United Gangs of America

What the Kidnapping of Maduro Reveals About the Empire

When I first saw the photos of Nicolás Maduro sitting in a U.S. courtroom after being kidnapped from Caracas by American special forces, something in me broke.

I don’t mean I was surprised that Washington would do such a thing. The history of coups, assassinations, sanctions, and proxy wars has prepared all of us for that. What broke was my remaining faith in the idea that the international system could still be repaired by “reform” or “multipolarism” alone. After this operation, it became much harder to pretend we live in a rules-based order. It looked much more like what I called in the live stream: the United Gangs of America.

Because this is exactly how gangs behave.

They send their armed men into someone else’s turf, kidnap the rival boss, loot his assets, and then put a more manageable capo in charge of the remaining structure. They don’t dismantle the gang system itself. They just change who owns it.

That is what we are watching today in Venezuela.

The Empire Takes the Mask Off

For decades, the United States tried to sell itself as a benevolent empire. It bombed countries, imposed starvation sanctions, and toppled governments, but always in the name of “democracy,” “human rights,” and “freedom.”

Now, under Trump’s second term, the mask is off.

This is the same man who once bragged, “We’re keeping the oil” in Syria. He didn’t bother dressing it up. He said the quiet part out loud. And in Venezuela, he has pushed this gangster logic to a whole new level: sending Delta Force commandos into a sovereign capital to kidnap a sitting president and his wife, and then spinning it as a victory for justice and freedom.

Look at how mainstream America reacts. Huge segments of the population, especially in the so-called “anti-woke,” “America First” camp, cheer this on. Commentators with millions of followers celebrate it as a clean, bloodless operation. Others call it a brilliant move that will bring cheap oil and allow mass deportations of Venezuelan refugees. Their only criticism is that it might turn into another “nation-building over-commitment,” not that it was a blatant violation of international law.

When even the self-styled “dissident” voices in the U.S. can’t see kidnapping a foreign head of state as a red line, you understand how deep the moral decay has gone.

Was It Really a “Hostile Extraction”?

There is another layer to this story that makes it even more disturbing.

On the surface, we are supposed to believe that elite U.S. special forces penetrated a hostile capital, grabbed Maduro and his wife, and flew them out under the nose of Venezuelan intelligence and the military. Hollywood stuff. Heroic stuff.

But several analysts, including the former UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, have pointed out how implausible this is if Caracas was truly hostile. You don’t send two dozen Delta Force operators into a city of millions, surrounded by hostile security forces, unless you know in advance the environment has been “cleared.” Otherwise, you are sending them to die.

Ritter’s argument is simple: this kind of operation only works if the CIA and other agencies have already bought off, blackmailed, or otherwise neutralized enough of the local power structure. The political elite, the upper sections of the military and intelligence, and key officials in the security apparatus have to agree to step aside. You create what he calls a “permissive environment” for the raid.

The Wall Street Journal has already published leaks about a classified CIA assessment concluding that top regime loyalists would be “best placed” to lead Venezuela after Maduro. In other words, the U.S. decided not to collapse the entire Chavista system, but to keep the structure intact under more cooperative managers.

Enter Vice President Delcy Rodríguez.

Regime Change Without Regime Collapse

According to these reports, U.S. intelligence has for some time viewed Rodríguez and other high-ranking Chavistas as the best candidates to front a transitional order. They are presented as “pragmatic operators,” people the U.S. can do business with while avoiding the chaos that would come from totally destroying the state.

This is why, after the raid, we suddenly see Rodríguez being framed as “acting president,” speaking to Marco Rubio. At the same time, the long-favored opposition figure María Corina Machado is quietly pushed aside. Trump even says publicly that while she is “a very nice woman,” she doesn’t have the support to govern.

In other words, they squeezed her like a lemon and threw her away. She performed her role in the pressure campaign, and now the empire prefers to recycle the old regime with a new, more cooperative face.

