Kevin Barrett
As of late January 2026, the United States under its “very stable genius” Commander-in-Chief had already seized at least seven oil tankers with alleged links to Venezuela. The ships were pirated in international waters, flying flags from a wide variety of countries, including Russia, and carrying oil that had already been paid for by customers including China.
Trump’s piracy escalated following the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro on January 3. That attack killed 83 people according to the Venezuelan Ministry of Defense. Belying the flimsy legal pretext—transparently bogus drug trafficking charges—Trump boasted that he was attacking Venezuela to steal its oil.
Maduro was spirited off to a prison in the New York district of Judge Alvin Hellerstein, whose terrorist family helped create the genocidal zionist entity. Hellerstein—the most notorious kosher-nostra-owned judge in America—presided over all 9/11-related cases and was a key figure in the coverup of the September 2001 Israeli attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Trump, a lifelong kosher nostra asset since he was “made” by Roy Cohn in the early 1970s, clearly takes orders from the global Jewish crime syndicate, including people like Netanyahu and Hellerstein, and presumably was acting under zionist orders when he attacked Caracas, Israel’s biggest enemy in the Western hemisphere.
Trump’s attack on Venezuela, alongside his other blatantly illegal actions and threats, has disillusioned those who imagine that the US abides by international law and its own Constitution. From now on, the only law for the United States, both internally and in world affairs, is the law of the jungle.
Trump’s deliberate destruction of the rule of law serves the zionists, whose blatant genocide of Gaza is incompatible with even the faintest pretense of legality. Since the zionists can no longer persuade the world to keep their universally-hated “Israel” afloat, they are using Trump to create a world ruled by brute force.
Outrageously criminal US actions, accompanied by incessant earsplitting ejaculations from America’s rabidly senile baboon-in-chief, contrast sharply with the preternaturally calm demeanor of Russian and Chinese leaders. Russia, an ally of Venezuela, reacted stolidly to the Maduro kidnapping.
Though the Russian Foreign Ministry issued condemnations, formally demanded Maduro’s immediate release, and accused the US of “international banditry” and “neocolonialism,” president Putin chose not to comment.
China, Venezuela’s biggest oil customer, also kept calm. The Chinese Foreign Ministry condemned Maduro’s kidnapping, demanded his immediate release, accusing the US of “piracy” and operating under “the law of the jungle.” And while President Xi did not comment directly, his references to “international bullying severely undermining the international order” were clearly aimed at Trump. Xi did not mention the fact that President Maduro had been meeting with Chinese representative Qiu Xiaoqi just hours before the kidnapping.
If the Russian and Chinese leaders’ words were relatively restrained, their actions were even more timid. Russia neither took nor threatened military action to protect its oil tanker, the Marinera, seized off Iceland’s coast by the crazed American Fuhrer. This despite the fact that Russia’s missiles could sink most of the US fleet in a matter of minutes.
China, too, pointedly refrained from even floating the idea of a military response to Trump’s theft of Chinese oil. Instead, China’s leaders are using diplomatic means to try to protect China’s $10 billion in outstanding oil-backed loans to Venezuela. (Venezuela supplies about 4.5% of China’s crude oil imports.)
Together, Russia and China represent a military, economic, and technological juggernaut that would almost certainly defeat the US in a shooting war. Between Russia’s treasure trove of resources and weapons starting with hypersonic missiles, and China’s gargantuan manufacturing capacity and ever-increasing technological edge, the two Eurasian powerhouses, alongside their ally Iran, are more than a match for the overextended American paper tiger, most of whose bloated military budget goes for graft and gold-plated toilet seats. The AI-inflated US economy’s dependence on Taiwanese chips, which can easily be denied by China, and the flaccidity of the US empire’s hollowed-out manufacturing sector, are fatal weaknesses that would doom America in any all-out war with a China-Russia alliance.
So why won’t sane, strategic leaders like Putin and Xi stand up to madman Trump? First and most obviously, all-out war could become almost unimaginably destructive. Though the US would lose, it could choose to take the world down with it.
Additionally, we may safely assume that Xi and Putin are following the Napoleonic dictum, inspired by Sun Tzu: “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.” Trump’s erratic behavior cannot be explained by Nixon’s “madman theory” of power politics, which suggests that a nuclear-armed leader can intimidate his opponents by feigning madness. Trump isn’t feigning. He is both unintelligent, and well and truly mad.
