By BETTBEAT MEDIA

By examining the bombastic seizure of Venezuela’s president, we perhaps find not strength but the desperate pyrotechnics of a dying hegemon.

I must begin with a confession. I have argued that the American empire is resurgent, that its apparent decline was overstated, that the machinery of imperial domination remained formidable and effective. I pointed to the systematic collapse of the axis of resistance in the Middle East, the collapse of Syria, the degradation of Hezbollah, the continued strangling of Iran. I wrote that those who spoke of multipolarity were engaged in wishful thinking, that the beast still had claws.

Today, I am contemplating an opposite view.

The seizure of Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores from their bedroom in the early hours of January 3rd, 2026—the sixth anniversary of the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, a date chosen with deliberate malice—was presented to us as a triumph of American military prowess. Donald Trump stood before the cameras and spoke of darkness, of expertise, of waves of attack held in reserve. He told us America would “run the country” until some unspecified “judicious transition” could be arranged. He spoke of sending in the oil companies to “fix the badly broken infrastructure.” He did not bother with the old liturgies of democracy promotion or humanitarian concern. He simply told us the truth: this was about oil, about domination, about the reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine in its most naked and vulgar form.

And yet.

And yet I find myself asking: Why did it require such a spectacle?

The Sound and Fury of Impotence

Consider what actually happened—and more importantly, what did not need to happen.

The United States possesses the most sophisticated special operations forces on Earth. Delta Force, the unit that reportedly executed this kidnapping, has conducted countless extractions in silence. They could have slipped into Caracas in the dead of night, seized Maduro from his bedroom, and departed without a single explosion. The world would have woken to a fait accompli: the Venezuelan president simply gone, spirited away like a ghost, appearing days later in a Miami courtroom. This is what a confident empire does. It acts quietly, lets the results speak, and allows the world to infer its reach.

Instead, the United States chose bombastic spectacle.

Bombs fell on six locations across Caracas. Multiple states were struck. Explosions lit up the night sky over civilian neighborhoods. Air defense systems were destroyed in fireballs visible for miles. The lights of the capital were extinguished through electronic warfare. Helicopters thundered overhead. Forty people died.

Why?

The bombing served no tactical purpose. Maduro was not protected by air defense batteries in Miranda or Aragua. He was asleep in his bedroom. The strikes on military installations did not make the extraction easier—the Growler aircraft jamming Venezuelan radar accomplished that. The explosions did not neutralize resistance—there was, by American accounts, no resistance to neutralize.

The bombs were a message. They were theater. They were a fireworks display designed to make the world gasp at American power.

“Look at us,” the explosions said. “Look what we can do. Look how we darken cities. Look how we strike from the sky. Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

This is not what strength does. Strength does not need to announce itself. Strength does not require an audience. When the British Empire was at its zenith, it did not bomb Cairo to prove it controlled Egypt. It simply controlled Egypt. When the United States was truly hegemonic, it toppled governments through quiet coups and diplomatic pressure—the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, the 1954 removal of Árbenz in Guatemala. These were whispered operations, their details emerging only decades later.

The Rome of Augustus did not need to burn villages to remind the provinces of its power. The Rome of Nero did.

An empire that must constantly demonstrate its omnipotence is an empire that doubts its own omnipotence. The spectacular violence over Caracas was not a show of strength but a confession of anxiety. It was the desperate gesture of a power that fears the world has stopped believing in it, that suspects its own decline, that needs to see terror in the eyes of others to convince itself it is still what it once was.

The Red Brigades kidnapped Prime Minister Aldo Moro from a Roman street. They held him for 54 days. They were ten people.

The United States of America, to kidnap one man, needed to set the sky on fire.

What does that tell you about who is strong and who is afraid?

The Empire That Cannot Build a Laptop

There is a deeper truth beneath the pyrotechnics, one that the corporate media will not examine because to do so would be to question the fundamental narrative of American power.

The United States no longer manufactures anything.

I do not say this as hyperbole. I say it as a statement of industrial fact. The country that put a man on the moon, that constructed an interstate highway system, and the basic infrastructure of the modern world—this country cannot today build a single laptop computer entirely within its own borders. It cannot construct the naval vessels its own military says it needs. It is canceling weapons programs not for lack of desire but for lack of capacity. Its sixth-generation fighter program exists as a concept, a budget line, a promise—while China flies actual sixth-generation aircraft in actual skies.

The American economy is a Potemkin village of financial engineering. Tesla is valued at one and a half trillion dollars while selling fewer vehicles than BYD, a single Chinese electric car manufacturer. The artificial intelligence bubble—and it is a bubble—has produced an explosion of data centers that consume electricity at rates that would have seemed fantastical a decade ago, all in service of technologies whose actual productive value remains largely theoretical. The national debt spirals upward in a death dance of compound interest. The deficit devours the equivalent of Venezuela’s entire oil reserves every six months.

And so the empire does what declining empires always do: it reaches for the gun.

