Amid accusations from Venezuela of piracy, US lawmakers have moved to bring back privateers, authorised by government-issued letters of marque, to ply the trade of piracy in service of their country by targeting enemy ships.
The Washington Post, 19 December 2025
This story does not relate to Bob Dylan’s cryptic and nihilistic Señor (Tales of Yankee Power), from Street Legal (1978). As for the meaning of his song, well, that’s pretty hard to fathom. A cowboy fever dream, perhaps; one of those strange illusions you channel in the early morning between sleeping and waking, more about mood than meaning.
Rather, these tales refer to the United States’ troubled and troublesome historical and contemporary relationship with its Central and Latin American neighbours – and particularly, to its current crusade against Venezuela’s autocratic president Nicolás Maduro. And it is less about Venezuela than about the US itself – an empire in all but name struggling to recover its own reflection in the shifting mirror of history. The restless ghost of Manifest Destiny is still pacing the corridors of the West Wing and the State Department. The “tales of Yankee power” keep repeating because the empire cannot imagine itself without them. Each show of force, each threat of “covert operations” is a reassurance ritual, a way of proving that the old muscles still work. But as with all empires in decline, the performance reveals more fragility than strength. The Monroe Doctrine once kept others out; the Neo-Monroe Doctrine may exist only to convince America that it is still in.
In That Howling Infinite has walked this road before in a 2017 post also entitled Tales of Yankee Power, a feature on American songwriter Jackson Browne‘s1986 album Lives in the Balance. At the time critics reckoned that its contemporary content, the USA’s bloody meddling in Central America, limited its appeal and long-term significance. And yet, here in the early twentieth first century, where the wars of the Arab Dissolution dragged the world into its vortex, and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine ended seventy five years of Pax Europa, the Great Power politics and proxy wars that taxed intellectual and actual imaginations in that seemingly distant decade jump back into the frame like some dystopian jack in the box.
Eight years after the original Tales of Yankee Power, the story hasn’t ended – it’s simply changed key. The Uncle Sam is still abroad, still restless, still convinced the hemisphere cannot manage without his supervision. Only the script has been updated: what was once called the Monroe Doctrine is now “neo”; what was once the “war on communism” is now the “war on drugs”. But the music is familiar – and derivative: in this sad world, whenever Uncle Sam (or Comrade Ivan for that matter) plays his hand, something wicked this ways comes. As Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn, who also condemned the North’s intervention in the politics of the South once sang, “Little spots on the horizon into gunboats grow … Whatever’s coming, there’s no place else to go, waiting for the moon to show”.
People with only a passing acquaintance with Latin American history and politics have been asking, with genuine puzzlement, “why Venezuela? And why now?” The question is reasonable enough, but the coverage has been thin – particularly here in Australia – where Venezuela tends to appear only as a shorthand for failure or excess, rarely as a site of serious American political investment.
So, as the history of US intervention in Latin America repeats itself – or rhymes, if that is the more appropriate adage – I asked Chat GPT to rummage through the copious commentary to shed some light on why, with so much else on its “to do” list, America is dedicating so much energy, military resources, credibility and prestige on a defiant caudillo and his ostensibly floundering state. It is followed by a précis of an illuminating article by American journalist John Masko analysing President Donald Trump’s options. [We have featured Masko’s work in a recent post, Tales of Yankee Power … at play in America’s backyard]
Have we see this film before?
There is a temptation to see Washington’s renewed fixation on Venezuela as an anachronism, a Cold War reflex kicking in long after the war itself has dissolved into history’s sediment. Oil state, socialist autocracy, US sanctions, ritual denunciations of imperialism – surely we have seen this film before. And yet the timing matters. Not because Venezuela has suddenly changed, but because the world around it has.
For much of the past decade, Venezuela functioned as a kind of geopolitical ghost ship: visibly derelict, drifting just offshore, but no longer worth the trouble of boarding. Sanctions were imposed, statements were made, opposition leaders were anointed and then quietly forgotten. The regime endured, hollowed out but intact, while Washington’s attention migrated—to China, to Russia, to pandemics, to its own increasingly operatic domestic divisions.
What has changed is not Venezuela’s internal character so much as its external usefulness.
Start with the most prosaic explanation, the one policymakers prefer not to dwell on too explicitly: oil. Venezuela still sits atop the world’s largest proven reserves, a geological fact that stubbornly resists ideology. Years of mismanagement and sanctions have reduced production to a shadow of its former self, but the resource remains—latent, tempting, strategically inconvenient to ignore. In a world of supply shocks, Middle Eastern volatility, war in Ukraine, and a climate transition that talks green while still burning black, Washington has rediscovered the value of optionality. Not Venezuelan oil tomorrow, necessarily—but the capacity to influence when and how it might re-enter global markets.
