OPINION
President Trump issued an ultimatum: Go now. Or else. . . We are destroying all narco-drug trafficking boats and seizing illegal oil and the tankers associated with them.
The message was clear and Maduro, an illegitimte president and indicted nacro-terrorist, rebuffed them. So, it took force in the form of "Operation Absolute Resolve," to dislodge the Venezuelan dictator from power.
Is it clear now?
Trump means business. The big stick of Teddy Roosevelt is in effect, again.
What comes next after liberation and long sought freedom for our hemispheric neighbors?
In chess the game ends after "checkmate."
In real life the game never ends, but we did just execute a checkmate maneuver on them.
The imperative to avoid further checkmates or the mass slaughter of the pawns, rooks, knights, and bishops (or what's worse that they might all turn on each other) is forcing the Queen (Delcy) to do what we want her to.
Since the Nobel Peace Laureate was successfully exfiltrated from Venezuelan territory, it should be less risky to bring up her long and spotty record of concentrating the hopes of anti-Chavista resistance into the wasted efforts we have heretofore witnessed to date.
It certainly isn't exclusively her fault, nor is this exclusively about her.
Yet today she is again at the pinnacle of a movement we know to be shot through with informants and agents working against the very cause they purport to embrace.
A transition will in time mean new elections and it a new game.
In the telling of this sorry story, a good place to begin is the February 2019 Live Aid concert organized under Eliot Abrams's failed tenure as Special Envoy for Venezuela.
Held in the Colombian town of Cúcuta, just across Venezuela’s western border, the region is famously peppered with narco-guerrillas like the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas (FARC) and Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN).
Since the speedboats full of drugs are valid targets, then armed encampments of what we would call "militants" in the Mideast or in closer jungles most definitely are.
Sadly, the current regime in Bogotá is very unlikely to play ball with "Enlist and Expand," the strategy outlined for the Western Hemisphere in the White House's National Security Council's Strategy published last this month.
A cursory look at the jumbotron behind the stage at Eliot Abrams' latter-day Bay of Pigs should immediately alert readers to something wrong.
Why would the U.S.-backed opposition be using the revanchist map of Venezuela, unrecognized by United States and the vast majority of the global community?
We pass from Venezuela's Western cardinal points to the east, where Maduro and his goons created facts on the ground that could be easily rolled back through concerted action by the U.S. and her allies in the region and abroad.
Recall that Hugo Chávez added an eighth star to the Venezuelan flag to represent the extra province, and Maduro celebrated a plebiscite (not unlike the Crimean referendum of 2014) to ratify the absorption of 87% of Guyana’s territory into Venezuela – electing provincial and municipal authorities for the first time in July 2024’s rigged election.
What is the motive behind such an expansionist policy from Caracas?
Ironically, for a country whose defensive narrative accuses Washington of coming to steal their oil, the Guyanese Essequibo has proven reserves in the billions of barrels and a concomitant maritime claim extending off the continental shelf containing billions more barrels reachable in the Exclusive Economic Zone.
Importantly, the oft-quoted number establishing Venezuela as having the largest proven oil reserves on the planet includes the Essequibo and the waters it comes with. (See More Here.)
There is a suspiciously large amount of Venezuelan "opposition" forces who support this irredentist claim to another country's territory and seas.
This needs to be forestalled as we come to the aid of the western hemisphere in the newer version of the Monroe Doctrine outlined first in the National Security Strategy and most recently in the post-game roundup hosted by POTUS at Mar-A-Lago.
Yes, Venezuela's freedom is long overdue. We want an entire continent without terror, narcotics, or any version of communism.
So, we need to set not just the record straight but the practice as well.
The effort is not regime change so much as restoration of private property and rule of law. Secretary of State stated such after the operation and will in the coming days provide a full plan for next steps.
There is no need for a neocon war to our south.
Trump realized this by showing sufficient force, ridding the waters of drugs, and taking the illegal shipments of oil, we will strangle Anti-American action.
DOJ used an indictment dating back to Biden to grab Maduro and extradite him and his wife for their years of crime as an illegitimate president turned narco-Lord.
But in achieving such we must also let the others know that there is only one option for freedom. That includes Colombia, Brazil, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Cuba, and yes, Mexico. Get in line and choose what is best for your people and the whole of the Americas.
(Additional Details Here.)
The relevant term of art is "Opoficción," a neologism portmanteau of "opposition" and “fiction”, to denoting a strategy well-known to students of democratic transitions.
Ever since (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) Lenin's NKVD/Cheka teamed up with Adolf Hitler's SS to create INTERPOL, the creation of "honey pot" groups to attract serious opposition into wasting their time in ways that don't threaten a regime you wish to preserve has been a major part of standard operating procedure to maintain internal security from threats to regime stability.
In our iconoclastic times, the fact an institution with such a lineage would remain unscathed is suspicious.
What is relevant is that the East German Stasi, successor to the SS, would be charged by Moscow to train Cuba's Intelligence Directorate in these (and other) dark arts, finally arriving at the goons in charge of ensuring the Maduro regime stays in place today.
