The recent decapitation of the Venezuelan regime by the US military is part of a longer history of induced collapse: from Iraq to Afghanistan to Palestine, the techniques of empire have been wielded to destroy societies. But behind the Maduro extradition may be a kind of new American weakness.As you know, Nicolás Maduro and his wife have been kidnapped by the US. The Trump Administration’s explanation for this illegal act has been a heady mix of call-backs to the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, and the longer seam of anti-communism.
Maduro will, per US Attorney General Pam Bondi, face charges for “pushing drugs in the US”. The indictment alleges that he, alongside members of FARC, “participated in a corrupt and violent narco-terrorism conspiracy between the Venezuelan Cartel de Los Soles and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (“FARC”).”
From the War on Drugs, it takes the allegation that Maduro was involved in drug-running into the US, which also somehow constitutes ‘terrorism’. In reality, only around 7% of the cocaine that enters the US is shipped from Venezuela through the Eastern Caribbean, and none of the fentanyl. Terrorism, of course, is a nebulous phenomenon that can be used to justify more or less whatever you want.
Despite having supported it at the time, Trump later called the War in Iraq a “big fat mistake”. Despite this, there is legal continuity with the War on Terror here: the controversially expansive reading of Article II of the American Constitution which was used, most famously by John Yoo, to centralise power in a Unitary Executive during the war and justify the torture campaigns the US ran (Trump has also called for the expansion of the use of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp). This same justification was invoked this morning to authorise military action, although Secretary of State Marco Rubio was at pains to underline in the press conference that the action was carried out by the Department of Justice against “fugitives.”
In the spirit of the War on Terror and the history of anticommunism – such as the 1953 coup in Iran against Mohammad Mosaddegh – the capture of Maduro makes claims on nationalised energy assets. Trump said this morning the US will be “very strongly involved” in the Venezuelan oil industry and would now “run” the country.
This has been a longstanding desire for Trump. Back in 2023, he said “when I left [in 2021], Venezuela was ready to collapse, we would have taken it over. We would have gotten all that oil. It would have been right next door.” Indeed, according to reporting in the New York Times, the US war-gamed situations in which Maduro’s ousting led to the country’s collapse. If the society does, in fact, now collapse, it is unlikely to make ideal conditions for oil extraction.
There is an American oil company, Chevron, which operates in the country, but it’s uncertain that it can maintain the control of its assets if the remnants of the Maduro government survive, presumably headed by either Vice President Delcy Rodríguez or Defence Minister Padrino López. Trump claimed that Rubio and Rodriguez had spoken and that she had agreed to do what they wanted.
Of course, it is all vastly more complicated than that.
This idea is the guiding fantasy of the Trump administration’s current outlook: that they would be able to stop at this point, with a new president, and Venezuela would simply come round to the US’ view. In fact, social power in the country is much more complexly constituted than that would allow for. This fantasy is an outgrowth of the view of Maduro as the head of a criminal gang rather than as an expression of a real, if increasingly weakening, social force that emerged in opposition to the neoliberalism of an earlier era. With Maduro gone, it is not that Venezuela will become a pliant state. It will almost certainly undergo a complex power struggle. In that context, wider intervention will seem almost entirely necessary.
The US has, since at least Obama, relied much more heavily on its special forces than on conventional troops on the ground. The regime’s beheading this morning follows this broader pattern. At his press conference, Trump said that they had also prepared for a second wave of military actions that would be much broader than the first “pinpoint” action. A full-scale invasion would be deeply domestically unpopular, both in the short and longer terms. In my coverage of the 2024 US election, I again and again met Republicans disgusted by Democrats pandering to the ghouls who had beaten the drums of the Forever Wars. However, one shouldn’t discount the idea that the domination of a relatively defenceless opponent could play well with his base. As might lower oil prices.
If a full-scale invasion does take place, then the resultant conflict would be no less complex than Iraq. The US would face a concerted opposition. The Maduro regime was relatively unpopular in the country, but nothing would give fuel to a patriotic insurgency like an occupying American force. The country’s geographic and social terrain is complex and could be beneficial to an insurgency.
If Rodríguez is unable to effectively do what the US wants, there is also the prospect of a colour revolution. María Corina Machado is waiting in the wings, although in his press conference Trump said that they had not spoken to her. Instead, the US would run the country: “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground if we have to have them”. How US control will relate to the present opposition is for now, unclear. Machado has, at the American Business Forum, offered to open up the entire economy – oil, gas, mining, gold, infrastructure, power, and tourism – to outside investment, a process that would surely constitute one of the largest fire sales in history.
Sitting behind all of these jumbled justifications is the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine – which grants the US the power to do as it will in the Americas. Through the 20th century and into the early part of the 21st, this power to act as a global police force, defending the interests of US capital, expanded globally. One current inside the Trump coalition – mostly around Bannon – advocated for pulling back American power from the world to refocus on the Americas.
And other people have taken an interest in the Americas. In an era in which Chinese investment and trade has become more central to the global economy, strikes against Venezuela are, in part, about threatening the stability of Chinese and Russian investment in the country and across the continent. The move also places pressure on Gustavo Petro in Colombia next door: last year, the US imposed sanctions on him.
If the focus on the Americas remains, we might come to retrospectively see that today’s action, for all the bluster both Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth gave at their news conference, is a sign of relative weakness: a shift from genuinely global power projection to a more limited focus on the Western Hemisphere.
However, if the US takes advantage of the present protests in Iran and doubles down on its recent strikes in Nigeria, it may prove instead to be the opening salvo of a new global power projection, unconcerned with even the spurious legal trappings of the War on Terror.