Inside Venezuela, this fuels a new debate. Some accuse Rodríguez of betrayal, of cutting a deal behind the people’s back. Others, including serious pro-Chavista voices, insist there is no evidence she sold out, and argue that anyone pushing that line is either misled or part of a U.S. psychological operation.

I do not claim to know the full truth yet. We have to wait for more leaks, more testimonies, more documents. But what is clear already is that the decisive negotiations about Venezuela’s future took place not in Caracas, but between Venezuelan insiders and U.S. intelligence. That is enough to say Venezuelan sovereignty has been emptied of content.

Lawfare as Empire: The DOJ Indictment

Parallel to the commando operation, the U.S. Department of Justice has rolled out a new superseding indictment against Maduro.

Max Blumenthal at The Grayzone has taken it apart in detail. What emerges is not a neutral legal document, but a 25-page political script. It leans heavily on coerced witnesses, some of whom were cultivated in CIA-controlled networks. It strings together vague accusations that Maduro presided over “thousands of tons of cocaine” shipped to the U.S., without providing concrete data that would stand in an ordinary court.

To give the whole thing teeth, prosecutors layer on narcoterrorism and old weapons statutes that could technically be applied to any number of people inside the United States itself. The goal is not a serious judicial process, but a narrative: “Maduro the drug kingpin,” “Maduro the terrorist,” “Maduro the existential threat.”

This is what lawfare looks like in an empire. The Justice Department becomes an extension of foreign policy, just as the “war on drugs” becomes a convenient packaging for regime change.

And it is not an accident that the indictment is rolled out with full media choreography right after the kidnapping operation. The spectacle in the courtroom is designed to legitimize what was, in reality, a raw act of force.

The Opposition’s Moral Collapse

One of the saddest aspects of this episode is the behavior of parts of the Venezuelan opposition.

We saw a prominent opposition figure in exile, who once shared the Nobel Peace Prize, say she had dedicated it to Trump because of earlier actions against Maduro. After the kidnapping, she went back on camera and declared that January 3rd would go down in history as the day “justice defeated tyranny,” not just for Venezuela but for all humanity.

Imagine that. Publicly declaring that the president of a foreign country deserves your Nobel more than you do, because he sent commandos to kidnap the leader of your own country.

This is a humiliation ritual.

A genuine political leader should have the dignity of his people in his job description. You cannot claim to be a patriot while applauding the sight of your president – even if you hate him – being dragged out of his country in handcuffs by a foreign army.

The message to ordinary Venezuelans is clear: if this is the alternative elite, they are not “national leaders,” they are aspiring viceroys.

United Gangs of America and the Global Reaction

From outside the Western bubble, the reaction has been sharper.

One Chinese commentary described the U.S. as “the world’s number one terrorist,” a country that cannot afford healthcare for its own citizens but has unlimited funds for bombing others. The journalist called the attack on Venezuela “another in a series of surging strikes under Trump’s second term,” listing Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Syria, Nigeria and others as targets of a desperate, belligerent empire.

The core argument is that the United States is lashing out precisely because it feels its global dominance slipping. And I think this is correct.

The more Washington fears losing its grip, the more it behaves like a wounded gang boss: unpredictable, violent, and unconcerned with appearances. It no longer even tries to seriously invoke international law. At best, it slaps a pseudo-legal fig leaf on operations that were clearly decided in the Pentagon and the CIA, not the Security Council.

Here we come to the tragic role of the United Nations. The UN was never perfect, but at least in theory, it existed to prevent exactly this kind of aggression. If a permanent Security Council member can openly invade, kidnap, and loot without consequence, then what is left of the UN’s credibility? Either we empower its tools to act as a real global police against all aggressors, or we should stop pretending this institution still protects the weak.

At the moment, it protects no one.

Europe’s Silence and Strategic Suicide

Europe’s reaction to the kidnapping of Maduro has been revealing and depressing.

