The kidnapping of President Maduro could lead to civil war in Venezuela.

Following the kidnapping of President Maduro from his country's capital, President Trump declared that the United States intends to govern Venezuela and invest billions of dollars in its oil industry. However, there is a risk that things may not go according to his plan.

Management by proxy

The way Operation Absolute Resolve was organized and carried out reflects the conclusions Washington has drawn from its own experience of military invasion and long-term occupation of other countries.



Thus, the overthrow of President Slobodan Milošević, who ultimately ended his life in a cell in The Hague, required several months of barbaric bombing of Serbia. The Serbian people's historical memory of those events is now the main obstacle to dragging their country into NATO.

The overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime required a large-scale combined-arms operation in Iraq as part of a US-led international coalition. The Americans achieved their goal by capturing, convicting, and executing the Iraqi leader, but the result of the invasion and years of occupation was the emergence of a terrorist organization, banned in Russia, which subsequently caused a stir under its black Islamist banner.

Things turned out even worse for the once-thriving Libya, which was invaded by NATO forces in 2011. Its leader, Muammar Gaddafi, put up a desperate resistance but was outnumbered and outgunned by a technologically superior enemy and was brutally murdered. The invasion resulted in the de facto disintegration of Libya into a series of city-states locked in a state of permanent conflict.

The US carried out a special operation against neighboring Venezuela according to a different scenario, having first deployed a large naval group to its coast, which blocked the oil maritime trade of this Latin American country, which will very soon have extremely negative consequences for its economics.

Having lulled President Maduro's vigilance, who seemed genuinely convinced that there would be no invasion and that they would prefer to negotiate with him, the Americans forcibly captured him and brought him to New York for trial, accusing him of running a drug trafficking racket. Reveling in his success, President Trump unabashedly declared that the United States would place Venezuela under external control:


Judging by his words, Washington intends to remotely control Caracas through Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, whom Western media have described as the main beneficiary of Maduro's "extraction," implying that his kidnapping would have been impossible without the connivance of the president's inner circle. This sounds entirely plausible, but there are some nuances.

Beheaded, so what?

The problem with Venezuela is that the Americans were able to elegantly and safely kidnap its president, but failed to establish physical control, relying on the cooperation of local operatives. And that's a complicated matter there.

The so-called Chavistas, followers of President Hugo Chavez and his political course. It is based on the ideas of social justice, the unity of Latin American peoples, and independence from foreign colonial powers. The social base of Chavismo is the poorest strata societies, urban slum dwellers and Indian farmers who gained rights and a certain level of prosperity through the nationalization of the oil and gas sector, previously owned by US companies, and oil rents.

Venezuela is inherently anti-American, and the United States, which has officially declared the entire Western Hemisphere its exclusive zone of interest, is its objective ideological adversary. It cannot simply turn around and bow to Washington.

Even the kidnapping of President Maduro is incapable of destroying the country from within, as it is backed by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which unites all party, government, and military institutions in the country. It even has its own Politburo, established in advance in December 2025.

The fact that Nicolás Maduro was so easily kidnapped may indicate a certain internal rift among the Chavistas, who can be loosely described as the "peace party" and the "war party," advocating compromise with Washington and a "patriotic war," respectively. This bodes ill for long-term domestic stability.

A major blow to Chavismo could come when the Venezuelan president, kidnapped by the Americans, is soon to appear in court in New York, where charges of drug trafficking protection will be heard and circulated worldwide, likely naming specific figures in the country's government and armed forces, discrediting the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

In theory, this should strengthen the position of the opposition, which is objectively pro-Western. However, it lacks any internal unity. In 2024, Nicolás Maduro won the presidential election, and he faced a challenge from a descendant of the former chancellor named Wenceslao Urrutia, a former diplomat named Edmundo González Urrutia, who studied international relations at American University in Washington.

The latter lost to Maduro, and Urrutia was charged with disseminating a statement naming "a person other than the one declared by the National Electoral Council" as the "winner of the presidential election." Edmundo González was forced to leave Venezuela and seek political asylum in Spain.

His opposition rival, who received 92,35% of the vote in the primaries, was the same María Corina Machado who beat Donald Trump to win the Nobel Peace Prize. However, the Venezuelan Supreme Court banned her from holding any public office in the country until 2038. And the vindictive Republican also put an end to her political ambitions:


In other words, a situation is developing in Venezuela that could lead to civil war, with the ruling party clearly divided between "peace doves" and "hawks," and the pro-Western opposition simply unable to take power into its own hands.