A hasty overnight combined arms strike, executed with the goal of abducting the leader of a foreign petrostate that embargoed their oil from the United States, combined with alleging that the country is harboring foreign terrorist organizations: we’ve seen this before.
On Jan. 3, 2026, at around 2 a.m., the United States executed a land, air and sea operation in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, taking the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro into custody.
The strike consisted of overwhelming ‘shock and awe’ tactics through naval-born tomahawk missile strikes, aerial jet bombing and helicopter attacks to cause disarray and distract from the operation to take Maduro.
Immediately, even without the surrounding context and justification for the strike, the similarities of this strike are reminiscent of U.S. conflicts from the mid-2000s and early ’90s to even earlier. That is, the usage of overnight airstrikes with high-ordinance weaponry against the capital cities of foreign states as a shock and awe approach to removing the country’s leader.
Recently, Operation Iraqi Freedom and the U.S. entrance into Afghanistan are good examples of shock and awe being used to cause a regime change and enforce control over a state, but the trend goes back to the Cold War era, in conflicts like the Vietnam War.
Beyond the familiar military tactics used in the exercising of U.S. will upon foreign subjects, are the similarities in the geopolitical surroundings of these conflicts as a whole.
To justify military buildup and later intervention, President Donald Trump alleged that Maduro was a narco-terrorist and that the country of Venezuela allowed drug trafficking despite government knowledge of it.
After the success of the operation in Caracas, however, the narrative immediately flipped.
Trump explicitly stated that the United States would make sure the country would be ‘run’ by the U.S. government until American oil businesses could set up to take advantage of Venezuela’s enormous oil coffers, which had been nationalized from U.S. businesses under Hugo Chávez decades ago.
‘Terrorism’ has been a common cop-out excuse for attacking foreign states from which we stand to gain by exercising our neo-imperialist will.
In Iraq, for example, yes, attacking Kuwait was a violation of international law, but our overwhelming response followed by military occupation was overkill. The old regime had already been toppled, and a new ‘democratic’ one could be created without long-term occupation.
However, democracy was never the goal here, nor was it in 1990, or in Afghanistan, or Vietnam, or Libya or any other proxy war the United States dipped into.
The goal has always been protecting American interests, chief among them being oil.
Trump has continued to threaten Colombia, Greenland, Denmark, Iran and Mexico among others based on either terrorism excuses, or ‘national security concerns.’ Meanwhile, all of these nations have massive oil coffers for the United States to capitalize on.
That pattern of neo-imperialism exercised through military pressure is simply continuing here. The chief difference now is that the current president is increasingly blatant about the real reasons behind his military aggression.
