Trump Is About to Waste American Soldiers in Venezuela

COLONIALISM GONE WRONG:
Trump Is About to Waste American Soldiers in Venezuela

Colonialism never announces itself as colonialism.

It shows up wearing a suit, clutching a briefing paper, muttering words like transition, stability, security and order.

It promises efficiency.
It promises speed.
It promises that this time (unlike the last time, and the time before that, and the time before that) it will be different.

Donald Trump’s Venezuela gamble is not different.
It is colonialism with a fresh coat of arrogance, and it is already going wrong.

The fantasy was simple: remove the head, the body collapses.

Extract Maduro, install a US-run “transition” flip the oil switch back on, declare victory and sell the spectacle to domestic audiences as proof of American omnipotence.

Shock and awe without the mess.
Empire without the body bags.🌚

Reality, as usual did not read the memo.

What Trump has stumbled into is not a vacuum but a trap—one history has set over and over again for empires arrogant enough to believe that tactical dominance equals control.

Venezuela is not Iraq 2003, not Panama 1989 and certainly not Grenada.
Venezuela is something more dangerous: a politicised, armed society with decentralised violence, ideological framing and intimate knowledge of its own terrain.

America may have removed a president.
But America has not removed power.

For the uninitiated;
1. Decapitation Is Not Control

The United States has an obsession with decapitation strikes.

Kill the leader,
kidnap the leader,
...neutralise the leader—everything else will magically fall into place.
This doctrine has failed so consistently that its continued use borders on superstition.

Maduro’s removal did not dissolve the Bolivarian state; it liberated it from hierarchy.
Power did not disappear — it atomised.
...it flowed downward into militias, colectivos, neighbourhood commanders, loyalist officers, criminal networks and ideological entrepreneurs who now operate without waiting for orders from Miraflores.

This is the first strategic failure: mistaking the presidency for the system.

Chavismo was never just a man.
It was a narrative fused with survival.
It embedded itself into food distribution, housing committees, oil labour unions, barrio defence groups and black-market logistics.

You can abduct the symbol, but the machinery keeps grinding (often more violently) once central restraint is removed.

Washington planned for a collapse.
What it triggered was a mutation.

2. The Streets Belong to Someone Else

America excels at taking airspace.
It struggles with streets.

Delta Force and air assets can neutralise a compound in minutes, but they cannot patrol a city of millions without turning every alley into a liability.

Caracas is not a battlefield designed for tanks and formations; it is a labyrinth of density, poverty, loyalty, fear and memory.

The colectivos understand this environment intimately.
They don’t need command centres or uniforms.
Their logistics are civilian.
Their intelligence is social.
Their deterrence is reputation.
They don’t fight wars — they impose costs.

And they have done the most important thing any insurgent force can do: they reframed the conflict.

This is no longer about Maduro.
This is no longer about socialism versus capitalism.
This is about occupation versus sovereignty.

About foreign men deciding who governs Venezuelans.
About oil extraction dressed up as democracy.

Once that frame locks in, you cannot bomb it away.
...and that’s why it applaud Maduro for doing the needful beforehand, now Trump has a race to run for futility.

3. Decolonial War: The Narrative That Kills Empires

The moment the conflict was rebranded as a decolonial war, the United States lost strategic initiative.

Narratives decide who absorbs pain and who breaks under it.!

America’s tolerance for casualties is low; its patience for ambiguous wars is even lower.
Venezuela’s armed networks, by contrast, are built to endure chaos; Instability is not a bug — it is their operating system.

Every US patrol becomes propaganda.
Every checkpoint becomes an insult.
Every “security operation” becomes evidence.

This is how insurgencies win: not by defeating armies, but by exhausting them morally, politically and psychologically.

Trump can set “terms” all he wants.
The streets do not recognise them.

4. The Military That Refused to Disappear

Washington claimed Venezuela’s military was “incapacitated”. That word is doing an enormous amount of lying.

What actually happened is fragmentation without surrender.

Units did not march en masse to salute a new order.
They melted into partial loyalty, silent resistance, selective cooperation and strategic ambiguity.

When Padrino López and Delcy Rodríguez appeared on television, the message was not operational unity — it was continuity.
We still exist.
We are still here.
We are not done.

In insurgent warfare, perception is everything.
A military that signals survival invites resistance.
It reassures militias.
It deters collaborators.
It tells civilians: don’t commit yet — wait.!

America did not break the spine.
...it merely bruised the ribs.!

5. Oil: The Resource That Turns Occupation Into Hell

Nothing exposes the lie faster than oil.

The United States talks about rebuilding infrastructure while occupying territory that contains it.
That contradiction is not lost on anyone.
Oil is not an economic asset here — it is a target.

You can secure terminals.
You can guard ports.
You can even restart refineries.
...but pipelines run through communities, jungles, mountains, and informal economies.🌚
They are soft, long, and impossible to fully defend.

