One of the most flawlessly executed special forces operations of the last half-century took place in 1979 when Soviet commandos stormed Afghanistan’s heavily defended presidential palace, killing Hafizullah Amin and several of his top aides. This allowed Moscow to install a replacement government much more congenial to its interests, though the result was the long Afghanistan war against Muslim guerillas.
Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, elderly and decrepit and not long for this world, must have felt tremendous pride at that successful action, as did his equally superannuated Politburo colleagues. I’m sure they all believed it demonstrated that the Soviet Union and its powerful military were still just as robust and vigorous as all their propagandistic Pravda editorials always proclaimed.
But despite that momentary military success, the Soviet economy and political system continued to decay. Just a dozen years later the USSR collapsed and disintegrated, with its Russian successor state soon entering one of the worst periods in its entire national history.
I think that lesson of the past should be kept in mind as the Trump Administration and its mindless sycophants currently crow over their successful seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife. The latter are now rather bizarrely being brought to trial in Manhattan federal district court, with one of the charges against that foreign head of government apparently being that he had been in possession of illegal firearms.
No Monty Python skit would have ever dared include such outlandish elements.
Our dramatic kidnapping of the Venezuelan president followed the recent blockade we had imposed on his country and the resulting seizure of various large Venezuelan oil tankers on the high seas, doing so based upon our unilateral declaration that they had been “sanctioned.” In proudly taking credit for those blatant acts of international piracy, President Donald Trump had boasted at his press conference a couple of weeks ago that he planned to keep the oil or possibly sell it.
Then at yesterday’s press conference announcing his triumphant seizure of President Maduro, Trump declared that America will now control Venezuela and our country will “take back” the Venezuelan oil reserves, which he stated were rightfully ours.
While neither I nor anyone else can be entirely sure what the American president meant by those bold statements, they do seem to set a uniquely dangerous precedent for international relations between supposedly sovereign nations.
In recent weeks, Trump’s Venezuelan policies have led some of his critics to condemn him for returning to President Theodore Roosevelt’s notorious “Gunboat Diplomacy” of the early twentieth century. But such accusations are entirely false. Neither America nor any other civilized country had ever taken such bizarre and lawless actions at any time during the twentieth century nor for hundreds of previous years. Or at least nothing along such lines comes to mind.
Noted military expert Col. Douglas Macgregor expressed a great deal of concern over this outrageous behavior of the country he’d long served:
In an excellent interview with Norwegian academic Glenn Diesen not long after Trump’s public announcements, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University emphasized the totally lawless nature of current American policy. Trump simply takes whatever actions happen to come into his head, doing so while nothing is heard from Congress, the United Nations, or any other legal body that might normally weigh in on such matters.
Sachs was convinced that Trump’s sudden attack on Venezuela would probably soon be followed by his seizure and annexation of Denmark’s Greenland, a plan of American territorial expansion that he had heavily promoted during the early months of his presidency. Stephen Miller ranks as one of Trump’s most powerful advisors, and just yesterday his wife Katie Miller tweeted out an image of that large island covered in the American Stars-and-Stripes, headlined by the single word “SOON.” Her social media post attracted more than twenty millions views:
Sachs believed that even if America took that radical step, our supine European vassals would very likely fall into line and endorse what had happened, notwithstanding all the explicit mutual-defense provisions of the NATO military alliance, an alliance that Denmark had joined as a founding member more than 75 years ago. Perhaps Trump’s plans to annex Canada might eventually follow.
I was also interested that Sachs drew a strong analogy between America’s current situation and the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. He noted that although Augustus had originally maintained the fig-leaf of republican institutions when he founded the Principate, the true nature of the hereditary absolute monarchy he thus established became more and more obvious under Tiberius and his other successors. Last month I had published an article making some similar points:
- Donald Trump as Our President Caligula
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 15, 2025 • 8,300 Words
Legal precedents obviously count for little in an era of total international lawlessness, but if they did, Trump should have carefully considered the potential implications of some of his recent actions.
Over the last few weeks, he had steadily escalated his pressure on Venezuela by declaring a unilateral naval blockade and seizing some of its oil tankers in international waters, taking these actions with no legal justification other than the superior military force that he deployed.
Oil exports were the source of that country’s income and by cutting those off, he demonstrated the terrible economic damage he could inflict. This added to the leverage he apparently applied as he somehow managed to have the local military air defenses stand down when he launched his raid to capture Maduro. But two can play at that same blockade game.
China was a leading importer of Venezuelan oil and one of the tankers Trump seized was carrying crude that it had already purchased. Around that same time he announced that he would be selling an additional $11 billion of advanced weaponry to Taiwan, including missiles able to hit Chinese cities. Adding insult to injury, Trump’s abduction of President Maduro came just hours after the latter had held extensive meetings with a high-level visiting Chinese delegation, and this must have surely been a major embarrassment to the Chinese government.