So with Maduro gone, what is Venezuela now stepping into? I am not an expert in Venezuela (I would welcome correction and elaboration on all parts of this), but the story of how it got here goes something like this.
In 1976, under President Carlos Andrés Pérez, Venezuela nationalised its oil industry. Companies like Exxon, Mobil, and Shell were fully compensated for the loss of their assets. In his second presidency, he imposed sweeping neoliberal reforms which deepened poverty in the country, and killed thousands of demonstrators.
In 1999, Hugo Chávez came to power. He led what was called the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ from the left: nationalisation of key industries, social welfare programmes, and the development of a social system for the expansion of democracy through Communal Councils. All this relied on high oil prices at the time. He was reelected in 2000, before being subject to a coup attempt in 2002 which failed, and then reelected in 2006 and 2012. In response to deteriorating conditions in the country, he announced an “economic war” on the upper classes. He died of cancer in 2013 and Maduro took over.
Oil prices had plummeted; the social welfare programmes were foundering. Maduro’s government was unquestionably repressive and it is likely he didn’t win the 2024 election, despite staying in power afterwards. One important question is the extent to which programmes of sanctions and the oil embargo of 2019 contributed to the plummeting living standards and to what extent they were a function of the mismanagement of the economy by Chavez and Maduro.
Over a quarter of the population has left since Chavez came to power – some of them have ended up in the US. And, of course, an assault on immigration has become a major part of Trump’s presidency. The right-wing migrants and exiles, who form the organised opposition, will no doubt now seek to return to the country to implement their own vision for the country: privatisation, repression of the social movements, and further de-democratisation, this time in their own favour. Despite this, the Chavista movement remains a major force in the country, and would form the basis for a protracted armed opposition to any comprehensive overthrow of the Maduro government.
How exactly the dynamics of the new decapitated Venezuela will play out are beyond me, as they are probably beyond anyone in the Trump administration. Even if they were capable of modelling the complex dynamics of a country thrown into disarray, it is not obvious that they would be interested: in a more cynical view of Applied Collapsology, sometimes the chaos is the point.
The larger scale change that this precipitates in the global system is expanded permissiveness for violence. From the Genocide in Gaza to today’s decapitation of the Venezuelan regime, even the pretence of constraints on the naked military power has evaporated.
What does this all have to do with collapse? It is not that the Trump administration has destroyed any actual infrastructure, but that it has produced the conditions for a power vacuum that will, it hopes, play to its advantage.
One of the main claims of this Substack is that in recent history, collapse has more often taken the form of the deliberate destruction of societies than their ‘tragic’ decomposition.
Through the latter half of the Cold War, astonishing developments in logistics, agriculture and medicine partially reigned in other horsemen of the apocalypse – Famine, Pestilence, and Death – but new techniques of violent social destruction proliferated.
Of course, even the more positive developments were tied up in destruction: the logistics revolution was, in part, a consequence of the US military’s need to ship materiel more efficiently over the Pacific to Vietnam; the Green Revolution was tied up with anticommunism and was partially responsible for the global spread of slums as agricultural consolidation pushed people into the cities; the attempted modernisation of agriculture in Maoist China led to the greatest famine in history; and even medicine was uneven and subject to manipulation and conditionality.
The technological revolutions of the postwar era didn’t produce stable or robust societies, but instituted an extremely complex process of capitalist development. Many of the coups and counter-insurgencies of the Cold War were designed to enforce capitalist social relations on countries that desired to break away from them. And, once accomplished, the impositions of capitalism then continued the process of social upheaval in another, less explosive, way: the constant revolutionising of the means and relations of production (continuous with but not what we call ‘collapse’). In many cases this led to zones of impoverishment, uneven developmentalism, and ongoing insurgency.
Modern economies are not stable, but always on the edge of chaos: a position that gives them their dynamism and their vulnerability. The technological development of an integrated life support system for billions of people wasn’t a clean process that produced societies resistant to social disintegration. There is no direct opposition between social collapse and cohesion. They are always working through one another; they turn into one another in a dialectical process that “comes into the world dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”
What the development of sophisticated logistics, modern agriculture and medicine did was shift the apocalyptic end of societies from something that could be represented – as it appears in The Book of Revelation – as a natural-spiritual form of judgement that comes from the ‘outside’ and turned it, more and more, into a matter of discretion. To a much greater extent, in the modern world small segments of the population can choose to destroy, or not destroy, societies.
Our greater capacity to model the world turned the reproduction or destruction of a society into a matter of self-conscious choice, although at the same time the increasing integration of the global economy produced another level of determination above this: the demands of global capital for lower energy prices (centrally important in Venezuela). And, at the same time, the hubris of power led to poorly planned post-invasion quagmires of spiralling complexity in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq.
On a relatively small scale, this looks like the kind of profit-seeking in war that sustains conflicts because they are profitable for their supposed combatants. War, in many cases, is not about winning, but about maintaining flows of money and resources from the insecurity that war produces. War is not a contest, but a system full of profiteers and entrepreneurial opportunity. The best account I know of these dynamics comes from David Keen’s Complex Emergencies.
On a larger scale, it looks like the regime change operations that the US has carried out with impunity since the Cold War, and most openly in the War on Terror: in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya most obviously.
The US is not alone: take Israel’s decadal constriction and now obliteration of Palestinian society, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or China’s mass interment of the Uyghurs. Each is, through different means, an example of what we call ‘Applied Collapsology’, the dark history of techniques used to destroy societies.
The study of collapse is an academic field, but the more consequential practitioners of same ideas are those who turn disinterested enquiry into social cohesion into the elaboration of a vast attack surface.