On matters of serious (Venezuelan) national importance, like the illegal invasion of Guyana’s Essequibo region, this consensus is very telling, as is the fact that U.S. instruments of power seem blind to relatively obvious signs of being fooled by pretenders.
Wrapping up our four cardinal points, to Venezuela's south is the Amazonian jungle under jurisdiction of another strenuous Anti-American, Brazil’s Lula da Silva, and as of mid-2025 the seas north of Venezuela look like an embargo.
And what about Venezuela's interior?
The multi-pronged strategy of sanctions, blockade, and the occasional lethal strike on narco-speedboats is designed to strangle illicit financing of the regime’s strategy to preserve itself.
By bribing the generals with drug money, they stain their hands with every shipment's proceeds, creating an ever-greater incentive not to defect.
No drug money means no bribes.
Coupled with the generous bounties on major regime figures including Maduro himself, the theory goes that the incentive structure of such officers will shift toward organizing against and ousting the regime.
Why hasn't it worked?
The fault in our stars here lies with ourselves, as ever.
Firstly, a bounty on a figure like Maduro assumes it's cheap suit Maduro who calls the shots in the first place.
That has never been true.
Maduro's original appointment as one of Venezuela's multiple vice presidents was brokered by the same Cubans who ensured it would be him who became President when Hugo Chávez met his final reward.
Maduro has been in office ever since, but he has never really been in power.
His removal proves this, the system must now adapt to this fact being made public.
Indeed, the rigged election of 2024 was not determined by him (for more than a little while it looked very much like he'd willingly hand over power peacefully), to say nothing of the 2018 election which ended with the ne plus ultra of the controlled opposition, Juan Guaidó, assuming the "transitional presidency."
In both cases, the personal involvement of Nicolás Maduro, the man, was negligible.
He remained in office because he was convenient to keep there, not because he is himself a power center unrivaled by other nearly equal power centers or Cuban handlers.
The second reason we can deduct from one of the through-lines of President Trump's own rise to power: The deep state which the beltway created during and immediately after the FDR/Truman presidencies, has always been accused of working for the reds.
Look no further than former US Ambassador Manuel Rocha, jailed for acting as an agent of Cuba despite managing to secure appointments to the Clinton National Security Council and Bush 43 Ambassador Corps.
What William F. Buckley once called a "totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores" as necessary and essential to combat its Soviet equivalents (the ones they meet with as equals in INTERPOL) keep producing the same old scandals.
Thus it should surprise no one that Elliot Abrams achieved precisely nothing during his tenure as not so special envoy for Venezuela, or that dilettantes (a hotelier) in diplomacy like Gordon Sondland would "flip" on President Trump at the first chance to do so and got him impeached.
What, then, is to be done?
The only deployment of ground troops that makes sense in Venezuela is not actually in Venezuela, at least not according to 99% of other nation-states on the planet.
Liberating the Essequibo from Caracas' current domination is essential.
Indeed, once accomplished, the Essequibo is a fine place to fly deportees while they await their acceptance in their countries of origin.
But that deal remains to be hammered out with Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, with Mohamed Irfaan Ali, the recently re-elected president of that country, whose consent would be involved in any such operations.
As far as finding causes to "Enlist and Expand" hemispheric allies for, a "rollback" of Venezuela's illegal invasion should be entirely unobjectionable by all countries.
The U.S. may very well find volunteers among neighboring states to assist in this liberation, which will irreparably dent the political situation of the regime Maduro ran.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, It will also clarify who is really on what side.
The "Oppofiction" is unlikely to find very much leeway as their leashes are yanked to support the regime's narrative once again, and internationally, countries like Sanchez's Spain, who pretend quite unconvincingly to be against Maduro will also be left swimming naked as the tide goes out.
Finally, in the words of none other than James Bond himself, "The Living Daylights" villain, KGB Gen. Georgi Koskov: Smiert Spionom – Death to the spies, both those in the United States and their counterparts in Caracas.
It's only by ridding Venezuela of the parallel armed forces and internal security apparatus that keeps this regime in power that a true democratic transition can happen.
Replacing Maduro with Edmundo Gonzalez, or even María Corina Machado, ignores who really holds the scepter of power in that country.
Uprooting the Chavista state and its hangers-on should be modeled on the de-Nazification of post World War II and Lustration ("de-communification") of the post-Cold War era.
Done properly this time, in cannot involve secret communist fellow travelers in the deep state and especially a nefarious CIA with so much dirt on its hands.
Otherwise, it will all be for nothing, just another example of Lampedusa's "Il Gattopardo."
For everything to remain the same, everything must change.
Hold the fake opposition to their word: Hold new elections and get rid of the Marxists — all of them, Cavistas, Cubans, Iranians, Russians, and Chinese.
It's the American hemisphere.
Marco Rubio, do you know?
We think you do.
Theodore Roosevelt Malloch and Felipe Cuello are the authors of "Trump’s World: Geo Deus." Malloch was a former Yale and Oxford professor. His new book is "GREATNESS: The Trump Revolution and the Coming Golden Age."
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