Yes, a few countries like Spain, Norway, and the Netherlands issued critical statements. But overall, the EU has been timid, careful not to offend Washington, carefully avoiding language that would clearly label this as a violation of the UN Charter and Venezuelan sovereignty.

This is not just a moral failure. It is strategically suicidal.

Europe loves to talk about “the rules-based order,” international law, the UN Charter, sovereignty, and human rights. But when a supposedly friendly superpower performs a gangster-style rendition of a foreign leader, Europe’s leaders act as if they are reading from talking points written at the U.S. embassy.

They have already sacrificed much of their economic autonomy by decoupling from Russia and aligning too closely with U.S. policy toward China. They have lost the leverage they once had as a major economic bloc that could act as a mediator or balancer. Now they voluntarily place all their eggs in the American basket.

And what does Washington then do? It starts treating Europe the way it treats Latin America: as a sphere of influence to be managed, not as a partner to be consulted. We already see this in the open talk about “needing” Greenland for U.S. national security, as if acquiring strategic territories by pressure or purchase in the 21st century were normal.

When European leaders tolerate outright gang behavior abroad, they send a message that they will also tolerate it closer to home. A power that kidnaps a Venezuelan president today will have fewer moral or psychological barriers to using similar tactics tomorrow in other parts of the world, including Europe’s periphery.

The Iranian Lesson: Why Everyone Now Wants a Nuke

Perhaps the most interesting consequence of the Maduro operation is the signal it sends to other states on Washington’s bad list, especially Iran.

If the U.S. can kidnap a foreign leader, tear up international law, and then dress it up as a fight against drugs and terrorism, what is supposed to deter it?

One answer is obvious: nuclear weapons.

It is no coincidence that Iranian social media is now full of posts calling on the leadership to finally go all the way and develop nukes. People are reposting images of North Korea’s leader with missiles, captioned with variations of the same message: “Only this protects you from becoming the next Venezuela or Iraq.”

The pattern is clear. Saddam Hussein gave up his WMD program and was invaded. Gaddafi surrendered his nuclear ambitions and was lynched. Bashar al-Assad gave up his chemical arsenal, and the war against Syria intensified. Meanwhile, North Korea kept its nuclear deterrent and, despite all the sanctions and pressure, no one is sending Delta Force to kidnap Kim Jong-un.

There was even a recent clip of Kazakhstan’s President saying it is better not to have nukes and instead focus on investment and harmony. Putin’s response was brutally honest: Saddam Hussein thought the same.

In this environment, the Maduro precedent can only accelerate nuclear proliferation. Every regime that feels threatened will now conclude that the only reliable shield is a bomb in the basement.

Conclusion: A World Run by Gangs or by Law?

“United Gangs of America” is not a slogan. It is a description of a system in decay.

A superpower that once tried to justify its actions with lofty ideals now acts like any other cartel boss: grabbing territory, kidnapping rival bosses, seizing assets, using law as a weapon, and media as a megaphone.

The tragedy is that many of the forces that claim to oppose U.S. hegemony are still not ready to face this reality head-on. Some in the so-called multipolar camp still speak as if it is enough to form new trade blocs and talk about BRICS while leaving the deeper structures of impunity untouched.

If international law means anything, it has to apply to everyone, especially to the most powerful. If the UN Charter is more than wallpaper, it must be enforced against the big five, not just against small states.

Otherwise, we are not moving toward a civilized multipolar order. We are drifting into a planet run by gangs; one big gang at the top, surrounded by regional gangs, and countless smaller gangs trying to survive.

Venezuela’s tragedy is a warning. If a country with the world’s largest oil reserves can have its president kidnapped in broad daylight, then no one is truly safe.

The choice for the rest of us is simple: either we normalize this and adjust to life under gangster rule, or we start speaking and acting as if principles actually matter, even when the perpetrator is called “our ally.”

The longer we stay silent, the more the United States – and those who imitate it – will behave not like a republic among nations, but like the United Gangs of America.

—Kevork Almassian is a Syrian geopolitical analyst and the founder of Syriana Analysis.