Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Author: Ian Welsh Page 10 of 436

Understanding America’s Plan and Venezuela’s Possible Submission

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On January 7, 2026

49 Comments

So, some stuff has begun to come out though so far it’s all from the US and I haven’t seen Venezuelan confirmation. First, Trump:

Second, the oil blockade per Hegseth (Secretary of War):

And third, Miller:

Meanwhile a Russian flagged oil tanker was seized. I’m not sure that it’s legitimately Russian flagged, there’s some indication they may have changed the flag in the last two weeks, but if it was, the Russians now have a quandry. The only real response is something symmetrical: seize a US bound freighter, like Iran has. We’ll see if Putin has the guts. He’s overlooked too many red lines in the past for me to be confident in his response.

Anyway, the play is obvious: no oil gets in and out of Venezuela without going thru the US first. The current government may or may not be allowed to stay in charge, we’ll see, but the Venezuelan economy can’t survive without oil exports so the US expects submission.

If neither Russia nor China are willing to intervene and Venezuela isn’t willing to take horrific losses (they’d probably win, but they’d get hurt doing so), then this is what will happen. If I were China I’d probably just end all military and dual use exports including all rare earths while there’s any blockade. What America is doing is clearly piracy. US law does not determine whether other countries can trade with each other—not de jure, anyway.

If there’s to be any remaining shred of freedom of trade it’s going to have to be enforced.

The next question is Greenland. If the US seizes that, then NATO is finished. Anyone MAGA friendly in Europe will be annihilated. Everyone will fall into China’s grasp, there’s no other alternative and there will be a mad scramble of nuclear proliferation. (Should have happened long ago, but people didn’t want to admit the US was an evil overlord.)

Trump may be able to coerce Venezuela (though China could stop him, it seems unlikeley they will) but he is accelerating the collapse of the American Empire something fierce. Again, the US is auto-catabolic in economic terms, and this is just the mad thrashing of a dying Empire, dramatic as it is.

Venezuelan crude is heavy oil. It will be of little value to the US economy, China can replace it without much difficulty and Russia doesn’t need it. This is seizing a wasting asset, acting like it’s 1935 or 1970 and oil is the most important strategic resource. It isn’t. It isn’t even close any more, as long as you have enough. China is aggressively moving away from dependence on oil, in particular, and China is who matters.

Trump’s just an aggressive moron. None of this will stop or even slow US decline where it matters. Instead it will speed it up, and in the longer term, the US will not keep control of Venezuela either.

No one’s talking about Trump being a pedophile right now, however, so I guess it’s “Mission Successful.”

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How To Defeat The US Militarily As A Weaker Power

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On January 6, 2026

14 Comments

Willingness to fight and to absorb damage is the most important thing. The Yemenis lost leaders, civilians and port facilities. They just kept going until the US withdrew. Everyone except the Chinese walks careful around the US because they know it can do a lot of damage to them: more than they can do to it.

But as the Vietnamese, Taliban, and Ansar Allah proved, if you’re willing to accept lopsided exchange numbers you can win just by being a lot tougher than Americans are. They’ll eventually give up and go away.

This was, by the way, Bin Laden’s explicit policy. He wrote as much. Get the Americans to invade Afghanistan and do to them what the Afghans did to Russia. It didn’t work that great (slow bleed, since they didn’t have Superpower support like they did against Russia) but then Bush decided to attack Iraq and whether you consider the occupation a win or a loss, it was a clusterfuck.

Venezuela is trying to avoid armed conflict, in part, I suspect, because they aren’t a unified society. That means the cost for the US is almost zero.

Hezbollah had the same problem with Israel and the US and it cost them a great deal. It may cost them everything. Their problem is and was exacerbated by the sectarian nature of Lebanon. If they had gone all out against the Israelis they could have inflicted massive damage, but Israeli retaliation might well have led to a civil war as other factions blamed them. Additionally, much of the issue, as with Iran, appears to have simply been a constitutionally extremely cautious leadership. (Khameini’s refusal to get nuclear weapons, in particular, is political malpractice of the highest order.)

