Keep Your Eyes On The Long Game of Imperial Collapse

For context of what they were up against, as recounted by Yves Smith in her comment here: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/01/even-the-wall-street-journal-doubts-the-trump-seize-venezuela-oil-scheme.html#comment-4350414

The Defense Minister’s house was bombed and he is alive only by virtue of having gotten to a shelter.

At least two of the ~10 helicopters were hit, which means shot at, and some soliders were injured as a result but I infer not badly. The US sent in over 150 planes.

From Task & Purpose: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/fighters-bombers-venezuela-attack-maduro/

The force included a mix of Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps bombers, fighter jets and electronic attack planes, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said on Saturday. Speaking at a press conference with President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Caine said that the force used included “F-22s, F, 35s, F-18s, EA18s, E-2s B-1, bombers and other support aircraft, as well as numerous remotely piloted drones.” The various aircraft hit several targets in Venezuela, including the La Guaira port, the military headquarters complex at Fort Tiuna in Caracas and multiple airports.

While the jets and bombers flew overhead and prepared for any aerial response, helicopters flown by the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment entered, carrying members of Delta Force. They flew over a largely blacked out Caracas, which Trump implied was as a result of operations by American forces. Caine noted that U.S. Cyber Command and Space Command carried out actions in support of the air assault.

Nobody knows what’s going down or coming down. Ian among others makes educated guesses and usually nails it.

Events unfold so hard, fast and furious in these times, that predictions are difficult and rapidly changing.

I often wonder what the oldsters and the youngsters will face in this time of accelerating decline and destruction.

Lots of pain and suffering all the way around.
One can be kind without being religious as we collectively circle the drain.

Here is the ironic twist:

If Venezuela turns into a shitshow for Trump, then America will actually be LESS inclined to try to annex Greenland, Canada, and every other resource-rich country in the Western hemisphere.

The fate of Greenland and Canada is in the hands of Venezuelans.

If Venezuelans decide to rise up , to resist and fight America, now it will actually be in the interest of EUROPE (due to Greenland) and CANADA to secretly fund and assist the Venezuelan insurgency to save their own hinds, to keep America preoccupied and tied down in Venezuela so that Trump will not be able to turn his attention to annexing Greenland and Canada.

I refer you to the Peloponnesian War — What the Fall of Athens Tells Us About America Today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcyWi75cajc

In the end, it was Athens’ former allies in the Delian League that funded Spartan that ultimately destroyed Athens.

ibaien:

I don’t think you’re completely wrong in what you’re saying, but I’ll just point out that things are only impossible until they’re not, and armies are only invincible until they’re not. In the history of the world, no nation has remained on top forever.

@eric

“I see a ten year window, max, before some equatorial country experiences a wet bulb event that absolutely devastates millions of people”

i think this explains the mass media push towards “zombie horde” content over the last decade – westerners need to be inured to the inevitable videos of millions of humans being chain-gunned as they surge towards any possible succor or escape. strong agree that it’ll be more devastating on a human scale than these wet firecracker wars.

They can also potentially murder Maduro and his wife by capital punishment.

Great power wars are started by the great power that sees economic defeat lurking (Dale Copeland, 2015). So far it’s correct. But hegemony collapses aren’t messier than other imminent losses.

The two world wars were not started by UK to avert loss of hegemony, they were started by Germany because it was locked out from the British and French empires and needed an empire of its own to get raw materials from (according to Copeland). UK’s loss of hegemony produced a few localized wars, e.g. in Kenya.

But most of the wars they started occurred during the upbuild phase of their hegemony.

In the 20th century, when their hegemony ended, they were to weak to fight. And the British public wasn’t interested, it was impossible to work up any imperialist feeling and willingness to pay.

Nothing says, though, that this loss of hegemony will follow the earlier pattern. After all, the big edge of the US is arms. So they will probably use them, because it’s about all they have left.

Until they have to cut because they can’t pay for it. Or because the big edge crumbles because of lack of industry to back it up.

“This is all standard late Imperial collapse messiness.” Just awake and my eyes unfocused reading the post this a.m., my original take was “Imperial collapse messianicness”, which is not bad for the pre-conscious level read. In fact Alexander Mercouris pointed out yesterday how shambolic Drumpf’s shouting triumph was, contrasting it with Reagan when he’d talk about bringing the little brown people “democracy” and “freedumb”, pointing out that a regime as openly violent and mercenary as TrumpCo is, that has torn off the mask, will alienate the “enemy” and make their resistance more determined.

