The Calamity in Caracas
Venezuela bulletin
Here we go again: this weekend, the United States violated the territory of a sovereign nation for the purpose of regime change, with airstrikes on Venezuelan military targets and critical urban infrastructure cutting electricity across the Venezuelan capital of Caracas before U.S. special forces kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. U.S. President Donald Trump announced their abduction on Truth Social, later posting a photo of President Maduro blindfolded and handcuffed aboard the USS Iwo Jima, in transit to the U.S. to stand trial as the supposed kingpin of Tren de Aragua and Cartel de los Soles, the Venezuelan crime syndicates—despite the conclusion in an April report from the U.S. National Intelligence Council that Maduro has nothing to do with the former, and the fact that the latter isn’t a hierarchical organization but a moniker invented to describe corruption in Venezuela’s armed forces.
What a way to start the year, huh? But our October bulletin on the subject speculated that “maybe a U.S. invasion is on hold until the court renders its ruling” on conflicts of interest in the auction of PDV Holding, parent company of Citgo Petroleum, the U.S. refining and marketing arm of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA). That ruling came on 25 November, with a judge approving Elliott Investment Management’s takeover of PDV Holding—clearing the path for the privatization of Venezuela’s crown-jewel foreign asset, pending approval from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.
So, maybe we should just feel surprised that the U.S. waited more than a month to kidnap President Maduro. After all, President Trump told us last month that the U.S. “had a lot of oil there […] and we want it back,” though many economists and historians reject the claim, noting that foreign companies never owned Venezuela’s oil and that nationalization—accomplished in stages between 1976 and 2007—followed global norms of resource sovereignty. Though U.S. and European oil companies lost billions in assets, they were partially compensated through arbitration.
With U.S. sanctions since 2014 having cripple Venezuela’s oil sector and finances, Venezuelan exports now represent a small share of worldwide oil supply. Accordingly, those looking ahead might expect less of a shock to global energy markets, and more of a contextual shift in currency markets: since Trump told us yesterday that U.S. intends to “run” Venezuela in the interest of “taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground” to benefit “people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela”—i.e., Western oil companies—we can surely expect petroleum exports from the Bolivarian Republic will be sold for U.S. dollars. Thus, the petrodollar system—the original purpose and recent decline of which we’ve covered a couple times in years past—looks like it has found fresh support against its gradual erosion.
Regarding just how the U.S. plans to run Venezuela—or rather, what proxies it will employ—our October bulletin contained another speculation that may have had a a similar degree of foresight: installing Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize recipient María Corina Machado as the country’s president. Naturally, Machado welcomed the U.S. intervention for which she has long advocated, declaring that Venezuela’s “hour of freedom” had arrived and calling for 2024 opposition candidate Edmundo González to assume the presidency after Maduro’s removal—though apparently stating elsewhere that she is preparing to take power herself. For his own part, Trump has expressed interest in the latter but hasn’t yet committed.
Turning now to the U.S., the implications of Maduro’s kidnapping reflect the declining empire’s efforts to maintain hegemony over the Western Hemisphere, but the ongoing development of the unitary executive theory as modus operandi. Trump claimed that the kidnapping represents an exercise of the Monroe Doctrine, under which the Western Hemisphere was declared off-limits to European colonization or intervention while promising U.S. non-interference in European affairs, but the absence of any efforts to bring Venezuela into the European sphere of influence renders Trump’s claims absurd on their face. Though the doctrine’s logic underpinned U.S. actions in Latin America throughout the Cold War—with presidents like Ronald Reagan invoking anti-communism to rationalize proxy wars, sanctions, and support for authoritarian allies—its latest invocation explicitly radicalizes the doctrine, dropping the pretense of opposition to European imperialism and instead simply asserting unilateral U.S. control over the Americas.
Continued exercise of this expanded doctrine—or, really, the continued assertion of U.S. hegemony over the Western Hemisphere—could mean laying the foundation for a long-theorized North American Union, which we here at Radio Free Pizza detailed almost one year ago, and which now warrants renewed attention. What once seemed dormant has been reanimated by Donald Trump’s post-2024 expansionist rhetoric—from musing about Canada as a “51st state,” to renewed interest in Greenland’s strategic resources, to threats against Panama—occurring alongside direct U.S. intervention in Venezuela, including regime-change operations, seizures of Venezuelan assets like Citgo, and the extraterritorial application of U.S. courts and force.
Placed in that context, Venezuela begins to look less like an isolated case and more like a testbed: a demonstration of how sovereignty can be overridden through sanctions, courts, and military power under the banner of security, narcotics control, or democracy promotion. While mainstream voices dismiss the North American Union as conspiracy, the pattern echoes older supranational ambitions—from NAFTA and the Security and Prosperity Partnership to CFR blueprints for a “North American Community”—now resurfacing amid U.S. anxiety over a multipolar world in which blocs like BRICS+ challenge American primacy.
The contradiction is telling. Trump’s earlier obsession with border walls coexists uneasily with continental ambitions, suggesting not a coherent nationalism but a reactive strategy to declining dominance. Of course, the risk is that “integration” and “stability” become pretexts for upward consolidation of power, elite control, and the erosion of democratic self-determination. Whether the North American Union emerges as policy, pressure tactic, or political theater, the through-line remains the same: who governs, by what authority, and for whose benefit—an unresolved question now being answered, most starkly, in Venezuela, and in what government takes shape following the success of U.S. efforts toward regime change.
If the events of this weekend tell us anything, it is that the language of international law, democracy promotion, and even counter-narcotics has finally collapsed into something far cruder: open force exercised without consent, mandate, or restraint. The kidnapping of a sitting head of state—preceded by airstrikes on civilian infrastructure and followed by boasts on social media—is not an aberration. It is the logical endpoint of a decades-long trajectory in which sanctions, courts, covert operations, and proxy politics gradually replaced diplomacy, only to give way again to naked coercion when those tools proved insufficient.
Venezuela now stands as the clearest warning of where that path leads. Its oil was first strangled through sanctions, its foreign assets seized through U.S. courts, its political process delegitimized through narrative warfare, and its leadership finally removed through military force—all while the rhetoric shifted seamlessly from “democracy” to “security” to “we want it back.” That sequence is not unique to Venezuela; it is simply the most complete case to date.
As the Monroe Doctrine is refashioned into an explicit claim of hemispheric ownership, and as expansionist talk bleeds into concrete action, the question is no longer whether old imperial patterns have returned, but whether they will now be normalized under a unitary executive that recognizes no meaningful limits. The future hinted at here—whether labeled a North American Union or something else entirely—is one in which sovereignty flows upward, accountability evaporates, and governance is imposed rather than chosen.
History suggests that such projects rarely end where their architects intend. What remains to be seen is whether the peoples of the Americas will accept this moment as inevitable—or recognize it, clearly and soberly, as a line that has already been crossed. We here at Radio Free Pizza presume that Latin Americans recognize that already, and hope that the U.S. population soon catches up and mobilizes to reverse the course.