Is this Civilization and Progress?” — Mark Twain

The year began with a bang in Venezuela as the New World Disorder revealed itself with a brazen shamelessness.

On the orders of Donald Trump an elite arm of the U.S. military kidnapped a notorious caudillo, Nicolás Maduro, killing his Cuban security detail. Yes, Cuba depends on Venezuela’s oil.

Yet the precise extraction left Maduro’s political machine in place where it lords over a failing petrostate. Half the people live in poverty and nearly seven million people have abandoned its chaos. Venezuela once fed itself but now imports 80 per cent of its food.

This unhappy kingdom is abetted by Russian and Iranian interests as well as the world’s largest oil importer, China, which is now ruing the day for lending $100 billion to the Maduro regime in exchange for crude.

After the illegal extraction U.S. President Donald Trump, a convicted felon, said he will “run” the country but, as usual, provided few details of any substance.

The impetuous imperialist then boasted that U.S. oil companies will revive Venezuela’s degraded heavy oil infrastructure with billions of dollars and that oil will make Venezuela great again.

Venezuelans, of course, have heard this promise before from demagogues of every political stripe since the 1930s. Yet oil, the mother of corruption, has always betrayed Venezuelans.

From this unseemly drama a central message emerges like a bright bitumen flare in the Orinoco. In the Western Hemisphere no government is now safe from U.S. intervention. Only leaders that openly bow, scrape and comply with Trump’s imperial agenda can be guaranteed a modicum of safety.

So, yes, the liberal order is now totally dead, sovereignty is up for grabs, and international law, always an imperfect affair, holds ever less meaning.

Age of the ‘Donroe Doctrine’

To Vladamir Putin’s great relief, Trump has launched his very own version of a special military operation in America’s backyard. As a result, the United States now looks and behaves more like Putin’s mafia state, and wasn’t that the point all along?

This unfolding drama should alarm every Canadian, but it should not surprise even the most naive among us. Last November Trump released a new national security strategy for a declining superpower obsessed with greatness.

The document, a celebration of ego and hubris, reads like bombastic Soviet and Nazi propaganda from the 1940s. Significantly, it contains two essential yet critical messages reflecting realpolitik shifts in the world.

The first is that the United States, the world’s original and most powerful petrostate, will not abandon its problematic role as the world’s energy dominatrix. In fact, Washington proposes to expand fossil fuel and nuclear production at full speed to ensure America’s eternal greatness.

“Expanding our net energy exports,” says the strategy, “will also deepen relationships with allies while curtailing the influence of adversaries, protect our ability to defend our shores, and — when and where necessary — enables us to project power.”

The second significant message concerns the Monroe Doctrine — the 19th-century policy that encouraged the American eagle to stretch its claws into neighbouring geographies such as Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba and the Philippines.

Here the document must be read fully to be appreciated. “After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.

“This ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.”

Trump’s incursion into Venezuela confirms the restoration of the Monroe Doctrine with a Trumpian twist: a focus on corralling energy resources in this hemisphere. Venezuela, you should know, contains the world’s largest proven oil reserves of some 300 billion barrels. Canada is fourth at 163 billion barrels. America’s shale fields, the source of light oil, are declining, and the U.S. empire carries a perilous debt load.

So here are a few things to ponder in the weeks ahead as events unfold in a non-linear fashion because we now live in an age of tyrants, and in a hyperconnected world tyrants court chaos the way carnivores hunt herbivores.

Mirroring disastrous interventions

The first point is obvious: interventions in other countries’ affairs tend to end badly.

For more than a decade the state of Venezuela has been in a state of ruinous collapse. Paradoxically, the state appears everywhere yet remains absent from everything that matters. Essential services such as water, electricity, health care and education rarely work. Day-to-day existence is about family survival in an authoritarian system where gangster capitalism prevails. More than half a million citizens are armed and work as a political surveillance system.

The social psychologist Colette Capriles reports that “Venezuelans awaken each day with many different fears: that we or our family members will disappear, that hyperinflation will wreck our savings once again, that our migrant loved ones are not safe in the places where they sought refuge.”

And now President Trump proposes to “run” Venezuela better with the same people in charge. History shows that U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan all went badly, unleashing disastrous outcomes at great human and economic cost.

That’s because U.S. experts failed to acknowledge the complexities and extreme costs of regime change. They had no skin in the game. How can Venezuela, a vast country on a different continent, be any different?

Redrawing ‘spheres of influence’

As U.S. dominance in global affairs now wanes, competing powers are once again revising an old political sport — competing spheres of influence.

In this new world disorder — a new Cold War really — the Russians claim that Europe should be theirs to control while the Chinese regard the Asian Pacific and much of Africa and Latin America as their rightful neighbourhood. As the United States has made plain in Venezuela, it will forcefully impose its will on the Western Hemisphere, a region that includes Canada, Greenland and Panama.

The United States, China and Russia each play by different rules in their respective spheres but all know the game of power. (Actually it is more complicated than that because Russia and China often act together in what the analyst Velina Tchakarova calls “the DragonBear.”)

While Russia excels at brutal aggression, China uses economic leverage and material dependency to coerce and cajole. The two petrostates, Russia and the United States, have weaponized oil and natural gas. China, an oil importer, has carefully chosen critical minerals, the essential ingredient of all modern technologies, as its economic big stick.

