23, 12PM noon NZ time/Sunday February 22, 6PM US East Coast time.

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Media Link: “A View from Afar” returns.

For those who may be interested, my buddy Selwyn Manning and I have decided to revive the “A View from Afar” podcast next week.

There is so much going on in the world the days, most of it bad sad to say, but our geopolitical angle perched down in the deep South Pacific may be different than some other perspectives for those who live in other parts of the world (and perhaps surprising to some who live in this neck of the woods)..

The show airs Monday February 23 at 12:00PM NZ time and Sunday February 22 6:00PM US East Coast time. It streams live on YouTube and various streaming platforms and then will be on demand. Just look for the title of the show wherever you listen/watch podcasts.

The first show highlights the death knell of the liberal international order and the US role in ringing that bell. Here is a summary tease of what is in store:

“The sad fact, though, is that the US is the center of our earthly geopolitical universe, serving as the first rock to drop in the global pond whose ripple effects are extensive, negative, and washing up in unexpected and unforeseen ways. That rock, in fact, is a black hole sucking the remnants of the rules-based order into oblivion, or if not oblivion, irrelevance in a new age of power politics (might makes right, etc.). It is a dark force from which things as they exist cannot return.”

See you then!

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Acquiescence is not consent, or a basis for rule.

As a follow up to my previous post (and harkening to a regular theme in my writing), consider this:

Used as the basis for authority, repression obeys a form of Newtonian Law: it wanes over time. You cannot repress the same amount of people with the same amount of force forever. Their numbers will grow and your ability to repress will drop unless you further increase the use of force. That only aggravates the situation. If the only response to dissent is more and wider repression, then less people have something to lose, even if it is their fear.

Repression must be justified ideologically and accepted by the majority for it to work as an instrument of social control. In other words, using mass repression without commensurate public consent is a brittle club. Despots try to shape narratives via lies, disinformation and propaganda in order to alter that inescapable fact, but the truth is that partisan spin or silence may obscure reality–what our eyes have seen and our ears have heard–but they can never replace it. It forms a memory that cannot be erased even if suppressed or delayed in its activation. It is the memory of what is and was real that forms the conscious basis of mass contingent consent (contingent because we do not give consent once, forever, to any given leader, government or administration).

That is why public acquiescence does not equal popular consent. That former is a short-term solution, born of silence and submission to superior physical force. The latter is the basis for political legitimacy and stable democratic rule. One is temporary, designed to break resistance to or reinforce a particular political project. The other is long-term in orientation even if contingent on material and social expectations being met.

Trump and co. appear to not understand this basic axiom and in fact seem blind to it given their slanderous and false accounts of the ICE murders in MN. This augers poorly for their longer-term prospects.

That gives me a basis for hope.

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Some observations about state violence leading to state terrorism.

A long time ago I wrote a scholarly article about the use of state terror during the Argentine “Proceso” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2111080).

Seeing what is happening in the US, I thought I would reference a few things from that article. First: state terror thrives in cultures of impunity. That is, where government authorities believe that they are immune from prosecution for criminal acts that they order or undertake, especially when they occupy the justice system and control the courts. The good news is that such a sense of impunity often leads them to eventually over-reach and make mistakes that cause their downfall.

Second, as with all forms of terrorism state terror follows a target–subject–object logic. Individuals and groups are targeted with state violence. The subject is the larger audience that witness state violence either directly or indirectly (via the media, word of mouth, etc.). The object is to intimidate the subject audience into submitting to the State’s authority, however illegally it is exercised.

Specifically, the object is to atomise and infantilize the body politic and society at large. “Atomization” means the forced breakup of collective identities and solidarity bonds, where people retreat into their own personal lives rather than risk being targeted by the State because of their collective ties to other social groups. They mind their own business, look away, do not make waves and certainly do not publicly confront the agents of repression even by peaceful non-violent means.

“Infantilization” refers to the forced loss of personal agency, where people are psychologically reduced to the level of a child’s nightmare because of what they are living, where monsters are real and have impunity when committing monstrous acts.

It may seem a stretch to say so right now, but the state violence being meted out by ICE and other US federal agencies against both citizen and non-citizen members of the public seems to lie on a continuum that inevitably culminates in state terrorism. The MAGA administration’s double-down response to ICE killings suggests that is where they are prepared to go.

The only answer to this is mass collective resistance, using the legal avenues and social networks available to people in spite of official judicial and extra-judicial retribution. There must be a groundswell of authentic grassroots push-back in spite of the inevitable dangers this poses to people’s lives and livelihoods.

