On January 3, American forces kidnapped Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and bombed multiple sites across the country, killing around 40 people. Hours later, President Trump spoke of “running Venezuela” and paying for a prospective occupation with Venezuelan oil. Critics of US imperialism are correct to note that Washington has violated the sovereignty of yet another country. At the same time, however, many of these “anti-imperialists” neglect Maduro’s own long record of interference in other countries’ affairs, including sponsoring foreign guerrillas and threatening wars of conquest against smaller, weaker neighbors. From its inception, the “Bolivarian” regime founded by Hugo Chávez made anti-imperialism a core tenet of its ideology, but Maduro’s belligerence abroad lost him crucial allies and laid the groundwork for his own downfall.
“Maduro’s belligerence abroad lost him crucial allies.”
Anti-imperialism, as it is understood by Maduro and his sympathizers, is a geopolitical variant of the oppressor-oppressed paradigm. In the same way that whites cannot be victims of racism, opponents of Washington and its allies cannot conduct imperialism—or perhaps deserve to do so as a sort of “reparations” for past wrongs committed against them by Western powers. Under this paradigm, the Maduro regime’s repeated threats of conquering two thirds of neighboring Guyana—a country governed by a social-democratic government with no military to speak of—and stealing its oil were, paradoxically, “anti-imperialist.” In 2023, the regime de jure annexed the disputed Essequibo region, which holds a majority of Guyana’s oil reserves, and then began amassing troops near the Guyanese border, conducting excursions into the territory.
The stunt turned a once stalwart and powerful ally—Brazil’s Lula da Silva—against Maduro. At present, road access between Venezuela and Guyana only exists by cutting through Brazil, meaning that any effort to seize the Essequibo necessarily entails violating Brazilian sovereignty. Lula subsequently amassed troops along Brazil’s border with Venezuela and took to promoting a negotiated transition in Caracas alongside Colombian president Gustavo Petro.
In the wake of Maduro’s blatant electoral fraud in 2024, Lula, along with Petro, Mexico’s AMLO, and Chile’s Gabriel Boric, demanded the release of precinct-level tallies, which the regime has yet to publish. For this crime, Maduro and his apologists slammed the quartet of left-wing leaders as agents of Washington, despite the fact that they also repeatedly denounced US action in Venezuela. The criticism so outraged Maduro that he asserted that Lula’s 2022 presidential victory was illegitimate. The Brazilian president subsequently went so far as to veto Venezuela’s entry into BRICS. For his part, Petro later accused Venezuela of sponsoring a brutal insurgency by ELN guerrillas in Colombia as retaliation for his refusal to recognize Maduro’s victory.
Then there was Maduro’s alienation of onetime Caribbean allies. His predecessor, Hugo Chávez, spent decades cultivating Venezuelan soft power in the region through oil initiatives like Petrocaribe, at one point making him the most popular politician in the Basin. But by threatening to invade Guyana—and more recently, also threatening Trinidad and Tobago—Maduro turned these friendly neighbors into hostile states that acted as the staging grounds for his own ouster.
His erratic rule also seems to have alienated preoccupied Russian, Iranian, and Chinese allies. Hours before his capture, the dictator met a special Chinese envoy. Beyond statements of solidarity, the CCP likely relayed a message that Caracas, an unreliable debtor to Beijing, was on its own.
What happens next in Venezuela is difficult to predict. The short-term scenario seems to be some sort of regime permanence under Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president. Notably, speaking after the operation, Trump declared that opposition leader Nobel Prize winner María Corina Machado lacks the “respect and support” to lead. Assuming he doesn’t feel slighted by the fact that Machado won the 2025 Nobel over him, the president likely means that the Venezuelan military deems her ascent to the presidency unacceptable. Indeed, the White House appears to favor the “anti-capitalist” Rodríguez for her tenure implementing free market reforms, particularly in Venezuela’s oil sector. In much the same way that Maduro sought to plunder Guyanese oil, Trump and his aligned oligarchs seem more interested in the free flow of Venezuelan crude than lofty notions of freedom and democracy.
In the event that Rodríguez calls for new elections under the threat of further American bombings, Edmundo González—Machado’s placeholder in the 2024 election—may emerge as the frontrunner. What is certain is that under free elections, Bolivarianism is unlikely to maintain its grip on power. While leftists abroad may excuse Maduro as a victim of imperialism, the broad public rejects this logic. Polls across a host of countries also suggest that resounding majorities supported the Venezuelan leader’s capture—a sad consequence of the devastation and migrant crisis wrought by the Bolivarian regime.
Leftists like Bernie Sanders and AMLO have the principled position that any foreign meddling—by any nation—is wrong. But those who continue to cling to Maduro as an “anti-imperialist” martyr would do well to recognize the catastrophic damage he and close allies like Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega have done for the left’s electoral prospects in the region. Hard as it may be for them to comprehend, the Orwellian logic of Maduro’s “anti-imperialist” imperialism is, in the eyes of voters, scarcely different from Trump’s naked pursuit of plunder.