But oil alone does not explain the renewed urgency. Venezuela has also become a symbolic problem—what might be called an authoritarian laboratory. It is a case study in regime survival under pressure: an illiberal state that absorbed sanctions, repression, diplomatic isolation, and international scolding, and still remained standing. Worse, it did so while cultivating alternative patrons—Russia, China, Iran—demonstrating that US pressure is no longer the decisive force it once imagined itself to be.
Left alone, Venezuela risks becoming precedent. A proof that sanctions can be endured, elections ritualised, opposition fragmented, and time allowed to do the rest. For an American foreign policy establishment already uneasy about its diminishing leverage, this is not an abstract concern. It cuts to the credibility of pressure itself.
Then there is migration, the most human—and politically combustible—dimension of the crisis. More than seven million Venezuelans have left their country, destabilising neighbours and feeding directly into US domestic politics. This is not simply a humanitarian tragedy; it is a hemispheric systems failure. From Washington’s vantage point, doing nothing is no longer neutral. Containment is expensive, intervention risky, abandonment costlier still.
And so we arrive at the question of timing. Why now?
Because Washington senses a narrow corridor. Maduro’s regime is weaker than it pretends but stronger than its critics admit. The opposition remains fractured but not extinguished. Sanctions relief, once treated as a moral hazard, has become a bargaining chip. And crucially, the US is acting before its own political calendar—always the hidden metronome of foreign policy—renders incremental diplomacy impossible. With another Trump presidency no longer unthinkable, subtlety has a sell-by date.
What the US is not doing, despite the familiar rhetoric, is embarking on a grand democratic crusade. The language of democracy remains, but largely as moral scaffolding. This is not Wilsonian idealism resurrected; it is managerial realism, stripped of romance.
The objectives are modest: reinsert leverage into a frozen conflict; test whether conditional sanctions relief still works in a multipolar world; signal to rivals that the Western Hemisphere is not entirely conceded; stabilise migration flows enough to quiet domestic unrest. Pressure without invasion. Engagement without trust. Diplomacy without illusion.
And this is where the contradictions sharpen. America is attempting to discipline illiberalism abroad while its own democratic norms feel brittle, contested, and—under the shadow of political retribution, institutional erosion, and performative governance—alarmingly provisional. It is hard to export confidence when you are busy auditing your own foundations.
So what will all this effort achieve?
In the best case, a managed thaw: partial electoral concessions, incremental sanctions easing, a trickle of oil, a slight widening of political space that can be narrowed again at will. Not democracy. Not regime change. Something closer to détente.
More likely, the choreography will look familiar. Maduro gives just enough to divide his opponents. Elections occur, tilted but recognisable. Washington claims progress. The regime consolidates. Oil flows marginally. Everyone declares victory, sotto voce.
The worst case is equally familiar: talks collapse, sanctions snap back, alliances harden, migration accelerates, and US credibility erodes a little further in a region already sceptical of American patience.
Which brings us, finally, to the point that sits beneath all the policy briefings and diplomatic cables.
Long story short …
In a nutshell: the US is leaning into Venezuela now because it wants leverage over oil, migration, and a stubborn authoritarian outlier—before rivals lock it in and before domestic US politics make subtle diplomacy impossible.
What it will achieve is unlikely to be transformation: at best a managed thaw and partial stability; at worst another reminder that pressure still matters—but no longer decides outcomes.
And perhaps that, more than anything, explains the urgency. Venezuela is not just a test of Maduro. It is a test of whether American power, recalibrated and diminished, can still bend events—or whether it has entered an era where it can only nudge, negotiate, and narrate its own restraint.
See also in In That Howling Infinite, Tales of Yankee Power … at play in America’s backyard and the original Tales of Yankee Power
Trump, Maduro, and the old, disgraced song sheet ..
The Chekovian principle: If there’s a gun on the wall in act 1, it has to be used in act 3, otherwise, what the point of it Trump has to do something or his huff and puff loses all credibility.
Somewhere in the wings of world politics there hangs a theatrical maxim attributed to Chekhov: place a pistol on the wall in Act I, and someone must fire it by Act III. Americans profess to dislike theatre but cannot resist its narrative temptations; they threaten, they mobilise, they crescendo—and then, sooner or later, the audience expects the gun to go off.
Trump, a man who treats the world as a stage of which he is always the centre, has spent months pointing such a pistol at Venezuela. Warships prowled the Caribbean, threats were lobbed and withdrawn like fraternity-house dares, the Venezuelan regime was slapped with a foreign-terrorist designation—as though a label might restore the gravity of a play that has been poorly rehearsed. The horns swell, the curtains billow, and the crowd waits for the downbeat.