The annals of psychiatry have never recorded such a clear case of narcissistic megalomania. That is why Trump’s moves are so un-strategic, and why Russia and China prefer to step aside and let Trump make stupid moves rather than attempt to stop him.
Trump’s obnoxious lunacy is alienating potential allies the US would desperately need in any World War III scenario. By threatening to invade Canada, Trump has driven America’s closest vassal (both geographically and morally) into the arms of China, where Prime Minister Mark Carney has been busily setting up commercial and security arrangements with Xi to defend Canada’s southern border. Carney also declared the end of the post-World War II pax Americana at the January 20 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
By alienating Canada while angering Latin America via the Maduro kidnapping, Trump is driving the entire Western Hemisphere towards the Russia-China camp. At the same time, Trump’s threats to invade and seize Greenland from Denmark, formerly America’s most faithful European ally, have all but ended the NATO alliance and turned Europe into an enemy of the United States. (Once Trump follows through on his threats, Europe will be forced to align with Russia, China, and Iran in their struggle for a genuinely multipolar world.)
And as if Trump’s incomprehensible decisions to turn Canada, Europe, and Latin America into enemies of the US weren’t enough, we’re also witnessing what may be the most momentous geopolitical transformation of a former US ally into an enemy in—of all places—South Korea. That nation is not just an economic powerhouse, but also one of the world’s leading military powers. In the wake of Trump’s crazy on-again-off-again tariffs, as well as his geopolitical dementia, South Korea has cozied up to China and affirmed its one-China policy—meaning South Korea may be an ally of China, not the US, in any future Taiwan crisis.
So rather than risking war over Venezuela now, close to America’s borders, Russia and China are playing a waiting game in the expectation that Trump will continue to weaken the US position until it finally becomes untenable. When that happens, the US empire will implode like a proverbially overripe fruit—with or without a nudge from the Eurasian powers, which could come in the form of puncturing the purchasing power of the dollar, or engineering a military confrontation at the time and place of their choosing.
It’s also worth noting that Venezuela’s oil is currently not very important, geopolitically speaking. Though when oil prices are high Venezuela’s reserves look impressive, today’s low oil prices make Venezuelan “tar” uneconomical to extract. After Trump kidnapped Maduro, oil executives told the deranged American president that Venezuelan oil is “uninvestable.” Given the fungible global oil market, the US would gain little tangible advantage over its adversaries even if it successfully controlled Venezuela…which it does not. Maduro’s loyalists still run the country and are not surrendering their sovereignty, while huge crowds fill the streets of Caracas demanding their president’s release. Given all of that, and Venezuela’s relative proximity to the US vis-à-vis Russia and China, it’s obvious why Putin and Xi did not want to try to go to war in South America to defend a kidnapped president whose replacements are pursuing the same policies. So Trump’s kidnap-a-president spectacle was really just a show—proverbial “sound and fury signifying nothing.”
So if they won’t fight for Venezuela, where will Russia and China choose to confront the US empire? Russia, of course, is shepherding its resources to defeat NATO in Ukraine. And China, like Russia, may be willing to risk war with the US in its own neighborhood rather than America’s. One likely scenario, explored by Ron Unz, would be China’s blockading rather than invading Taiwan. By cutting off the microchips that are driving the American AI bubble, China could threaten to bring the US economy to its knees. China’s blockading its renegade province would not be viewed as an act of war by most of the world. The Americans would either have to initiate the shooting war (which they would quickly lose) or surrender Taiwan and US claims to global hegemony.
It also appears that China, alongside Russia, are helping Iran prepare for another Zio-American bombing spree. During the week of January 20, China sent 16 large military cargo planes to Iran. Almost simultaneously, Russia allowed Iran to test-fire a 10,000 kilometer ballistic missile into Russian territory. The test was successful, showing that Iran now has the power to rain down missiles on the United States. Since Iran has been a de facto undeclared nuclear weapons state since last June, according to Theodore Postal, and boasts a united population disgusted by the terrorism it has suffered and determined to resist, Trump and his zionist masters may be preparing to bite off more than they can chew.
So Maduro’s kidnapping “succeeded” logistically. But strategically, it achieved very little. As a public relations stunt, it backfired catastrophically, helping turn the world in general, and Latin America in particular, against the United States. While China and Russia could have been much more bellicose, their calm demeanor and insistence on peaceful solutions under international law are winning them friends internationally and positioning them as founders of the new BRICS-dominated international order that will emerge from the smoking ruins of the lawless and genocidal Zio-American empire.
Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, won a clear victory in last month’s recall referendum, called by the country’s US-supported right-...