America can absolutely be beaten. In fact, the US war record since WWII is abysmal. Great at winning battles, but if the opponent is willing to take the hits, the US cannot stay the course.

There are damn good reasons for trying to placate the US. The amount of damage they can do is insane.

But Trump is, even more than any other American President of my lifetime, a classic bully. If you back down to him, he takes that as a sign of weakness and that he can get more. He will keep pushing and taking till he has everything, or until you fight back and hurt him, even if it’s only just a little.

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Keep Your Eyes On The Long Game of Imperial Collapse

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On January 5, 2026

35 Comments

The kidnapping of Maduro is fascinating and it’s interesting to speculate whether it was inside job. Some sources have claimed it, we’ll know by the actions the new leadership takes. If they let the oil majors and American “advisors” in, then the allegations are probably true. Other sources are saying that Acting President Delcy and the new leadership are actually more dedicated Chavistas than Maduro was. Until we see what the Venezuelan government we don’t know which storyline is true.

There’s also talk of taking Greenland and perhaps even Canada or Mexico.

This is all standard late Imperial collapse messiness.

But nothing has changed in the fundamentals. The US is in auto-catabolic collapse and so far there is no sign of the oligarchy losing control, which is the pre-condition for any attempts to change the trajectory. I’ve now seen data indicating China is leading in 89% of key tech fields, up from 80% a couple years ago. US industry is still collapsing. Research funding has been slashed. Final bastions like chips, AI, civil aviation and biotech/pharma are all under assault and will fall like dominoes over the next five to ten years. The US has no ship building capacity to speak of, is behind on drones and missiles (the key weapon systems of modern war) and can’t even make key components in its military chain without Chinese help. Dollar hegemony is no more than five years out from being lost.

None of the trends have changed, and there is zero sign that they will change. Actions against Venezuela will speed up the purchases of Russian and Chinese AA, missiles and drones by other countries to avoid this situation, and while China’s reluctant to send “advisors”, Russia is much less so and once the Ukraine war is over (this year or next) it’ll be happy to do so, with combat proven troops and tech. This is going to make South America more resistant to America and more determined to diversify away, not less.

As I have repeatedly said “Empires die bloody.” The US is no exception. But it is dying and NOTHING has changed which effects that. Imperial power in the modern world is entirely a product of industrial capacity and technological supremacy, with resources and population placing upper limits on what industry can accomplish.

The US is done, this is just the thrashing about of a dying giant. A lot of people will die or be hurt in the process, but, again, nothing of significance has changed.

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Maduro Kidnapped

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On January 3, 2026

75 Comments

Didn’t expect this. Guess enough of the military wasn’t loyal or competent. Won’t work out well for the US in the longer run, but here we go again. Hell of a precedent to set. If I were Mexico’s President I’d be very worried. Hope she can trust enough of her military.

A lot will depend on if a new leader not approved by the US steps up, ideally a military man. Don’t know enough about Venezuela to have an opinion on this. Decapitation strikes don’t work on real movements (see Ansar-Allah.)

However, more likely a “unity government” will be announced, the US oil majors will be let back in and so on. It’ll be interesting to see if an insurgency springs up or not. If I were China (I’m not, and they tend to be more passive than I think is wise) I’d happily supply any insurgency that does happen.

Anyway, discuss here.

Update: US President #DonaldTrump said in a press conference that the US is going to “run #Venezuela.” Trump added that the #US will run the country until it decides a “safe, proper, and judicious” transition is in place. He said that the US does not want to be involved with “having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.”

Update 2: Could be that the kidnapping did nothing but replace Maduro with someone more competent. Alternatively Delcy, whom the US has acknowledged as head of state, lead the negotiations to sell out Maduro. We’ll see.