But Nicolás Maduro—part caudillo, part stagehand in an unraveling drama—has now done the one thing presidents hate most: he has refused to play his assigned role. He called the bluff.
When the Venezuelan National Assembly announced an investigation into an alleged American strike that killed survivors of a drug boat, it was the diplomatic equivalent of flicking Trump’s nose. It broke the Putin playbook: flattery first, deference always, never embarrass the man who believes himself the protagonist of history. Instead, Caracas stepped forward and said, in effect: All right then, fire your gun. We are still standing.
Now Trump is between a political rock and a theatrical hard place. His threats—grand, extravagant, and not altogether serious—have become a promise in the eyes of his supporters; promises demand fulfilment. To withdraw now would be humiliation. To act might mean plunging the United States back into the kind of messy, generational entanglement it claims to despise. The pistol on the mantel must discharge; the question is into what.
To parse the bind honestly, one must acknowledge an uncomfortable truth we have circled before: Venezuela is not a conventional state. It is a patchwork of criminal enclaves, guerrilla zones, mining fiefdoms, and military mafias stitched together by a government whose stability rests not on legitimacy but on shared complicity. Maduro presides not over a functioning bureaucracy but over a mutually-assured-corruption pact. The US demanding Maduro “stop the cartels” is akin to demanding a puppet cut its own strings.
Washington keeps treating narcotrafficking as a moral and strategic emergency demanding muscular intervention, and yet refuses the more awkward truth that demand originates north of the Río Grande. The US keeps trying to prune the branches while fertilising the roots. Eliminate a distribution node and another will spring up; curb the supply and the addiction of demand remains. This is the farce of policies sold as decisive: a clean narrative for messy problems.
That narrative—remove the strongman, restore democracy—does not fit a country that is less a dictatorship than a tangled criminal archipelago. The first domino in Trump’s new Monroe Doctrine refuses to topple. And worse: Washington is discovering that its preferred script cannot accommodate a terrain where power is exercised not by state capacity but by patronage, graft, and predation.
So what can Washington do? Masko’s menu of options—attacks on cartels, direct strikes on the regime, or covert coups—reads like a particularly bad buffet of imperial choices. Each invites familiar Latin American déjà vu: civil war, occupation, an opposition that cannot govern, and long occupations in which American “advisers” proliferate like mushrooms after rain. US policy keeps writing cheques reality cannot cash. Threats become commitments; commitments become entanglements; entanglements become “forever wars.”
If Trump escalates, Venezuela risks becoming another chapter in that long, wearying book the US pretends not to have read—even though it wrote half the pages. If he backs down, the political cost is immediate: the performance of American hemispheric resolve collapses into farce. The Monroe Doctrine reboot—portrayed as a return to muscular Rooseveltian policing—becomes a punchline when the first test proves a stubborn, shabby caudillo.
There is another uglier truth hidden in the theatre lights: Maduro’s survival is not proof of ideological victory but of practical, transactional survival. He has kept his inner circle bound to him through graft and opportunity; he has turned state instruments into instruments of private enrichment. That sort of stability looks like power because it is durable; but it is hollow, brittle, and violent. You cannot negotiate with a manager of vice the way you negotiate with a functioning state.
Trump staged a drama that now requires a climax, but the stage is rotten and the actors are improvising. The US treats Latin America like a backyard it keeps tripping over, never the garden it accidentally poisoned. Year after year Washington dramatises crises and expects tidy resolutions. Every generation invents a new justification—communism, terror, narco-terror—but the habit remains: pressure, coercion, intervention, regret.
The tragedy—ancient, predictable, almost Greek—is that Latin America again becomes the terrain on which American narratives are tested and American credibility measured, rather than a set of societies whose own tragedies and complexities deserve to be understood on their own terms. The region is treated as a proving ground for policy theater rather than a neighbour with histories, grievances and real human costs.
What should be done? Not much in the way of heroics. Policy that pretends to be theatre is precisely the policy that will go wrong fastest. If the United States truly seeks to reduce drug flows and migration, it must look at demand; it must reckon with domestic consumption patterns, with financial flows that launder proceeds northwards, with the geopolitics of trade and sanction that hollow out legal economies. Most of all, it must stop pretending that the remedy lies in a staged intervention that will neither eliminate the cartels nor restore democratic governance.
But the theatre will have its denouement whichever path is chosen. If the gun is fired, the consequences will echo for years in the hemisphere and in the lives of migrants and refugees. If it is not, the spectacle of American impotence will redraft the calculus of rivals and allies alike.
Either way, Venezuela will feel the impact long after the curtain falls. And the United States, which keeps writing checks the world will not conveniently cash, will be left to explain why a pistol on the mantel was ever thought a suitable prop for foreign policy.
https://unherd.com/2025/12/maduro-has-called-trumps-bluff/
In That Howling Infinite 