Fake Imperialism in the Age of Social Media

One of the voices I encountered in researching this piece made an observation that, despite its rhetorical excess, contains a kernel of uncomfortable truth. Alon Mizrahi argued that humanity’s primary colonization today is not military but mental—that the American empire maintains its grip not through aircraft carriers but through content, through the endless stream of entertainment that occupies the collective mind and renders it incapable of critical thought.

This is perhaps too simple. The aircraft carriers are real. The bombs that fell on Caracas were real. The forty dead are real. And yet there is something to the argument that the American empire has become primarily a phenomenon of perception management, a hologram projected onto the global consciousness by a sophisticated apparatus of media and entertainment. And it seems to work.

Even the largest of nations such as China and Russia seem to be paralyzed in the face of US imperialism.

Consider the language deployed to describe what happened. The word “captured” was used rather than “kidnapped.” The word “operation” was used rather than “crime.” The oil seizure was framed as “fixing badly broken infrastructure” rather than as theft. The entire apparatus of American journalism—those credentialed professionals in their glass towers—repeated these formulations without question, without irony, without any apparent awareness that they were participating in a project of mass psychological manipulation.

The Venezuelan government was not legitimate, we were told, because the US had decided it was not legitimate. Never mind the elections. Never mind the constitutional processes. Never mind that the opposition has cried fraud in every election it has lost for a quarter century, winning only a referendum and a single National Assembly vote in that entire period—and those are the only two results they accepted. The Maduro government was a “dictatorship” because Western capitalists called it a dictatorship, and therefore kidnapping its president was not a crime but a liberation.

This is the epistemology of empire: reality is what it says it is.

The Indictment That Reads Like Satire

I have read the indictment against Nicolás Maduro filed in the Southern District of New York. I recommend it to anyone who wishes to understand the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of American imperial jurisprudence.

The document alleges that Maduro, while serving in the Venezuelan National Assembly, smuggled “loads of cocaine” into the United States. Loads. This is the word used in a federal legal document prepared by officers of the court. Not kilograms. Not shipments. Loads.

The Drug Enforcement Administration’s own reports, published annually and available to anyone with internet access, state that 85 percent of cocaine and fentanyl entering the United States travels up the Pacific coast through Central America and Mexico. The Caribbean route, which would involve Venezuela, accounts for marginal amounts. Marginal. This is not my characterization. This is the DEA’s.

The same administration that prepared this indictment has pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was actually convicted in an American court of law of drug trafficking. He was not accused by political enemies. He was tried, with evidence, before a jury, and found guilty. Trump pardoned him.

So the man convicted of drug trafficking walks free, while the man accused without evidence is kidnapped from his bedroom by special forces in the dead of night.

This is not law. This is not even the pretense of law. This is power naked and unashamed, wearing the theatrical costume of legality the way a child wears a superhero cape.

“It suggests a power that has lost the capacity for quiet confidence and must instead resort to theatrical displays of violence. It suggests, in short, decline”

The Testimony of Those Who Were There

A Venezuelan journalist named Andreína Chávez was in Caracas when the bombs fell. She described waking to explosions, to the sound of aircraft, to a terror she had never experienced. She described going to the streets in the morning and finding not celebration but determination—Venezuelans of all political persuasions gathering not to welcome the Americans but to demand the return of their president.

“Even though you kidnap President Maduro, it doesn’t mean the Bolivarian revolution is over.”

This testimony will not appear on CNN or in the New York Times. It contradicts the narrative. It suggests that Venezuelans, whatever their views of Maduro, do not wish to be colonized, do not wish to have their oil stolen, do not wish to become another Iraq or Libya or Syria—countries “liberated” by American intervention into chaos and ruin.

Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia, spoke with a clarity that shames every American and European official and commentator who has addressed this atrocity. “A clan of pedophiles wants to destroy democracy in Colombia,” he said, referring to those whose names appear in the Epstein files. “And to keep this list from coming out, they send warships to kill fishermen from this city and threaten the neighbor.”

He continued:

“They want to use us here with violence so that the people of the United States don’t think about their own government, but instead get consumed by xenophobia, racism, ideas of racial superiority, and other false beliefs. And they use us to avoid addressing their own problems.”

This is the president of a neighboring country, an ally of the United States by treaty, speaking the truth that no American official will speak: the violence abroad is meant to distract from the rot at home.

What Strength Does Not Require

True strength is quiet. This is an old wisdom, one that the architects of American empire once understood. “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” Theodore Roosevelt advised. The formula worked because the stick was real. The Ottoman Empire, at its height, did not need to prove its power through constant spectacle. It simply was. Its dominance was assumed, internalized, accepted as the natural order of things.

The American performance in Venezuela suggests something very different. It suggests an empire that no longer believes in its own omnipotence and therefore must constantly demonstrate it. It suggests a power that has lost the capacity for quiet confidence and must instead resort to theatrical displays of violence. It suggests, in short, decline.