It will be interesting when how/why Maduro was sacrificed as a pawn is fully revealed. The take I heard from John Helmer on Nima’s program was that his own people saw that he was giving Trump everything he wanted except ONE item, he would not step down. This surrender (which Trump didn’t take because it was only 98%, he’s incapable of “losing” 2%) then made his cohort decide he’s worthless and self-serving, thus he was sacrificed– along with at least 35 of his Cuban guards and 80 other Venezuelans, the brown people need to be exterminated and deported, Trump is very clear in his hatred of Hispanic people inside or out of the US.

I’m repeating myself but look at his “stunning victory, the likes of which has never been seen before” in bombing an Iranian mountaintop with nothing gained to aid Netanyahu, it is true that Donnie is a superannuated infant Id, a Walter Mitty type (showing how old I am with that reference) imagining his Great Deeds which will Forever Be Sung by The Muse of History unto The Eternal Ages. But he’s just an obese, stinking, racist failed businessman who finally “succeeded”, failing to the top with the Dimmies’ massive help. The J doesn’t stand for Stable “Jenius” (or Jesus) and Walter Mitty’s wife would jolt him out of his fantasies of athletic prowess, spy games etc. but there is nobody in the Trump admin who can naysay his most insane Rube Goldberg plans, so the Titanic plunges forward. Another important point that Larry Johnson, Mercouris, and others have made is the “indispensable man” fallacy (an important one like DC’s The Lesser Evil Makes Things Better fallacy), that “if we just kill Hitler/Saddam/Paul Wellstone” our enemies will lose and we are victorious.( Okay, it worked in the case of Wellstone as there were few other Dimmies who actually were on “the people’s” side, Kucinich was forced out via politricks (as Mamdami likely will be, assuming he is sincere). The Russians have been very slow and methodical, perhaps too much so I’m now joining others in thinking, however they never succumbed to the Indispensable Man removal fantasy, as they know that Zelensky is (like Trump) a TV media-created crackpot clown who will damage his country & cause massively over the long-term. Zelensky called for the death of Putin this past Christmas publicly (& his British or even US-made handlers tried to make that call a reality and failed), yet the Russians take their time reducing Ukraine to an empty shell.

Ian is correct that the Giant’s thrashing will be very bloody, millions will die. But with the kind of people, Whisky-breath Hegseth, Li’l Narco Rubio, White Saviour Stephen Miller, Crazy Eyes Kash Patel leading the admin, there will be few if any long-lasting successes or gains. Oh and though his base hates George Soros, Soros toady Scott Besant to loot the Treasury Dept.

Failed Scholar’s link is invaluable, and in fact no less a bipartisan genocidal goon than Elliot Abrams, now serving in the Trump admin just after he served the Biden admin, rewarded over decades for enabling a genocide across Central America in the 1980s and lying under oath to Congress about it, pardoned by Poppy Bush, has spilled the tea that the major Oil Execs are quietly beseeching the White House with requests to peacefully negotiate grabbing “our oil” over there, they know if we send troops in, insurgency sabotage will ruin their profit margins. https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-former-venezuela-envoy-torches-his-takeover-plans/

Ansar Allah took out one of Israel’s most important ports for many months, this is not insignificant. They asked for Saudi permission to march through their territory to directly attack the Zionist Entity but were refused. When the Saudis attempted their own genocide against Yemen with an invasion, they lost thousands to much better fighters and turned tail and ran very quickly. But as long as the Saudis and the other Gulf family autocracies serve the US, there is only so much they can accomplish.

“barely securing half of Ukraine” is no small feat either. The Ukrainian Army was in fact at the start of the war massive, built up between 2014-22 via billions of US and NATO Training and equipment into Europe’s largest military by far, but incapable to defeat a country many times its size with a much larger population, industrial base and military experience. The best veteran critics, McGregor, Johnson, and many others have pointed out Merz & Ursula’s dream of building a massive European Military to attack Russia and roll back its now-evident victory by 2028 or 29, the entire militaries of, e.g. France, the UK, Germany, Romania, Poland, Finland, the Scandinavians, mighty Estonia & Latvia, etc. etc. would be a shadow of what Ukraine had in early 2022. (And many are opting OUT of that Children’s Crusade idea: Hungary, Austria, Slovakia etc. not joining in.) Thanks to NR for a much shorter takedown of Ipecac than I bothered with, btw.

