When an empire has nothing left but brute force to communicate with, it has already lost the battle of history. And when it starts intercepting ships and kidnapping leaders, it means that its rights, influence and legitimacy have already been lost.
Taking both a diachronic and synchronic approach, this article delves into the mysteries of international relations to examine the underlying reasons for the American military intervention in Venezuela. It explores the historical continuities and strategic ruptures that shed light on this operation, while placing it within the complex web of contemporary tensions between major powers. Through this dual interpretation of time – that of geopolitical legacies and that of current dynamics – the aim is to understand whether the removal of Nicolás Maduro is an isolated episode or a turning point in the brutal reconfiguration of the world order.
Caracas as a symptom of American imperial violence
The Venezuelan episode, whether interpreted as a direct operation, extreme pressure or a demonstration of strategic force, is part of a long tradition of American imperialism whose roots go back well before the Cold War. Since 1898, the date of the Spanish-American War and the placing of Cuba under US control, Washington has never ceased to regard Latin America as a backyard to be protected from the influence of Moscow and Beijing, to be administered, disciplined or punished. This is why, without Russia and China, Washington’s foreign policy would lose much of its raison d’être since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. One need only look at history to realize this.
The overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, orchestrated by the CIA to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company, laid the foundations for a clear doctrine: any attempt at economic or political independence is a declaration of war. The coup against Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973, supported logistically and financially by the United States, confirmed that democracy was only tolerable when it produced compliant governments. Operation Condor, formalized in 1975, transformed South America into a laboratory of political terror in the name of the anti-communist struggle.
Chavist Venezuela, starting in 1999, broke sharply with this legacy. By regaining control of Petróleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) in 2002, diversifying its energy partnerships starting in 2006, and bringing China on board as a strategic creditor starting in 2007, Caracas committed the irreparable: it demonstrated that a Latin American state could survive outside the Washington straitjacket. The US economic sanctions imposed from 2014 onwards, reinforced in 2017 and 2019, caused a calculated economic collapse, which was then used as a humanitarian argument to justify interference.
In this logic, American brutality is neither accidental nor improvised. It is the direct consequence of the failure of indirect domination. When influence is no longer enough, the empire strikes.
From Cuba in 1962 to Ukraine in 2022: the American obsession with global lockdown
The equivalent of the Ukrainian conflict, the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 remains the founding trauma of the American strategic psyche: the fear of otherness as the core of foreign policy. The idea that a rival power could establish a strategic foothold close to American territory has been established as an absolute red line. Far from disappearing with the collapse of the USSR in 1991, this obsession has shifted and amplified.
Since 1999, NATO’s eastward expansion – Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, then the Baltic states in 2004, Montenegro (2017), North Macedonia (2020), Finland (2023) and Sweden (2024) – has methodically encircled Russia, violating the political commitments made in the early 1990s. The Ukrainian conflict, which broke out in February 2022 in response to the Euromaidan coup supported by the entire Western microcosm, revealed the American strategy in all its crudeness: to transform Europe into an economic and military battlefield in order to weaken Moscow, at the cost of massive industrial and energy destruction on the European continent. And all this, thanks to the magic of its whimsical and insipid elites, giving the impression that the crisis of intelligence, so meticulously documented by Michel Crozier, now extends across the entire political field of the old continent: a veritable state of brain death, said Erdogan of Macron, the master of the European art of vassalage and servility towards Washington, who, failing to be Charles (De Gaulle), is simply Emmanuel of public debt and political polarization.
At the same time, China’s rise has been treated not as a natural historical fact, but as an anomaly to be corrected. Since 2011, with the ‘Asian pivot’, Washington has stepped up provocations in the South and East China Seas, strengthened its military alliances around Beijing and exploited the Taiwan issue, particularly after 2018, as a lever for strategic pressure. Deliveries of sophisticated weapons, high-level diplomatic visits such as that of Nancy Pelosi in 2023, and joint exercises with Taiwanese forces openly challenge the one-China principle, at the risk of regional conflagration.
Venezuela, in this global architecture, represents the western front in the war against Eurasia; a war theorized as early as 1904 by Halford Mackinder. By striking Caracas, Washington is not only seeking to control oil; it is desperately trying to prevent the geopolitical junction between Latin America, Russia and China. But this attempt comes too late.
The return of history: Russia and China as poles of strategic stability
Contrary to Western narratives, Russia and China are not destabilizing powers, but rather reactors of systemic stability in the face of the chaos produced by decades of American intervention. Since the Iraq War in 2003, the destruction of Libya in 2011, the fragmentation of Syria since 2012, and the ongoing conflagration in the Sahel since 2013, the world has learned a simple lesson: wherever the United States and its allies go, states collapse.
Conversely, Moscow and Beijing have proposed a different strategic approach. Putin’s Russia, by reaffirming its sovereignty after the chaos of the 1990s, has demonstrated that a state can resist Western military and economic encirclement. Xi Jinping’s China, through the New Silk Roads launched in 2013, has built a global infrastructure based on interconnection rather than military subjugation.
In Latin America, Africa and Asia, this alternative has found a deep resonance. The BRICS, expanded since 2023, embody this historic transition: a world where Washington no longer dictates the rules alone, where the dollar is gradually ceasing to be the ultimate weapon, where sovereignty is once again becoming an operational principle.
The relentless US persecution of Venezuela has shown the peoples of the Global South that the West no longer offers a vision of the future, but only sanctions, bombs, and extraterritorial tribunals. Conversely, Russia and China now appear as the poles around which a post-imperial world is being recomposed.
In this historical sequence, the United States and its allies are no longer the architects of the world order, but the saboteurs of a system they no longer control. The systematic use of force does not indicate a restoration of power, but rather a strategic panic in the face of a world slipping from their hands.
Russia and China, for their part, no longer need to conquer: they just need to hold on. History is now working in their favour. And Caracas, like Kiev, like Taiwan, like Gaza or Tripoli yesterday, is just another chapter in the slow but irreversible deconstruction of Western hegemony.
It is therefore clear that the American operation in Venezuela marks the return of history, not its end. It refutes Fukuyama’s prophecy of the universal triumph of liberalism, revealing a civilizational clash between the Western world and the Sino-Russian axis, reviving the Monroe Doctrine. Far from isolating Moscow and Beijing, this coup de force fractures the West, accelerates multipolarity and confirms Huntington’s clash of civilizations.
It could be said that American imperialism, supported by Brussels and London as far as Caracas, may well find its grave in Tehran after being put into a comatose state in Ukraine by Moscow, in the South and East China Seas, and in Taiwan by Beijing.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Humanities and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
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