Photo by Joe Mabel – CC BY-SA 4.0

Kleptocracy, crony capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, carbon politics or Kissinger-style politics. Call it what you wish. But the Trump semi coup in Venezuela is another example of the retro politics of the Trump administration, and it is destined to pull the US into yet another quagmire, reminiscent of Iraq, Afghanistan and perhaps even Vietnam.

There is an adage that states always prepared to fight the last war. Trump’s incoherent views of the US were always backward looking, thus to make America great again has always been retro, looking at the US through Halcyon, rose colored glasses, seeing a time when the US dominated the world.

Yet as Karl Marx once observed in The Eighteenth Brumaire, the first time history repeats itself it is a tragedy, the second time it is a farce. What is unfolding in Venezuela fits neatly into that second category. It is not merely repetition, but repetition stripped of strategic seriousness. What remains is spectacle masquerading as statecraft.

From the beginning, it has been obvious that Venezuela was never about drugs. The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy made that clear. Rather than focusing on narcotics, governance, or humanitarian concerns, it resurrected an explicitly imperial vision of hemispheric dominance. Venezuela was framed as a problem of control, not law enforcement.

That........

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