If the United States could simply install a compliant government in Venezuela, it would not need to bomb civilian neighborhoods. If it could win hearts and minds, it would not need to darken cities and jam radar systems. If it could compete economically with China, it would not need to seize oil fields by force. If it could build the ships and planes and weapons its military requires, it would not need to bully small nations to prove it remains formidable.

The very excess of the violence is the tell. Empires in their prime do not need to work this hard.

The Resistance That Remains

And here is what the spectacle was meant to obscure: the Venezuelan government still exists. Delcy Rodríguez, the vice president, addressed her nation within hours of the attack. She was flanked by military officers. She declared a state of emergency. She demanded proof that Maduro and his wife were alive. She rejected, categorically, the American claim that she had agreed to cooperate with the coup.

“I am not negotiating with anybody,” she said. “I am here. I am with the Venezuelan people.”

Diosdado Cabello, one of the most powerful figures in Venezuelan politics and one of the most hated by the opposition, was on the streets of Caracas rallying supporters. The civilian militias that Maduro spent months arming remain armed. The Bolivarian revolution, however damaged, has not collapsed.

Trump declared that America would “run the country.” But with what administrators? With what local support? With what understanding of Venezuelan society, culture, language, politics? The United States cannot govern its own. It cannot manage its own crumbling cities, its own failing schools, its own epidemic of deaths of despair. And it proposes to govern a nation of thirty million people who do not want to be governed by it?

This is not a plan. This is a fantasy. This is a narcissist’s delusion that everything will bend to his will because he wills it.

The Mask and What Lies Beneath

Vijay Prashad, the historian, pushed back when a host suggested that Trump represents “empire unmasked.” There was never a mask, Prashad insisted. The 2002 coup against Chávez. The sanctions under Obama. The recognition of Juan Guaidó. The assassination attempts. The sabotage of electrical grids. The hybrid warfare that never stopped. All of it was visible to anyone who cared to look.

He is right, of course. The crimes have always been there, documented and undeniable. What has changed is not the behavior but the presentation. Previous administrations maintained the fiction of rules, of international law, of multilateral processes. They bombed and killed and overthrew, but they did so while insisting that they were following proper procedures. The hypocrisy was a tribute that vice paid to virtue.

Trump dispenses with the tribute. He simply states what American power has always been: the capacity and willingness to take what it wants by force. In this sense, he is more honest than his predecessors. But his honesty reveals something else as well. It reveals an empire that can no longer afford the luxury of legitimacy, that has lost the ability to win consent and therefore must rely entirely on coercion.

This is not strength. This is the desperate flailing of a system that feels its foundations crumbling.

The Sixth Anniversary

It is not coincidence that this operation was launched on the sixth anniversary of the murder of Qasem Soleimani. The symmetry was intentional, a message to Iran, to the remaining poles of resistance to American hegemony, to anyone who might consider defying the empire.

But consider what the symmetry actually reveals. Soleimani built networks of resistance that, despite his assassination, continue to function. The Houthis control the Red Sea shipping lanes. The Iraqi militias that he helped organize still operate. Iran itself, despite everything the United States and Israel have thrown at it, remains standing. The assassination was supposed to decapitate the resistance. It did not.

Will the kidnapping of Maduro decapitate the Bolivarian revolution? Perhaps. Venezuela has suffered enormously under sanctions and hybrid warfare. Its economy has contracted. Millions have emigrated. The suffering is real and should not be minimized.

But the structures Chávez built remain. The political consciousness he awakened has not been extinguished. The memory of what was possible—free healthcare, free education, land reform, the nationalization of oil for the benefit of the people—does not disappear because a president is seized in the night.

Empires can destroy. They are very good at destroying. What they cannot do, what they have never been able to do, is create. They cannot build the new societies their propaganda promises. They can only administer the ruins of what they have demolished.

“We are being shown a world in which might makes right, in which there are no rules, in which the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. A world where the prison guard can do with you what he wants when you are falsely arrested”

The Question We Must Ask

The question before us is not whether this operation was a tactical success. By all appearances, it was. The question is what it portends for the empire that conducted it and for the world that must live with the consequences.

If the United States can kidnap a sitting head of state with impunity, what is beyond its reach? If international law is openly treated as a dead letter, what restraints remain? If the rule of the jungle is openly proclaimed as policy, what prevents every other armed power from adopting the same logic?

We are being shown a world in which might makes right, in which there are no rules, in which the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. A world where the prison guard can do with you what he wants when you are falsely arrested. This is the world the American empire is creating. It is not a world that will be kind to Americans when the empire falls.

And the empire will fall. All empires fall. The only questions are when and how much suffering they will inflict in their death throes.

The spectacle over Caracas was not a demonstration of strength. It was the flare a drowning man sends up, hoping someone will mistake it for a signal fire.

The darkness Trump boasted of creating over Venezuela’s capital will not remain there. It will spread. It will come home. It always does.

I write on empire, war, and moral collapse from an undisclosed location increasingly convinced that the lights are going out everywhere — here as well.

– Karim