I do not think that the US has reached the level of the state terror experiment of the “Proceso.” No yet. But the mindset of those in power–the demonisation of opponents as “communists” and un-American/anti-American “wokesters,” the gaslight of the public by officials saying that what people have seen with their own eyes is not true, that victims of state violence brought it on themselves and perpetrators of state violence are justified in their acts because it is making the country safe from criminal “aliens” and their treasonous native-born supporters–is very much the same (and in the cases of Stephen Miller, Greg Bovino and Kristi Noem, might as well be right out of central casting for a movie about the 3rd Reich). To reiterate, the US is on a continuum of violence when it comes to its increasingly authoritarian trajectory, and state terrorism is the culmination of that continuum.

I hope that my US whanau think about this as they go about their lives far from the front lines of Minneapolis, Chicago and other blue front-line states (because ICE is focusing its repression on Democrat-supportive states and cities, not Red GOP-supportive electorates). Just because one is not targeted now does not mean that one will never be.

And as the saying goes, if you wait until they come for you, it will be too late.

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The Mad King.

Two things stand out in that crazy note that Trump sent the Norwegian Prime Minister. And no, it is not the reference to “the boat landing” and claim that there is a lack of formal documentation of any agreement about jurisdictional  control of Greenland (it turns out that there is, including a 1917 convention swapping recognition of Danish control over Greenland in exchange for US possession of what were then known as the Danish West Indies–now the US Virgin Islands–and a 1951 “Defense of Greenland” pact granting the US exclusive military basing rights on the island).

Nope.

It is the fact that 1) Trump believes that the Norwegian government controls awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize. Besides the unhinged obsession with winning the Nobel Peace Prize and the lies about ending eight (?) wars (?), Trump seems to think that because the Nobel Awards Committee is located in Oslo and committee members are selected by parliament, the Norwegian government somehow “controls” it. This is like saying that the US government controls the Academy Awards because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) is located in Los Angeles and receives (well, used to receive) federal funding. Then he goes onto say that because the Norwegian government did not give him the prize, he is no longer interested in peace. WTF?

2) He seems to think that Norway either controls Greenland or has influence over Denmark’s policies regarding Greenland. Greenland is an autonomous (self-governing) territory of Denmark, like the Cook Islands are for NZ or New Caledonia is for France. Norway is not Denmark and has no control over Greenland or its relationship with Denmark.

That suggests that Trump is an ignorant buffoon of the highest order–maybe there is Legion of Honor equivalent prize for that, akin to a First Class Darwin Award–or he operates in a sardonic alternate reality-turned–parallel universe where he can make threats and issue ultimatums devoid of practical, diplomatic, legal or moral grounding. This has moved from being a case of unbridled narcissism into an instance of madness, be it a product of old age, medications, unchecked ego or a combination thereof, all enabled and encouraged by a coterie of cynical and sociopathic advisors, political allies and partisan media hacks.

Time to put him out to pasture, because any way you look at it, he ain’t all there. He has become a destabilizing danger to both the world system as well as to the US itself (I will refrain from commenting on his domestic policies here but they are also malevolently and destabilizingly nuts). Although JD Vance may step into the role of POTUS, he will not have the cult-like hold on the MAGA base that the madman has and will be challenged in any event by rivals who are already lining up to take a run at the presidency in 2028. Meanwhile, the current MAGA entourage will turn on each other and/or disperse like rats.

It could get bad, but it cannot get worse than what we have now.

Time for Article 25 and if not, impeachment yet again.

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Media Link: Pablo on ICE.

In light of the shooting in Minneapolis this past week of an unarmed woman by an ICE agent, I put on my formal “security analyst” hat for an on-line interview with Radio New Zealand on what the US security agency ICE is and does. I think that the RNZ explainer does a good job of outlining the basics regarding its scope of authority and powers. Let’s just say that they are broad.

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Military Extortion as Coercive Diplomacy (UPDATED).

The lethal theatre of the absurd that has been the Trump administration’s sabre rattling performances in the Central American basin over the last few months culminated with the military attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president and his wife in the early hours of Saturday morning, Caracas time. The tactical precision of the special operation was excellent, efficient and low cost when it came to human lives. While the exact number of Venezuelan casualties are yet unknown (although there have been reports of dozens killed, including Cubans), US forces suffered eight injuries and although some of the helicopters deployed suffered shrapnel damage, all assets returned to base safely. From a military tactical standpoint, the operation was a success and a demonstration of capability.