Jan Wiklund’s comment is excellent as well. Yes, the British success over centuries is amazing given their small populace and land-mass, but they knew they couldn’t sustain it even with the enslaved bodies of millions of Indians, Africans, Burmese and other “subjects” fighting for them, and it was a long, slow decline, prodded endlessly by rivals like the Germans. I see that “support” in the US in polls for Trump’s blundering attack was something like 23%, certainly NOT found among much of his MAGA base either. The American people are stupid, beat-down and ahistorical, but since the original “Shock and Awe” that followed 9/11, they do seem to be starting to realize that the endless World Police antics are the reason they don’t have health care, do have shitty roads, decaying infrastructure, mentally ill war veterans committing suicide or shooting up the local school or restaurant, a worsening standard of living with no social safety net (Trump just froze childcare funds in 5 Blue states, heartwarming, ain’t it?), etc.

L&S is starting to resemble the old comics villain Two-Face in recent posts– https://www.dc.com/characters/two-face, not that I’m accusing LaS of being a super-genius of course. A glancing mention of Climate Change fx and reveling in how destructive it will be, anthropomorphizing that Mother Nature is somehow responsible for humanity’s violence and cruelty so it’s all okay?

“People will only take so much before they turn against every government that is still playing oligarch games.

Hogwash! Those days are over. “People” have no fight left if “people” ever had any fight. Look at Venezuela. The “people” sold out and cut a deal and offered Maduro up so Trump could thump his chest. The Chavistas are now as impotent as Hezbollah or Hamas. Paper tigers.” — a couple of Category Errors in the Defeatist message he loves to send– the Russians would be idiots to sacrifice “a million soldiers” (not), to take “Keev” and prevent 5 million early deaths as occurred after 1991–8, when Russian mortality rates fell by 7+ years due to the Chicago Boys destroying the economy and installing oligarchs under Yeltsin’s drunken watch.

It wasn’t “the People” that threw Maduro to the vultures, it was the Leadership Class. What is their long game? I don’t know, I don’t see Ian claiming to know, and I certainly know that Lurk and Suborn doesn’t know either. But like another commenter he wants to piss in the punchbowl and celebrate preemptive defeatism.

Unlike L&S (I assume) I have lived in a revolutionary society a few years after its revolution, also after passing through miserable slave-states like Guatemala and Honduras and I know the difference directly between “peasants” “happy” (not really) to die and see their children die quietly and in desperation. People do have agency when their back is against the wall, and make no mistake (since L&S seems to love despair I bet he’s less resistant here) at some point they do fight back. Read some history, Spartacus’ Revolt and many others have failed, but their have been (temporarily, I am by no means unaware of human flaws) liberations and actual freedom. To follow that line from The Wire that “If you don’t play, the game you can’t lose” is a cowardly surrender and self-fulfilling prophecy.

L&S is not my ally and never will be. No worries though, I will seek allies elsewhere.

I suspect that China will generally leave the Western Hemisphere to the tender mercies of the USA, aside from $T/Decade Infrastructure investment/construction. When – not if – the USA strongarms some LatAm country into defaulting on Chinese loans, China can absorb the financial loss, leaving that country to simmer, watching its neighbors get richer. (Maybe China will install some clever Kill Switches on what it builds there?)

Russia is more likely to [try to] support LatAm countries with MilTech, AD, drones, advisors, Wagner Mercs, etc, but China may convince them not to waste their time and money.

China (and Russia) can afford to let the USA screw up the Western Hemisphere while they consolidate the World Island.

Europe will squawk for a while, but they will eventually have to deal with it (that will be easier once they admit that Russia doesn’t need Lebensraum in Europe?).

Africa is likely to be more of a battleground, with USA & Europe desperately trying to suck out whatever resources they can, while they can. China can afford to play the long game, linking all of Africa to Eurasia with common rail gauges, etc, but that could take long enough for Climate problems to get nasty there (‘wet bulb event’, h/t Eric Anderson). Even then, China is more likely to be in a position to supply tropical countries with as-yet-unimagined Tech for ‘mitigating’ (surviving…) such events.

“And in the aftermath? The Venezuelan government remains loyal to Maduro because nobody actually betrayed him. The Trump Administration claims they did this without a grand betrayal because none was actually necessary. And Maduro is smiling and wishing people a happy New Years in New York because he avoided a war and, let’s face it, those charges are a joke.”

