Image is of military and civilian sites across Caracas which were bombed by the United States as of last weekend.
As everybody has already known for a couple days, the US has abducted Maduro and his wife in a massive operation (of which the exact details are not currently known, but involved hundreds of aircraft and at least some bombing of military and civilian targets), and has threatened Venezuela and the socialist party with further abductions and widespread murder if they do not hand over control of the country directly to the United States. In a statement that really says it all, Trump said that Machado is not being considered for the colonial viceroy position due to her sheer unpopularity. Various parties and countries around the world - and inside the US - have expressed their disapproval, which, as we all know, will not shift US foreign policy a single iota.
A few months ago, when the pressure campaign on Venezuela began, I speculated that Maduro was going to be killed or captured eventually. Flagrantly illegal and violent American military campaigns in Latin America are not new. The US has been invading land, looting banks, assassinating democratically elected leaders, and otherwise overthrowing countries in the region for their own economic benefit for the better part of two centuries, under both Democratic and Republican parties. Unfortunately, we all know that Russia and China are unlikely to do anything meaningful to contest the US in their attempt to more violently assert hegemony in Latin America. I doubt very much that the China of today will come out to bat for Venezuela and start meaningfully pressuring the US economically. For better and worse, we are far from the days of the USSR.
However, Latin America has, historically, met the US in its radicalism, committed to wars of anti-colonial nationalism, and carried out successful revolutions against the dictators placed in control from the US. As history continues ever onwards and conditions develop, I can only assume that we shall once again enter that radicalizing cycle. In that vein, the big question on my mind, and everybody else's, is: what comes next? Does the Venezuelan socialist party have the social and military cohesion to wage a years-long guerilla war against occupying troops? Can they quickly transition from a conventional to guerilla force as their military facilities are bombed, or will it take several years? Can they prevent the theft of their oil resources and make the attempt at foreign occupation more costly in both the manpower and economic costs than what that war will generate? Can Venezuela manufacture weapons for this guerilla war in a state of blockade? Will this military campaign begin immediately upon soldiers landing, or will it take a period of relatively unopposed occupation of months or even years? Will Cuba, Colombia, and even Mexico be in the same situation by the end of the year, with abducted leaders?
Yemen is the very recent proof that seemingly weak countries can force the American military to retreat in defeat. Can Venezuela follow? We shall see what Maduro has done to prepare the country for this war very soon. The only certain thing is that the murderous violence propagated by a trembling and dying empire shall be defeated eventually, whether it takes months, years, or decades, and the end result will be a socialist victory.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Some interesting commentary from Beijing moves to cut losses in Venezuela after Maduro’s capture Asia Times:
…
We already know that China already switched to Canadian crude since last November, right after the Trump-Xi meeting:
So it’s quite possible that the US gave China some “grace period” to reroute their oil supply before the actual operation in Venezuela. China has also built up a massive amount of strategic petroleum reserves so the oil stock in China should be quite safe for now.
Obviously it’s still early days and much of this kind of commentary is still speculative, but if the US goal in Venezuela is indeed to replicate what they did in Iran with the bombing of nuclear facilities, which is to scare off Chinese investors, then it’s going to have a broader impact to Latin America as a whole, as it did to the ME/NA region where both Russia and China are pulling away their strategic interests from.
Right now, it feels like the US could be in the process of cutting up the edges of China and the CPC would be sitting here thinking that they can still appease the US. Do they really think the US is going to stop at Iran after they are done?
China is going to be fine. The CPC leadership is not stupid, obviously. China has been intensely building up self-sufficiency in the last few years, the strategic petroleum reserves and food stocks are at an all time high, as well as the push for technological breakthroughs and especially in clean renewable energy.
The problem, as I have said, is internal and ideological in nature.
I think the biggest surprise for everyone was how China’s domestic consumption has failed to pick up since abandoning Zero Covid in early 2023. I remember even Western financial presses during 2021-2022 were like: “just wait until China opens up its economy, then global demand will soar and we’ll all be making money”.
