Date: Sunday, 16 November 2025
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/trump-against-venezuela-recolonizing
https://theduran.com/trump-against-venezuela-recolonizing-the-americas/
Trump Against Venezuela: Recolonizing the Americas
15 November 2025, posted by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
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“Southern Spear: The American Pole and the Recolonization of the Hemisphere”
14 November 2025, by "Prince Kapone" (and subsequently)
The Point of the Spear: Operation Southern Spear and the Recolonization of the Americas
For years, the United States has moved like a desperate empire stumbling toward a familiar refuge. It threatened Panama over the Canal. It escalated sanctions on Cuba. It promised to unleash a “war on narco-terrorists” in Mexico. It bled Argentina through financial coercion. It sharpened its attacks on Venezuela. It even renamed the Gulf of Mexico as if a cartographic tantrum could rewrite geography itself. To most observers, these were disconnected episodes of bluster and bullying—another round of Trumpist excess, a string of chaotic impulses. But there was always a pattern beneath the noise, a deliberate architecture taking shape in slow, brutal strokes. And with the announcement of Operation Southern Spear, that architecture finally reveals itself in the open.
The name is not an accident. A spear is not fired broadly; it is thrust into a single point to break open the body. It is an instrument of incision, a weapon designed to puncture and then widen the wound until the whole is compromised. Washington did not choose this symbol lightly. The architects of U.S. power understand perfectly what they are doing: Southern Spear is the tip of a larger campaign, the point of entry into the continent itself. The Caribbean is merely the soft tissue. South America is the organ. The hemisphere is the body the empire seeks to immobilize and reclaim.
This is the first openly declared military expression of the doctrine we have been tracing for months: as unipolarity collapses, as China and Russia rise, as the world slips beyond Washington’s grasp, the U.S. ruling class has retreated to the oldest, bloodiest logic in its arsenal—hemispheric domination. Trump’s America cannot dominate the world, so it intends to dominate the Americas. It cannot impose its will on Eurasia, so it fortifies its claim over the Caribbean Basin. It cannot break multipolarity abroad, so it seeks to consolidate an American Pole at home: a captive bloc of states, resources and chokepoints that can sustain U.S. power in a world where the empire no longer reigns by default.
Look again at the pattern. Pressure Panama until Canal governance bends. Strangle Cuba until starvation becomes pretext. Threaten Mexico until U.S. forces operate inside its borders. Weaponize the IMF against Argentina until its economy kneels. Surround Venezuela with warships until sovereignty looks like defiance. This is not improvisation. These are rehearsals. These are the softening blows. These are the peripheral cuts around the point where the spear will eventually enter.
Southern Spear is not a counternarcotics operation. It is the operational birth of Monroe Doctrine 2.0, the militarized hinge on which the American Pole swings. The drug war rhetoric is a mask for hemispheric recolonization. The “narco-terrorist” label is a passport that allows the U.S. to kill with impunity where it once had to negotiate. And the sudden militarization of the Caribbean is the opening gambit of a broader strategy: to puncture one spot, one zone, one corridor—and from there, pry open the continent that Washington has always considered its inheritance.
With Southern Spear, the empire has thrown its weapon. It has chosen its point of entry. And it has announced to the hemisphere—and to history—that if it cannot rule the world, it will attempt to rule its backyard by force. This essay is the excavation of that doctrine: how it emerged, why it is accelerating, and what it reveals about an empire no longer confident in its power, but still confident in its violence.
The Caribbean as the Empire’s Test Range and Gatehouse
To understand why Southern Spear begins in the Caribbean, you have to understand what the Caribbean has always been to the United States: not a sea, but a gatehouse; not a region, but a strategic organ whose circulation determines the empire’s health. Every empire has a place it cannot afford to lose. For the British it was the Indian Ocean. For the French it was North Africa. For the United States, since the first slave ships and sugar plantations, it has been the warm waters wrapped around Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Venezuela—the maritime hinge connecting the Atlantic to the Canal, and the Canal to the Pacific. It is here that the United States learned to intervene, to blockade, to install dictators, to crush revolts, to test its new weapons and doctrines in low-cost laboratories of violence. The Caribbean is the empire’s first classroom, and now, in its decline, its last refuge.