 

Open Thread

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On January 3, 2026

9 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

The Accelerating Nature Of Financialization Collapse

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On January 1, 2026

21 Comments

There’s a lot of confusion about the end of the American empire, and the fall of neoliberalism. Many people think the US will just be in “second place” and it’ll be OK.

No.

The problem is the nature of America’s decline. Since 1980 the US economy has been progressively financialized. Profits are all that matters, not what is done to make profits. In properly functioning markets the idea is that products fill a need, on net improve human welfare and lead to more growth of real products.

If a company doesn’t make a profit, that means it isn’t growing the real economy with products which are a net positive. In such a case it goes out of business.

This is approximately how the Chinese economy works. It’s how the US economy worked for much of its history. It’s how the British economy worked up till about 1890 or so.

It’s not how the US economy works.

You could say that the US economy is currently auto-catabolic. The more money that is made, the more the real economy is damaged. You see this most purely in Private Equity. They buy up companies, loot the company, load it up with the debt (including all the debt used to buy the company), then the company goes out of business. This is what happened ToysRUs, it is also, contrary to the current storyline, what happened to Blockbuster. The company was trying to pivot to online, but all profits were drained out by PE owners.

This happened to, literally, tens of of thousands of companies.

The sort of monopoly roll-ups which Matt Stoller so ably covers increase prices without increasing product quality. Health care price increases provide no utility (you can get a CT or MRI scan in China for under $100.) All of this damages the economy. Headline GDP goes up, but the actual strength of the economy decreases. I would estimate that fully half of US GDP is essentially “fake”, driven entirely by increased prices and fake profits. The US economy has been smaller than China’s, in real (not PPP adjusted, but “how much do we produce”) terms for at least ten years.

This process continues till there is no muscle left to consume.

The only possibility of the US avoiding the UK’s fate, despite being a continental power, is for the oligarchs to lose power and for there to be a huge compression of asset and service prices. This process will be extremely painful and is currently politically impossible, due to the control of the duopoly. Both parties are owned by oligarchs, the tech bros are rising and none of them have the least interest in creating a good economy when it’s so much more profitable to loot America.

Real innovation is moving to China and will increasingly do so. They are at least equal in pharma and will soon be ahead in biotech. Their markets prioritize increased production (which westerners complain about as “over-capacity.”) The Chinese government does not want high GDP numbers or high profits, they want increased human welfare and a more powerful state and country. So their markets are organized, well, as actually competitive markets, the most “free” in any major economy.

So Americans who are patting themselves on the back, figuring “well, how bad can it get? We’ll still be number 2” are underestimating how bad the economy is going to get. India is effectively a continental power too, and it punches way below its geographical weight.

This isn’t to say there is no hope for the US, but decline has a long way to go yet because reversing it requires the most powerful people in society to give up massive profits, and many of them, in the process, would lose their fortunes. Meanwhile many ordinary Americans are still doing “OK” if not great, and they don’t want radical (change from the roots) change either.

All of this is not a worse case scenario either, it’s the default—maybe even slightly optimistic. The worst case scenario involves some form of civil war, not like the War between the States, but low grade shit wafare that slowly drives a country into the dirt.

The bottom is not yet close.

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2025 Is The Year The US Empire Acknowledged The End of Hegemony

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On December 31, 2025

17 Comments

Let’s keep this brief. In 2025 the US:

  • Gave up trying to win the Ukraine war;
  • Turned NATO from a vassal protection scheme into a vassal looting scheme;
  • Slashed scientific spending massively;
  • Lost a trade war to China;
  • Doubled down on the AI Bubble, in a race it will lose;
  • Was humiliated by China’s rare-Earth sanctions, realizing it couldn’t build weapons without China;
  • Pivoted hard to trying to hold onto Latin America, after almost all Latin American countries had replaced the US with China as their main trade partner;
  • Went to war with their own university system;
  • Realized (this is now widespread) that dollar hegemony is almost over;
  • completely destroyed what remained of their moral soft power to enable a genocide in Palestine, making everyone realize America is run by people who might as well be Nazis;
  • Was governed by the most corrupt and stupid President of the 20th and 21st centuries; and,
  • Gave up on solar and renewable energy.