We’re now in 2026 and China’s domestic consumption is unlikely to return to the pre-Covid 2019 level anytime soon, and at least not in the next few years (the most optimistic analysis I’ve seen say at least wait until 2030).
I’ve written a lot about the deflationary economy so won’t be repeating here. Property market is imploding and the local government debt crisis being the major factors, and this translates into a slump in domestic consumption which also means that China is now even more dependent on its export sector (which is also under attack by Trump’s tariffs, and the EU unable to substitute the US as a consumer market since the Ukraine war) as well as making profitable investments overseas (which is being undone by Trump’s B-2 stunt in Iran and the Maduro capture stunt in Venezuela - note that both endeavors required only minimal effort from the US without being dragged into a long war that many predicted).
And it’s not that the Chinese leadership doesn’t know the importance of domestic market. The Dual Circulation strategy has been implemented since April 2020, it simply did not produce the result even after 5 years. If anything, the opposite has happened where trade surplus is now at a record high while the domestic consumption plunged.
So China is in a very weird spot right now when it comes to its international relations:
Militarily, China has been building up its military but still inadequate to protect its overseas investments, as other users have pointed out. This demonstrates an overly optimistic view of the Washington-led international order, which has greatly benefited China’s fast growth in economy but the lagging military expenditure also means China cannot project its power like the USSR did, which I still see as the superior foreign policy compared to China’s win-win cooperation model.
(NOTE: this is not to say that China cannot put up a fight if it wants to. Warfare is an extension of politics, and with hybrid warfare the goal is to exert enough costs - political, economic and social costs - to force your opponents into backing down and mitigate the damage. So it’s not always black and white, like the only victory can only come from complete neutralization of your enemy)
Economically, China has amassed great influence all over the world. See that even Argentina, who is now effectively US colony, still continues to trade with China, because nobody can really decouple from China. So, China does indeed have a lot of economic levers if it wants to assert its interests. However, China continues to adhere to neoliberal ideology that makes them very difficult to abandon their export sector, and as a result of needing to run trade surpluses, finds themselves continue to be dependent on the global free market. The failure to build a strong consumer market (which is really the result of over-reliance on export and supply-side investment) also made China unable to absorb global export surpluses and replace the US consumer market. It keeps them in a competitive state with the rest of the exporter economies in the Global South instead.
Finally, I want to point out that the US is not “invincible” either. The 2022 Ukraine war and the sanctions that ensued caused global energy supply disruption and the high inflation in the US resulted in the Biden administration hiking the interest rates. This placed the US dollar at an unprecedented perilous situation, and with Russia calling for global de-dollarization and many Global South countries looking to abandon the dollar because they started to run into dollar liquidity crises, China’s reluctance to go with it (because China is still too dependent on and benefited greatly from the dollar hegemony) has caused this opportunity to be missed.
So, it is very important to understand that while the US has given China the room to grow into a global economic superpower, it also tied China to become highly dependent on the US consumer market. China has become addicted to the neoliberal free trade and the dollar hegemony that made them wealthy. Remember that 70% of Belt and Road investments were made in US dollars - this is as clear a signal of the intention behind China’s foreign investment strategy.
It’s unlikely that China will lose anything substantial, but it makes the relationship with the Global South a very distinct one from the USSR, where the latter was ideologically driven. This is why I said the problem with China is internal and ideological.
How deeply entrenched are the neoliberal brainworms in the CPC leadership? Are there factions that favour more socialist economic policies waiting to swoop in if the current admin weakens?
Chongqing model - a potentially very different path taken by China if Bo Xilai was not embroiled in the famous scandal (many believe it was persecution by the reformist faction) and gave way to Xi Jinping’s rise, who is more moderate and acceptable by the liberal reformers.
The Pope has spoken and the world map for Q2 of the 21st century has been drawn.
What China should do is help other nations economies transition past oil. Solar - huge in near equator region. Batteries. Store that excess power to moderate peaks and demand cycles, and distribute it to neighbors even. Affordable Electic vehicles and build out the infrastructure to handle to handle them. None of that is free but I would say that would pay dividends more than what the us spends on it's military debt abyss.
Moving beyond oil will humuliate the west.
fell for it again award