That anyone thinks that Maduro will beat whatever charges the US government concocts is where the entire theory breaks down.

@ibaien

The Houthis outright won. We sent fleets to neutralize their ability to hit Israel and block ship traffic. We failed. We bombed them a bunch, but they kept on shooting, We ran out of missiles, withdrew from the field, and negotiated a ceasefire that allowed them to keep hitting Israel.

We lost. Saying we didn’t, that we just went home because Yemen isn’t worth the effort is like a kid walking around from a game he’s losing because he says its stupid and he didn’t really want to play anyway. We went and picked a fight with them, then gave up. We started out by saying it was worth the effort. Saying something to the effect that ‘if we wanted their ability to shoot gone, it would be gone’ is absurd. We tried. We failed. They can keep shooting.

As to why Venezuela didn’t nail any of those helicopters to the wall–my personal suspicion is that they were taken by surprise in the sense that they didn’t expect something as extreme as kidnapping the president. They probably thought at first that the US was just blowing some stuff up, and their orders were basically to let them, because the general belief was that the US was just doing escalating provocations and if they fought back, the US would have the excuse it needed to really go to town.

Joke’s on them in that Trump is a thug who doesn’t really need excuses. On the other hand, the complete lack of Venezuelan military action against the US has made it harder for various heads of state to portray it as some kind of war with two sides.

All in all, I don’t think this is going to help the US in any way. I think the PSUV is that rare thing in modern politics, a political party with a strong ideology, and I don’t think they’re going to cave. I don’t think Rodriguez will cave, but if she starts to I think other elements in the administration will sideline her. They’re not going to hand over the oil or anything else. And it’s the usual backfire of such heavy-handed tactics–if you do things to piss people off, quite often they will react by getting pissed off, go figure.

But it may help Trump’s administration. This has finally got most people to shut up about Epstein, for one thing. And for another, fascists need states of exception–emergency and war–to consolidate power. The Trumpies finally kind of have one.

“Predictions of long term events are easy”

It depends on what you mean by long-term (and short-term). And it depends on what you mean by “events”.

This is from the U.S. military’s 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review:

“If you had been a security policymaker in the world’s greatest power in 1900,
you would have been a Brit, looking warily at your age-old enemy, France.”

“By 1910, you would be allied with France, and your enemy would be Germany.”

“By 1920, World War I would have been fought and won, and you’d be
engaged in a naval arms race with your erstwhile allies, the U.S. and Japan.”

“By 1930, naval arms limitation treaties were in effect, the Great Depression
was underway, and the defense planning standard said, ‘no war for ten years’. ”

“Nine years later World War II had begun.”

“By 1950, Britain no longer was the world’s greatest power, the Atomic Age
had dawned, and a “police action” was underway in Korea.”

“Ten years later the political focus was on the “missile gap,” the strategic
paradigm was shifting from massive retaliation to flexible response, and few
people had heard of Vietnam.”

“By 1970, the peak of our involvement in Vietnam had come and gone, we were
beginning détente with the Soviets, and we were anointing the Shah as our
protégé in the Gulf region.”

“By 1980, the Soviets were in Afghanistan, Iran was in the throes of revolution,
there was talk of our “hollow forces” and a “window of vulnerability,” and the
U.S. was the greatest creditor nation the world had ever seen.”

“By 1990, the Soviet Union was within a year of dissolution, American forces
in the Desert were on the verge of showing they were anything but hollow, the
U.S. had become the greatest debtor nation the world had ever known, and
almost no one had heard of the Internet.”

“Ten years later, Warsaw was the capital of a NATO nation, asymmetric threats
transcended geography, and the parallel revolutions of information,
biotechnology, robotics, nanotechnology, and high-density energy sources
foreshadowed changes almost beyond forecasting.”

So sure, it’s easy to say, “The world will change. The post-WWII so-called “Pax Americana” will end. The U.S. dollar will lose its supremacy. And so on.” Of course all those things will eventually happen. But the devil is in the details, and the questions of “How?” and “When?” will always be tricky.

PL was not a good person. He was a privileged prick and an ornery, abusive drunk who considered his opinions fact. Good riddance.

You left out annoyingly Catholic, Canadian as historical vanity rather than by conviction and expert weaponizer of epistemology. For all that, I liked him.