Southern Spear treats this sea as a laboratory once again. Months before Hegseth unveiled his “narco-terrorist” narrative, the U.S. Navy quietly announced that it would be “operationalizing” a new mix of robotic and autonomous systems in these waters—unmanned surface vessels tracing invisible gridlines, vertical-takeoff drones stitching the ocean into a map of pixels, medium-altitude craft circling endlessly in the sky. The language was bureaucratic, the tone antiseptic, but the meaning was unmistakable: the Caribbean would be wired into a permanent surveillance and interdiction architecture, a maritime nervous system whose purpose was not to monitor cocaine but to monitor power. What began as an experiment in maritime domain awareness was always destined to graduate into a live-fire instrument of imperial enforcement.
And graduate it did. No sooner had the robotic flotilla taken shape than the United States began launching lethal strikes on small boats across the region. The official story was that these were “drug runners.” But the truth is that the targets were whatever vessels happened to be intercepted, and the deaths were whatever corpses the empire could justify. The point was never interdiction; it was demonstration. A great power in crisis needs to show the world that it still has the capacity to rearrange flesh and metal across entire coastlines. It needs to show its rivals—China with its deepening presence in Panama, Russia with its oil diplomacy in Caracas—that the Caribbean remains a U.S. stronghold, a territory patrolled with the same casual cruelty once reserved for Fallujah or Helmand. Southern Spear is that signal. It says: the Caribbean is not neutral water; it is a U.S. operating theater.
But the Caribbean is not being militarized merely as a buffer. It is being militarized as a gate—a mechanism for determining which states may access global markets on sovereign terms and which must do so under U.S. supervision. The Panama Canal may belong to Panama on paper, but in practice the empire sees it as the choke chain that keeps the hemisphere leashed. Energy flows from Venezuela, shipping lanes from Brazil, supply chains touching Mexico and Central America—all of these routes converge in or around the waters now patrolled under Southern Spear. A drone circling off Aruba can surveil a Venezuelan oil tanker. A naval destroyer stationed near Jamaica can pressure any Caribbean government drifting toward Chinese financing. Every sensor, every strike, every patrol is part of a single imperial proposition: only Washington decides what passes through its maritime gates.
This is why Southern Spear feels less like a counternarcotics mission and more like an occupation conducted at sea. The region is being treated not as an international commons but as a domestic security zone—an extension of the U.S. border wrapped around the hemisphere’s waist. In a moment of imperial contraction, when the empire cannot impose its writ on Eurasia without provoking a wider war, it turns to the waters it believes it can still dominate. But domination in decline looks different than domination in ascent. It is jittery, erratic, heavy-handed. It reaches for technologies that promise omniscience and winds up revealing desperation instead. The Caribbean, once the offshore heart of U.S. confidence, is now the proving ground where a wounded empire tests the weapons it hopes will preserve its shrinking world.
Southern Spear makes this plain. It is not about boats running drugs. It is about an empire running out of time. It is about a ruling class that cannot accept that multipolarity has made geography political again. It is about the recognition that if the United States loses control of the Caribbean—of its lanes, its currents, its chokepoints—then it loses the core of its hemispheric project. Southern Spear is the reminder, spoken in gunpowder and steel, that the empire intends to hold the Caribbean as the armored threshold of the American Pole. And as always, it intends to do so not with diplomacy or development, but with the quiet thunder of engines and the cold certainty of distance weapons seeking targets on dark water.
Venezuela: The First Battlefield of the American Pole
No operation centered in the Caribbean can be understood without naming the gravitational force at its core: Venezuela. Every map of Southern Spear’s activity bends toward its coastline; every deployment, every strike, every briefing to Trump about “options in the region” circles around the same political problem. Venezuela is not merely a state Washington dislikes. It is the hemisphere’s most durable experiment in sovereign development, the anchor of anti-imperialist politics in Latin America, and a key node in the multipolar order Washington hopes to delay, deflect, or defeat. If the Caribbean is the empire’s gatehouse, then Venezuela is the door it is trying to keep shut.
That is why the first major escalation of Southern Spear was not an interdiction on the high seas but the arrival of the USS Gerald R. Ford—the largest aircraft carrier on Earth—into the SOUTHCOM theater. An aircraft carrier strike group is not deployed to chase smugglers; it is deployed to intimidate states. Its presence casts a shadow large enough to be seen from Caracas itself. And it arrived just as Trump’s top generals briefed him on potential land strikes against Venezuela, a detail reporters buried in their coverage but one that reveals the real strategic calculus. Southern Spear is not a drug mission; it is the forward screen of a pressure campaign designed to test Venezuela’s defenses, probe regional reactions, and condition the American public for the idea that violence against a sovereign state can be justified by the word “narco.”