The “Donroe Doctrine” implies that as U.S. presence grows in the Western Hemisphere, its absence will be duly felt elsewhere — a policy that gives Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping free rein in their respective spheres. Will the United States now quietly concede Ukraine to Russia and Taiwan to China as the product of its new national security strategy? Are there any rules in this jungle?

The destructive power of petrostates

Trump’s foray into Venezuela is also a reminder that petrostates are the authors of most of the world’s mischief. They now dominate global politics for one reason: fossil fuels account for more than 80 per cent of all primary energy consumed around the world. Oil remains the dark blood that animates economies, drives economic growth, fuels wars and concentrates power. It is the master resource.

In the new world disorder, control of fossil fuels means control of the systems and polities that support the advance of energy-intensive data centres, AI hubs and tyrannical infrastructure needed to support the fourth industrial revolution. That’s the rapid conquest of humanity by robotic technology.

In the 1970s the U.S. political scientist Terry Lynn Karl first noted that oil changed the metabolism of governance by creating unique and dysfunctional states that typically overspent and rarely saved. Polities that relied solely on fossil fuel revenues, she discovered, simply accelerated a string of economic and political calamities. As a result, oil-exporting nations tend to be as volatile as the resource they champion. (Alberta remains a classic case in point.)

Petrostates are also more bellicose, vain, aggressive and well-armed than neighbours without oil. Just think of Russia, Iran — or the United States, which has launched military strikes against six countries in the last year alone.

Evidence shows that oil invariably strengthens autocracies and weakens democracies over time. Oil money also allows political parties or cartels to concentrate power, buy loyalty, marginalize dissidents, fund right- or left-wing revolutions and extend the rule of oligarchs for long periods of time. The profits made by refining Canadian bitumen at U.S. refineries owned by the right-wing Koch brothers help to fund the Trump revolution.

Some of the world’s longest-serving despots and political parties preside over oil-enriched nations. Vladmir Putin, Nicolás Maduro, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Donald Trump all hold one thing in common: they understand the primal power of oil, and oil funds their ambitions.

The Texas geologist Earl Cook warned years ago that when global energy supplies begin to contract and more people experience precarity, petrostates could end up dominating our affairs. “The resulting shock will find us stripped of democratic government by an opportunistic group that comes out on top in the wreckage, a group that controls us through their control of the energy systems.”

That is part of the reality now unfolding in Venezuela, Russia, China and the United States.

Why Canada should tremble

Much has been written about the economic implications of Trump’s incursion for Canada, the world’s No. 4 oil producer. Various pundits have warned that cheaper Venezuelan crude could outcompete and displace Canadian heavy oil in U.S. coastal refineries in the near future.

These claims hold some truth, but another reality overshadows them — Venezuela’s oil infrastructure is badly degraded. The country once pumped out three million barrels a day in the 1970s but now is reduced to less than one million due to leaking pipelines, aging infrastructure, badly maintained wells and chronic corruption. By most accounts it would take an army of engineers at least a decade and tens of billions of dollars to change that material reality along with an even rarer resource called political stability.

So, the immediate threat to Canada comes not from cheaper Venezuelan crude but from the Donroe Doctrine. Which is why Canadians like Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre cheering on Trump’s takedown of Maduro should think a minute about how the dominoes might fall.

In Venezuela Trump has shown, once again, his disdain for state sovereignty, the rule of law and prohibitions on the use of force. These principles mean nothing to an imperial government intent on securing resources whether they be water, oil or rare earth minerals.

As a result, the complexity expert Thomas Homer-Dixon recently spelled out in the Globe and Mail the risks to Canada after the military operation in Venezuela. And they are considerable.

Alberta, a volatile petrostate in its own right and the most American of provinces, is now ruled by a revolutionary government that openly supports Donald Trump. History shows that oil money often sees benefit in funding extremism. Well-funded separatists in Alberta, thanks to the policy actions of Premier Danielle Smith, likely will force a referendum this year on leaving Canada.

Although a majority of Albertans have no interest in supporting this chaos-making machine, Donald Trump could declare the outcome of the vote “fake” and support independence. At that point “the U.S. moves troops to the northern Montana border and tells the rest of Canada that Alberta must be allowed to join America as the 51st state.”

Nobody in Europe believed Hitler would invade Czechoslovakia until it happened in 1939. He did so to create a “Greater Germany.”

So the new year has arrived, and the world’s power dynamics are shifting in a new Cold War. A revolutionary U.S. government has revived the Monroe Doctrine, gunboat diplomacy and the primacy of oil. In so doing it has kicked old-fashioned notions of law and sovereignty in the shins with a Putin-like swagger.

And if the anti-imperialist Mark Twain were alive today, he would ask the same question he asked in 1901. “Is this Civilization and Progress?”

Teaser image credit: U.S. Air Force crew chiefs watch as F-35A Lightning II’s taxi following military actions in Venezuela in support of Operation Absolute Resolve, Jan. 3, 2026. By Senior Airman Katelynn Jackson – https://www.dvidshub.net/image/9468564/us-military-aircraft-return-following-actions-venezuela, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=181505504