Some of this is sort of admirable. Ukraine can’t be won, so you might as well not pretend it can be and acknowledging the end of dollar hegemony is wise. Pivoting to the Americas won’t work in the medium run, but it’s at least an acknowledgement of actual power realities.

However basically the US now knows that it is weaker than China. China has a larger navy by ship number, and it won’t be long before they have more tonnage (if they wanted to, they could have larger navy by tonnage in two years, they have the capacity.) The Chinese and Russians have more advanced missiles and drones, and far more production capacity. The Chinese are ahead in almost all tech areas with only a few bastions (civil aviation, chips, space launch being the most important ones) remaining and all those bastions are under assault and WILL fall. There is precisely no question that in 10 years, perhaps even five, China will be equal to the West or ahead in every important technology and almost all non-important techs.

What people are not understanding is that while the US may be able to turn Venezuela (MAY) their days of throwing their weight around are almost over. The drone/missile revolution and China’s advances in making them cheap and abundant mean that sitting offshore and freely bombing other nations is a strategy whose best-by date is now in sight.

The US/West had already lost years ago in the most important sense: all the important trends (tech, industrial capacity, military build capacity, shipbuilding) were running against it and there was zero possibility that those trends would change. For over 20 years I have pointed out that US policy and international trends meant the US dollar would lose its reserve and default trade status, now it is becoming common wisdom.

2025 wasn’t the year the US lost, but it was the year when everyone with two brain cells to rub together and even a smidgen of objectivity realized it.

The US is still a great power, and ex-hegemons do not go gracefully into that long night. America will kill and impoverish a lot of foreigners and Americans as its decline accelerates.

But it is all over but the shooting, and 2025 is the year it became impossible to argue otherwise without people laughing in your face.

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American Sanctions Are Now Benefiting Countries

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On December 30, 2025

22 Comments

The war against Russia was a big bet on sanctions. The Russian military was always stronger than Ukraine, but the West believed that sanctions would destroy the Russian economy, enabling a win and hopefully weakening Russia so much that it could be broke up.

Instead Russia’s economy has performed better since the war than it did before. Sanctions encouraged re-industrialization and Russian and Chinese businesses replaced Western ones.

Venezuela has been under sanctions ever since Chavez launched his Bolivarian revolution. Every year there are more sanctions. For a while, it worked. But…

That’s right, the most sanctioned country in South America has the highest GDP growth. It’s not doing as well as it was a couple years ago, but it’s still growing fastest.

This explains, in part, the desperate attempt to overthrow Maduro and install an American backed government.

The simple truth is that America and Europe just don’t matter much any more:

No one needs the West any more. They’ve got China. Thus the oil blockade, which is a simple act of piracy. Sanctioned ships are only sanctioned by the West, not by the countries that Venezuela is sending oil to like Cuba, China and Iran. This is a last ditch effort to collapse Venezuela’s economy, in a way that failed with Russia. The bet is simple enough: you can’t really mass-seize Russian ships, because Russia is a great power and anyway, increasingly oil is shipped by land. Venezuela has one major weakness left and Trump, led by the nose by Neocons and Cuban exiles is making a last gasp government change effort.

We’ll see if it succeeds. My money is on “no”, though they can cause a lot of damage along the way, and probably hope that seeing the damage, other countries will be dissuaded from outright hostility to America.

My bet is that it doesn’t work: Chinese and Russian anti-ship and and anti-air systems will be sold in vast quantities to developing countries and increasingly America will find itself unable to enforce blockades. It couldn’t even defeat Ansar-Allah, after all.

The twilight of Empire is an ugly time, but this is America’s twilight.

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