Trump’s radical new nationalist and neocolonial vision for the American empire in the second quarter of the 21st century now includes regime change in Caracas.
The new year began with a new war. The United States carried out strikes inside Venezuela on Saturday, hitting multiple targets.
US President Donald Trump said Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife were “captured and taken out of the country”.
The attacks, apparently a regime change operation, followed others on Christmas Day, when US President Donald Trump authorized airstrikes in Nigeria and Somalia, and a CIA drone strike in Venezuela.
On December 29, Trump was at Mar-a-Lago, the southern palace of the aspiring US emperor, with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.
“There was a big explosion in the dock area where the boats are loaded with drugs,” Trump told reporters alongside the Israeli prime minister, referring to the first ground attack against Venezuela, anticipated by months of deadly attacks on fishing boats in the Caribbean. Trump claimed that the victims of these attacks were drug traffickers. Members of Congress say it looks like war crimes. It doesn’t matter.
The attacks in Nigeria — the first by the US against suspected militants in the country — were announced to the press, while those in Somalia were not announced or reported. Somalia has been the target of an escalation of American attacks since Trump returned to office, another long-running military intervention that Western media rarely covers.
As for Israel, Trump repeated exactly what Netanyahu wanted to hear. Like a puppet repeating the words of his ventriloquist, Trump asserted, without any embarrassment, that Israel had “100%” complied with the terms of its 20-point “ceasefire” in Gaza, while Hamas had violated it by failing to disarm unilaterally.
In reality, Hamas has handed over all but one hostage, living and dead, since October 13, as agreed, despite Israel’s daily violations, the blockade of humanitarian aid and numerous attacks that have killed more than 400 Palestinians. The occupied West Bank is being annexed every day.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics released its year-end report, showing that the Gaza Strip suffered a “sharp and unprecedented population decline of approximately 254,000 people,” representing a 10.6% decrease in population compared to the period before the start of the genocide in October 2023.
With estimates that just over 150,000 Palestinians have left Gaza since 2023, this is in line with a recent German demographic report that claims more than 100,000 people have been killed during the two-year Israeli assault.
Failed peace efforts
Still at Mar-a-Lago, Trump met once again with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for another round of fruitless negotiations to resolve a war that Vladimir Putin has shown no desire to end, while Russia bombed Kiev with drones.
In response, Ukraine – whose drone and missile attacks are guided by intelligence from the CIA – attacked a cafe and hotel in a Black Sea resort occupied by Russia, killing 24 people and injuring 50 who were celebrating the New Year.
Just like all of Trump’s peace efforts, including Gaza, this Ukraine-Russia deal is going nowhere, a shady real estate deal with Trump as a dishonest middleman. Trump’s business dealings, which date back decades to his partying days with Epstein in New York, fall apart as soon as he leaves the building.
Trump’s mentor was Roy Cohn, political advisor to notorious Senator Joe McCarthy, who led the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s. Cohn taught Trump to be “a snake,” “a scoundrel,” and “a new breed of son of a bitch.”
Like Trump, Cohn has been indicted multiple times for alleged crimes including stock market fraud, obstruction of justice, perjury, bribery, conspiracy, extortion and blackmail. Just like Trump, he generally gets away with it, until the end, when his past catches up with him.
Indeed, if there’s one thing Trump appreciates in an ally, it’s that he, like him, is an indicted criminal who denies everything — corruption, murder, war crimes — like his friend Netanyahu.
At Christmas, Israel also recognized the breakaway region of Somaliland in a normalization deal with the region’s prime minister, a widely condemned deal in which Somaliland reportedly agreed to take in more than a million Palestinians from Gaza and allow Israel to establish a base in the crucial Bab al-Mandal Strait overlooking Yemen.
Thousands of Somalis took to the streets in protest against the agreement, many of them waving Palestinian flags in demonstration of Somalia’s historic support for the Palestinian cause.
Ahmed Moalim Fiqi, Somalia’s Defense Minister, stated that Mogadishu would accept “under no circumstances” Israel’s recognition of the northern region. “Any discussion about the forced displacement of Palestinians or their relocation to Palestinian territory [somali] is completely unacceptable [e] it violates their fundamental right to live on their own land,” he added.