Militias don’t even need to destroy everything.
They just need to make production unreliable.

Every sabotage delays output.
Every delay inflates costs.
Every cost turns domestic opinion.
That is the slow bleed strategy — and it usually works, ask Tompolo, Asari Dokubo and the Niger Delta guys.👌🏾

The Orinoco Belt is not a prize; it is a minefield.!

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6. The Iraq Model: The Nightmare America Pretends It Forgot

The warnings are not subtle. They are screaming.!

Limit involvement, and you get urban unrest, terrorism, assassinations, cartel opportunism and a shadow war that never ends.
Expand involvement, and you trigger organised resistance, regional escalation and a body count that poisons domestic politics.

There is no Goldilocks zone.!

Iraq did not collapse America militarily...
It rotted it strategically.
It drained legitimacy, credibility, cohesion, and trust.

Venezuela threatens to do the same — but faster.

The US military is already overstretched.
Its soldiers are tired.
Its recruitment numbers are weak.
Its public is fractured.

This is not 1991.
This is not even 2003.

...and Trump is about to learn that empires do not get to choose how wars end.

7. Collaboration Is a Death Sentence

One of Washington’s quiet assumptions is that Venezuelans will step forward to help administer the transition.
That assumption is suicidal, very suicidal.!

In environments dominated by militias, collaboration is not politics — it is a mortal risk.
Anyone who openly aligns with US authority becomes a marked individual.
Families get threatened.
Businesses get burned.
Lives get erased quietly...

This shrinks the pool of “partners” to opportunists and fools. Neither builds a state.

What emerges instead is a hollow administration surrounded by walls, guarded by foreigners, issuing decrees no one enforces outside fortified zones.

That is not governance.
That is occupation cosplay.

8. Cartels Thrive Where States Pretend

As authority fractures, criminal networks do what they always do: expand.
Libya and North Africa 2.0 for context!

Smuggling routes multiply.
Arms flow.
Human trafficking spikes.
Drug corridors adapt.
Militias tax them.
Officials skim them.
Violence becomes transactional.

This is the dirty secret of failed interventions: chaos is profitable.
The longer instability persists, the more actors have a financial interest in keeping it alive.

Washington did not eliminate corruption. It deregulated it.!

9. Trump’s Strategic Illusion: Speed Over Structure

Trump believes speed equals victory.
Move fast.
Hit hard.
Declare success.
Leave others to clean up.

...but unfortunately speed without structure creates vacuums and Vacuums attract predators.

The United States did not install legitimacy.
It installed presence.
And presence without consent is a magnet for resistance.

You cannot outsource nation-building to a society you just destabilised.

10. The Coming Body Count No One Wants to Name

This is the part officials avoid saying out loud.🥺😕

If the US stays, soldiers will die.
Not in glorious battles...
In ambushes.
In bombings.
In sniper fire.
In targeted attacks against “advisors” “engineers” and “security contractors”.

Names will trickle in.
Then lists.
Then silence.

And for what?

To “run” a country that does not want to be run.
To extract oil that cannot flow.
To impose order that dissolves on contact with reality.

This is not strength. It is hubris.!
...technically it's Afghanistan 2.0.

11. Colonialism Always Overpromises and Underdelivers

Colonial projects fail the same way every time.

They assume superiority equals compliance.
They mistake fear for loyalty.
They confuse infrastructure with control.
They believe resistance will fade instead of evolve.

Venezuela is not resisting because it loves Maduro.
Venezuela is literally resisting because foreign boots rewrote the meaning of the conflict and that’s dangerous.

Unfortunately that mistake is irreversible.

12. No Clean Exit, No Victory Speech

There is no clean off-ramp here.

Leaving looks like defeat.
Staying looks like disaster.
Escalating looks like madness.
...and that’s why it feel Trump is currently under the effect of Nigerian Voodoo.🌚

Trump has initiated a process that feeds on inertia.
Each day creates new enemies.
Each operation generates new grievances.
Each death multiplies the cost of withdrawal.

This is how empires get trapped — not by losing battles, but by winning the wrong ones and we all saw that in Afghanistan.

In Conclusion: The Streets Decide, Not Washington!

The United States may “run” ministries, oil terminals, and fortified zones.
But Venezuela’s militias run time, space and fear.

They decide when things explode.
They decide who feels safe.
They decide who pays for loyalty.
...and in asymmetric warfare, that is what power looks like.

Trump wanted a spectacle of dominance.
What he is getting is a grinding lesson in imperial overreach.

A slow-motion replay of every intervention America swore it had learned from — but didn’t.

Colonialism has always failed the same way: not loudly, not immediately, but block by block, coffin by coffin and promise by broken promise.

And to be sincere by every available indicator, Venezuela has already entered that phase.

The nightmare has just begun.

- Oreoluwa O. Olaleye
Custodian of Brutal Truths