Even so, the broader picture is more complicated and therefore less straightforward when it comes to assessing the aftermath. Here I shall break down some of the main take-aways so far.

The strike on Venezuela was interesting because it was a hybrid decapitation and intimidation strike. Although US forces attacked military installations in support of the raid (such as by destroying air defence batteries), they only went after Maduro and his wife using their specialist Delta Force teams. That is unusual because most decapitation strikes attempt to remove the entire leadership cadres of the targeted regime, indulging its civilian and military leadership. They also involve seizing ports and airfields to limit adversary movements as well as the main means of communications, such as TV and radio stations, in order to control information flows during and after the event. The last thing that the attacker wants is for the target regime to retain its organizational shape and ability to continue to govern and, most importantly, mount an organised resistance to the armed attackers. This is what the Russians attempted to do with their assault on Kiev in February 2023.

That did not happen in this instance. Instead, the US left the entirety of the Bolivarian regime intact, including its military leadership and civilian authorities. Given reports of CIA infiltration of Venezuela in the months prior to the attack and the muted Venezuelan response to it, it is likely that US agents were in “backdoor” contact with members of the Bolivarian elite before the event, providing assurances and perhaps security guarantees to them (amnesty or non-prosecution for crimes committed while in power) in order to weaken their resistance to the US move. US intelligence may have detected fractures or weakness in the regime and worked behind Maduro’s back to assure wavering Bolivarians that they would not be blamed for his sins and would be treated separately and differently from him.

This might explain Vice President Delcy Rodriguez’s promise to “cooperate” with the US. That remains to be seen but other Bolivarian figures like Interior Minister Diosdaro Cabello and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez, notorious for their leadership of Maduro’s repressive apparatus, may not be similarly inclined given that their post-Maduro treatment is likely to be very different–and they still may have control over and the loyalty of many of the people under their commands.

Trump says that the US “will run” the country for the foreseeable future until a regime transition scenario is developed, but in light of the limited nature of the military operation, it is unclear how the US proposes to do so. What is clear is that the US had real time intelligence from the CIA and perhaps regime insiders that allowed them to track and isolate Maduro in a moment of vulnerability. Ironically, for Maduro this proved fortunate, because given the surveillance that he was subjected to, any attempt to escape Caracas could have resulted in his death by drone. Instead, he and his wife get to be a guest of the US federal justice system.

(As an aside, it is noteworthy that the Maduro’s were indicted on cocaine trafficking charges and possessions of machine guns. No mention is mentioned in the indictments of fentanyl, the justification for the extra-judicial killings of civilians at sea by US forces and one of the initial excuses for attacking Venezuela itself (the so-called “fentanyl shipment facilities”). Possession of machine guns is not a crime in Venezuela, certainly not by a sitting leader facing constant violent threats from abroad. So the US is basically charging them with unlicensed firearms violations in the US rather than in Venezuela–where it has no jurisdiction–even though they do not reside there while switching the basis for the kidnapping from a fictitious accusation to something that may have more evidentiary substance. But in truth, the legal proceedings against the Maduros are no more than a fig leaf on the real reasons for their extraordinary rendition).

Even if limited in nature as a decapitation strike, the immediate result of the US use of force is intimidation of the remaining Bolivarians in government. Unless they regroup and organise some form of mass resistance using guerrilla/irregular warfare tactics, thereby forcing the US to put boots on the ground in order to subdue the insurgents (and raising the physical and political costs of the venture), at some point the post-Maduro Bolivarians will be forced to accept power-sharing with or replacement by the US backed opposition via eventual elections, and as Trump has indicated, the US will take control of Venezuelan oil assets (in theory at least). In his words: “they (US oil companies) will make a lot of money.” For this to happen the US will maintain its military presence in the Caribbean and adjacent land bases, in what Marco Rubio calls “leverage” in case the Venezuelans do not comply as demanded. This is coercive diplomacy in its starkest form.

Put bluntly, this is an extorsion racket with the US military being used as the muscle with which to heavy the Bolivarians and bring them to heel. In light of Trump’s and the US’s past records, this should not be surprising. The question is, has the US read the situation correctly? Are the Bolivarians ao much disliked that the country will turn against them in droves and support an ongoing US presence in the country? Is the military and civilian leadership so weak or incompetent that they cannot rule without Maduro and need the US for basic governmental functioning (which is what the US appears to believe)? Have all of the gains made by lower class Venezuelans been eroded by Maduro’s corruption to the point that a reversal of the Bolivarian policy agenda in whole or in part is feasible? Will average Venezuelans, while thankful for the departure of the despot, accept abject subordination to the US and its puppets? Or will Cuban and Russian-backed civilian militias and elements in the armed forces retreat into guerrilla warfare. thereby forcing the US into a prolonged occupation without a clear exist strategy (i.e. deja vu all over again)?

