TRUMP HIDDEN SUPERPOWER

The year 2026 doesn't promise to be much different from 2025, dominated by international speculations about what's going on in the head of American President Donald Trump. On the night of January 3rd, US forces bombed Caracas and captured Venezuelan "President" Nicolás Maduro and his powerful wife Cilia Flores, who are now in New York awaiting trial by an American court for various crimes, including drug trafficking.

Maduro was already no longer an internationally recognized president: the elections of July 28, 2024, in which Maduro had prevented Maria Corina Machado, Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 2025, from participating, were in fact won by Machado's ally, Edmundo Gonzales, who was subsequently arrested by Maduro and is now in exile in Spain. The countries that recognize Maduro as president are a few old allies in South America (Cuba, Bolivia, Honduras) and, internationally, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and a few others. Which certainly doesn't make the American action comprehensible or legal, but it certainly helps explain why Trump might think he has some international support, or at least a complicit silence, for his new Venezuelan crusade.

That the United States meddles in Central and South American affairs is nothing new either: from the CIA's role in the Chilean coup of 1973 and the United States' support for General Pinochet, to the support for the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s, the Argentine dictatorship between 1974 and 1983, the invasion of Panama in 1989, the attempts to subvert the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, the invasion of Grenada in 1983, and much more, the United States applies the famous Monroe Doctrine in its own way and gives the impression of thinking that South America is populated by a bunch of idiotic scoundrels who must be kept under strict political, economic, and military control, especially when they have communist tendencies. So, what's new in the Trump Doctrine and the spectacular handcuffing of the Venezuelan dictator?

First of all, Trump is disruptive, as usual. He has too many objectives simultaneously: the war on drug trafficking, dominance over South America, Venezuelan oil resources, the problem of Venezuelan immigration to the United States, settling scores with China for control of the world (South America and Africa in the first place, where China now dominates in infrastructure investments and trade, but also Greenland). A war or a revolution is fought with one objective, maybe two: but not a hundred, because the cause becomes diluted and the moves become difficult to plan. The objective of all previous US actions in South America, in addition to economic control, was the fairly clear one of the Cold War: not to leave the Soviet Union with possible areas of influence, especially in the Western Hemisphere. Here, the objective is less clear, because there are too many reasons and therefore inconclusive. The primary objective from the point of view of the international spectacle is to demonstrate that force prevails over everything. If I think of the painful and interminable justifications that G.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the whole gang of famous neo-cons had to provide (lying) to justify the second war in Iraq, here we are in a completely new scenario: the use of force is the same, but the justification is no longer important. What the President decides should be done is done, and no one even minimally worries about the effect on local public opinion or international reputation. This is new

Even for the United States. Many commentators who think they are brilliant (for example, the unbearable Italian know-it-all Marco Travaglio) say that Trump is doing what America has always done, only without hypocrisy. But, sorry Travaglio, hypocrisy in diplomacy is a cardinal virtue, and the fact that Trump's America has suppressed it is an interesting fact to analyze. Because it changes things. Trump has suppressed hypocrisy because he is on a different chessboard. In the New World, values do not exist, force is sovereign, as it has always been in the business world, and whoever wins knows that whoever loses will bend in endless genuflections to obtain a few thousand or million, depending on the inclination of the genuflection, of dollars. Trump humiliates, because humiliation is the law of business, not politics, and makes people genuflect: he makes you eat your own excrement if you want to stay alive. He is more reminiscent of the Narcos TV series than Homeland or, even more ideally, West Wing.

Faced with real power, not that of great narratives, not that of values, but the base one of money, of economic domination, everyone shits themselves, and would sell their own mother for a few extra pennies. And Trump is a monster but also a genius, because he knows it. Note that for the moment Trump has not imposed any regime change, a classic of the previous attacks on South America that I listed above. He quickly dismissed Machado at his press conference in Mara Lago saying that she does not have enough influence. Which means: we don't want to get bogged down in regime change, just buy everyone, Chavistas, Democrats and whoever else, to do with this country what we want.

Vice-President Delcy Rodriguez, a corrupt and powerful businesswoman, will probably do anything to stay afloat. Trump innovates by acting without values, with vague objectives and strong intuitions. In addition, he often acts against indefensible regimes, such as Iran, which is trembling in these hours, or Chavist Venezuela, leaving the opposition baffled on debates that ultimately have no substance. Although it is likely that from next week in Italy there will be anti-imperialist pro-Maduro and pro-Venezuela mobilizations, the demonstrators will probably not meet the support of the crowds who can only be happy with the departure of an authoritarian drug trafficker allied to Iran and North Korea. Trump is disruptive, has no project because he is too old to think about the future, and risks everything, like a business shark. Iran, Colombia, Greenland are already on alert, because the American brute force is on the march for them too. But the stakes are high, fewer and fewer will be allies of such an unpredictable character and all this agitation on the international scene is deeply in contradiction with his America First. Trump risks soon finding himself alone, weakened internally and externally, like his alter-ego Maduro.