But Venezuela is not simply being targeted for ideological reasons. It sits at the crossroads of every imperial anxiety. It possesses the largest proven oil reserves on the planet. It has deepened military and economic ties with China, Russia, Iran, and the broader Global South. It has resisted sanctions, coups, and diplomatic isolation. Its ports open onto shipping lanes that feed the entire hemisphere. And in an era where Washington’s supremacy is eroding, the idea of a stable, multipolar-aligned Venezuela thriving in “America’s neighborhood” is an existential nightmare for the U.S. ruling class. A sovereign Venezuela signals that the hemisphere is no longer the private estate of the United States. Southern Spear is the attempt to reverse that signal, to reassert dominance not by negotiation but by force of example.
The tactic is as old as empire: frame the enemy as a criminal, then treat their sovereignty as contraband. By labeling Venezuelan-linked actors as “narco-terrorists,” Washington fuses the drug war with the war on terror, transforming political resistance into criminal insurgency and criminal insurgency into a justification for extrajudicial killing. That fusion is not rhetorical. It is operational. The lethal strikes at sea—lauded by officials as successes in removing “narco-terrorists”—function as a rehearsal for broader military action. Each strike normalizes the idea that U.S. forces can kill suspected Venezuelan affiliates without evidence, trial, or transparency. Each briefing to Trump about “land options” becomes easier to justify when the public has already accepted the premise that Venezuela is a hub of hemispheric criminality.
What is unfolding, then, is not a counter-narcotics effort but a campaign of geopolitical conditioning. The empire understands that it cannot simply invade Venezuela outright without risking regional revolt and global backlash. So it advances by increments: a strike here, a deployment there, a public briefing hinting at military options, a slow tightening of maritime and aerial surveillance around Venezuelan airspace and waters. Southern Spear is the slow, deliberate saturation of the region with U.S. military power until the abnormal becomes ordinary, until the presence of a U.S. carrier near Venezuelan waters feels as routine as a Coast Guard cutter off Florida.
Venezuela, in this sense, is the test case for the entire American Pole doctrine. …
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AND HERE’S THE OPENING OF AN EARLIER ONE FROM “PRINCE KAPONE”:
https://weaponizedinformation.wordpress.com/2025/07/19/civilizations-dont-clash-empires-do/
“What the Global Civilizations Dialogue Reveals About the Moral Bankruptcy of the West”
By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information
July 17, 2025
When the Oppressed Speak, the Empire Scoffs
There is something deeply threatening, almost heretical, to the Western ruling class about the image of hundreds of delegates — African, Asian, Arab, Latin American, and even a handful of white Europeans — gathering in Beijing to talk peace. Not NATO’s kind of peace, the kind dropped from drones or negotiated at gunpoint. No. A peace built on mutual respect, cultural dignity, and multipolar solidarity. This week’s Global Civilizations Dialogue Ministerial Meeting did precisely that. While Washington continues to dress up permanent war in the language of “freedom,” China quietly assembled a roomful of nations to say: the world is bigger than the West, and the future will not be written in English alone.
You won’t find that in the New York Times. For them, a summit like this is a “soft power play.” When China builds bridges — literal and metaphorical — it’s seen as sinister. When the U.S. builds bases, it’s framed as “security cooperation.” Yet here we are: ministers, scholars, artists, and young people from 140 countries — Egyptians and Slovaks, Kenyans and Croatians — speaking across languages and civilizations, not in spite of their differences, but because of them. As Maged Refaat of Egypt said of his travels in China, “There is absolutely no barrier.” A single meal in a Chinese village became a moment of spontaneous internationalism, not orchestrated by a think tank or an NGO, but made possible by people’s curiosity, humility, and joy. That’s the kind of thing no State Department memo can predict — or replicate.
But it’s not just pleasantries and photo ops. Beneath the surface of dumplings and bullet trains lies a frontal assault on the West’s civilizational chauvinism. The very premise of the meeting — safeguarding diversity of human civilizations — is a political Molotov thrown at centuries of colonial ideology. …
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