Somalia’s ambassador to the UN harshly criticized his Israeli counterpart in the organization, following statements by the Israeli ambassador in New York that the former Siad Barre regime had committed genocide, when justifying Israel’s unilateral recognition of Somaliland.
“To come to this place and lecture us about humanity and genocide, human rights, independence and democracy… We know what you do on a daily basis, this is simply an insult.”
A new Monroe doctrine
Trump’s attack on Venezuela and his airstrikes in Africa reflect the new US National Security Strategy (NSS), released in November. This strategic document outlined a new nationalist and neocolonial vision for the American empire in the second quarter of the 21st century. It formalized the end of the post-war transatlantic era, marked by Western unity under US leadership.
Furthermore, the National Security Strategy makes clear that Western Europe—not Russia—has been downgraded from a historic ally to a troubled region, where the U.S. will intervene by “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” by “patriotic” anti-immigration parties. The document warns that the continent could face “civilizational erasure” due to migration, an explicit endorsement of the great replacement theory in the main American strategic document.
The document represents a return to the 20th century, when Latin America was Washington’s backyard and the country intervened at will to maintain its economic and political dominance, supporting authoritarian and pro-US regimes, from Cuba to Chile.
“We will affirm and apply a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine”, says the text, employing “when necessary, the use of lethal force to replace the failed strategy of exclusive action by police forces in recent decades” and “establishing or expanding access to strategically important locations”.
Trump has openly declared that he wants to “get our oil back” from Venezuela, a country that nationalized its vast oil reserves decades ago and consolidated state control under the government of Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor. Since then, Venezuela has been in the crosshairs of the United States, facing severe sanctions against its oil exports.
Far-right candidates have won power, with US support, across Latin America, first in El Salvador during Trump’s first term and, more recently, in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and now Chile and Honduras, creating a series of pro-Trump allies. Still, the region’s giants—Brazil and Mexico—are, for now, firmly in the hands of left-wing democratic governments.
The fatal flaw of the doctrine
But there is a serious, perhaps fundamental, flaw in this new “America First” doctrine as outlined in the National Security Strategy: Israel and the Middle East.
As veteran journalist Jeremy Scahill told Middle East Eye’s Ashfaaq Carim in Doha last month, since the 9/11 attacks and the George W. Bush administration, “it is a mistake to view the US and Israel as separate political entities.” The US is tied to Israel in Washington, through the executive and legislative branches, but, as Scahill states, “Israel is a serial killer pretending to be a nation-state”, with “a doctorate in violating ceasefires”, something that Trump, like Biden before him, cannot and does not want to see.
As Scahill says, “Israel is a serial killer pretending to be a nation-state” with “a doctorate in violating ceasefires,” something that Trump, like Biden before him, will not realize.
Trump saved Israel from itself by ending its war of annihilation against Gaza, only to replace it with a hybrid war of recolonization of Gaza and the West Bank. As long as the US government plays into Israel’s hands, it will have to tolerate and cover up the endless Israeli war crimes and colonial expansions in Lebanon and Syria, and will inevitably be drawn into more conflicts.
During interviews given on his most recent trip to the United States, Netanyahu once again urged the US to attack Iran, associating Tehran with the socialist president of Venezuela.
The global response to the American doctrine of supremacy and sovereignty of nation-states means that any power or group of states can employ the same doctrine of force, as American allies already do: from the European rearmament plan against Russia to the new UAE empire in the Red Sea, to Saudi Arabia’s attacks on UAE assets in Yemen. This is how the death of multilateralism manifests itself.
And with the most recent attack on Venezuela, the world in 2026 is already more dangerous than ever.
Originally published by Middle East Eye on 03/01/2026
By Joe Gill
Joe Gill has worked as a journalist in London, Venezuela and Oman, for newspapers such as the Financial Times, Morning Star and Middle East Eye.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Middle East Eye.
Source: https://www.ocafezinho.com/2026/01/03/a-paz-de-trump-significa-guerra-em-2026/