There are some interesting twists to the emerging story. Maria Corina Machado, the CIA-backed opposition figure-turned-Nobel Peace Prize winner, has positioned herself to be the power behind the throne for Maduro’s heir apparent, Edmundo Gonzalez, who most election observers believe won the 2024 presidential elections but was denied office due to Maduro’s clearly fraudulent manipulation of the vote count. But Trump says that she “is not ready” and does not have the ” support” or “respect” within Venezuela to run the country. This seems to be code words for “too independent-minded” or “not enough of a puppet” (or even “female”) for Trump, who seems unaware of how a close overt association between his administration and any potential future Venezuelan leader may receive mixed reactions at home and abroad. In any event, sidelining Machado could have some unexpected repercussions.

Then there is the issue of how the US and its Venezuelan allies propose to purge the country of foreign actors like Hezbollah, Russians, Cubans and most importantly from an economic standpoint, the Chinese. Rounding up security operatives is one thing (although even that will not be easy given their levels of experience and preparation); dispossessing Chinese investors of their Venezuelan assets is a very different kettle of fish So far none of this appears to have been thought out in a measure similar to the planning of the military raid itself.

Finally, Trump’s claims that Venezuela “stole” US oil is preposterous. In 1976 a nationalisation decree was signed between the Venezuelan government–a democracy–and US oil companies where Venezuela gained control of the land on which oil facilities were located and received a percentage of profits from them while the private firms continued to staff and maintain the facilities in exchange for sharing profits (retaining a majority share) and paying sightly more in taxes. That situation remained intact until the 1990s, when a series of market-oriented reforms were introduced into the industry that loosened State management over it. After Hugo Chavez was elected president in 1998 on his Bolivarian platform, that arrangement continued for a short time until 2001 when the Organic Hydrocarbon Law was reformed in order to re-assert State control and foreign firms began withdrawing their skilled labor personnel and some of their equipment when taxes were increased on them. By 2013 the oil infrastructure was decrepit and lacking in skilled workers to staff what facilities are still operating, so Chavez (by then on his death bed) expropriated the remaining private holdings in the industry.

This was clearly unwise but it was not illegal and certainly was not a case of stealing anything. Moreover, the Venezuelan oil industry limped along with help from Bolivarian allies like the PRC and Russia because it is the country’s economic lifeline (and cash cow for the political elite dating back decades). So it is neither stolen or completely collapsed. As with many other things, the complexities of the matter appear to be unknown to or disregarded by Trump in favour of his own version of the “facts.”

Regardless, the PRC and Russia have stepped into the breech and invested in Venezuela’s oil industry with people and equipment. They may resist displacement or drive a hard bargain to be bought out. It will therefore not be as simple as Trump claims it to be for US firms to return and “make a lot of money” from Venezuelan oil.

It is these and myriad other “after entry” (to use a trade negotiator’s term) problems that will make or break the post-Maduro regime, whatever its composition. In the US the word is that the US “broke it so now owns it,” but the US will never do that. It has seldom lived up to its promises to its erstwhile allies in difficult and complex political cultures that it does not understand. It has a very short attention span, reinforced by domestic election cycles where foreign affairs is of secondary importance. So it is easily manipulated by opportunists and grifters seeking to capitalise on US military, political and economic support in order to advance their own fortunes (some would say this of the MAGA administration itself). If this sounds familiar it is because it is a very real syndrome of and pathology in US foreign affairs: focus on the military side of the equation, conduct kinetic operations, then try to figure out what else to do (nation-build? keep the peace? broker a deal amongst antagonistic locals?) rather than simply declare victory and depart. Instead, the US eventually leaves on terms dictated by others and with destruction in its wake.

One thing that should be obvious is that for all the jingoistic flag-waving amongst US conservatives and Venezuelan exiles, their problems when it comes to Venezuela may just have started. Because now they “own” what is to come, and if what comes is not the peace and prosperity promised by Trump, Rubio, Machado and others, then that is when things will start to get real. “Real” as in Great Power regional conflict real, because launching a war of opportunity on Venezuela in the current geopolitical context invites responses in kind from adversaries elsewhere that the US is ill-equipped to respond to, much less control.

The precedent has been set and somewhere, perhaps in more than one theatre, the invitation to reply is open.

Stay tuned and watch this space.