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In today’s Venezuela special, Yanis Varoufakis and Wolfgang Munchau expose the reality behind the abduction of Nicolás Maduro and the dawn of a ‘Donroe Doctrine’ that signals the end of international law. As the first days of 2026 unfold, could Trump’s gangster-style intervention actually be emboldening Putin and Xi, and are Greenland and Canada truly the next targets on the list? And in a ‘Putinized’ West where European leaders remain non-entities, is this merely a regime change in Caracas, or a strategic flooding of the zone designed to shatter the transatlantic alliance and usher in a new era of transactional warfare?
The iconoclasts have been out-clast by Trump. They debunk only current issues with predictable arguments and cannot handle a curve ball.
Coverage in The Times today is very good. Excellent article by Roger Boyes: ‘Putin will feel Maduro’s loss more than most’.
This is refreshing. Calling Trump Hitler is so 2025. Now our wise elites can tell us he’s Putin. Putin eats potatoes. Trump eats potatoes. That can’t be a coincidence.
Varoufakis and Munchau miss a lot when analysing the removal of Maduro. They focus entirely on Trump and US policy and ignore what the removal of Maduro means for Venezuela and Venezuelans.
Firstly, there appears to have been no mention by Trump or anyone of political reform. Venezuela has clearly been a dictatorship since 2015, when the results of the National Assembly elections were effectively annulled by transferring the Assembly’s powers to the Supreme Court consisting of Maduro appointees. The economic collapse and the emigration of millions of Venezuelans have followed the total collapse of the Venezuelan legal system. The absence of political reform implies that Trump is happy to leave Delcy Rodriguez as a dictator.
Secondly, Maduro’s bodyguards did not consist of Venezuelans but of Cubans. This implies that Maduro did not trust the people around him. Why not? And what exactly were the fissures that ran through the Venezuelan regime.
Thirdly, the father of Delcy Rodriguez may well have been murdered by government agents. That however did not stop her from being the deputy leader of a regime that tortured tens of thousands of political prisoners in El Heliocoide as well as murdering thousand more of its opponents on the streets.
Fourthly, self-proclaimed socialists have a record of being greedy people who embezzle billions from their impoverished countries. The ‘M’ in the Angolan MPLA stands for ‘Marxist’. This didn’t stop Dos Santos from stealing billions. Rodriguez and her colleagues have probably been offered similar wealth if they co-operate with US oil companies in reviving Venezuelan oil production, which is currently very low due to the incompetence of the Chavez and Maduro regimes. The US might also offer the Venezuelan Government help in recapturing control of the large amount of territory controlled by narco-traffickers, who no longer feel that they have to pay dues to the Venezuelan government.
Isabel dos Santos: From Africa’s richest woman to ‘dirty money’ probe | Corruption News | Al Jazeera