I doubt that China will appreciate the prospect of having their cities placed within missile range of the new weapons systems that Trump will be delivering to Taiwan, so perhaps they might decide that now is the time to finally take decisive action.
An actual invasion of Taiwan would be out of the question, but if Trump can declare a blockade of the independent country of Venezuela with no justification, China can certainly claim it has an equal right to do the same towards an island that the U.S. government and almost the entire world has long recognized as an integrable part of a single, unified China. Indeed, at the end of December, China engaged in some extremely serious saber-rattling, threatening to impose a “chokehold” against what it has always considered a rebellious, breakaway province.
Not only would such a blockade put severe pressure on the Taiwanese government, but it would do the same to America and the rest of the West. Taiwanese foundries produce a majority of the world’s microchips, including up to 90% of the most advanced ones. Although Venezuela is an important oil producer, its exports accounted for merely a small slice of that fungible global commodity. Meanwhile, without Taiwanese microchips, much of Western industrial production would soon grind to a halt, and it’s not obvious to me what America or any of its allies could do in response.
Although for generations, we have boasted that our unequaled navy controls the waters of that region, dramatic changes in military technology over the last couple of decades have radically transformed that balance of power.
If our forces tried to break such a Chinese naval blockade and war erupted, the results seem likely to be extremely one-sided. China has amassed an enormous arsenal of both conventional and hypersonic missiles, while our own air-defense systems are rather ineffective. I’m no military expert, but I really don’t see anything that would prevent the Chinese from using waves of their missiles to immediately sink every American aircraft carrier and other warship in the region, as well as destroying all our airbases within a thousand miles or so, thereby winning the war within the first 24 hours.
Indeed, the notion that America would be decisively defeated after just a day or so of combat might even be an overly cautious conclusion. Last month, a leaked Pentagon report indicated that the Chinese could destroy our biggest aircraft carriers “within minutes.” So perhaps America would suffer a crushing military defeat within the first hour or two.
I think that the only plausible factor restraining Chinese’s cautious leaders from taking such actions would be their concern that faced with such a dismal and embarrassing outcome, our only possible military response would be to go nuclear, and they would fear that our totally irrational leaders might do exactly that.
Surprisingly enough, our sudden attack against Venezuela’s capital city and our abduction of its president may not have even been the most shocking and dangerous action our government had recently undertaken.
About a week ago, a huge wave of 90-odd explosive drones had attacked the personal Novgorod residence of Russian President Vladimir Putin in what seemed clearly to have been a major assassination attempt. All the drones were shot down by Russian air defenses and the CIA declared that the target of the drone strike had actually been a nearby military base, leading Trump to say that Putin was lying.
But analysts such as former CIA operative Larry Johnson noted that the CIA’s claims to have known the exact destination of the drones actually indicated that they had been directly involved in the attack. Meanwhile, the Russians announced that they had deciphered the intended coordinates from one of the recovered microchips, proving that Putin’s home had indeed been the target, and they turned over some of that hard evidence to American representatives. Whether or not the Ukrainians themselves launched the drones, such a long-range strike almost certainly required the direct use of American targeting intelligence, implying that our country was almost certainly involved.
Putin’s home was located more than 200 miles from any Russian border, so a drone strike of that type so deep within Russian territory was extraordinarily reckless and provocative. Trump’s own lavish Mar-a-Logo residence is right on the Florida coast, and I doubt he would take kindly to having it hit by explosive drones or a missile strike especially if he and his family happened to be there at the time. Moreover, the pitiful quality of American air-defense systems would greatly increase the likelihood that such a strike would be at least partially successful, with Trump’s home likely to be severely damaged or even destroyed.
Obviously, it would be very unwise for the Russians to consider any such extreme retaliatory measures, regardless of how legally justified they might be.
But I do think that Putin and his government have to finally respond in sufficiently strong fashion as to deter such continuing American provocations. In the past they have failed to do so, and as a result these Western actions have continually escalated, with Trump’s ignorant and bellicose national security team having apparently convinced themselves that the Russians were militarily so feeble that their leadership could be regularly attacked with total impunity.
In a further example of such Western provocations, just a few days ago yet another three-star Russian general was assassinated by a car-bomb in Moscow, the third such senior military officer to suffer that fate over the last year.
I wonder how America would react if the Russians began assassinating our own high-ranking generals with terrorist car-bombs on the streets of Washington, D.C.
Once again, although such tit-for-tat Russia retaliation might be fully warranted, it would be extraordinarily unwise for the Russians to consider taking that step.
So what actions should the Russians take? I doubt that the American government would care in the least if they merely increased their missile bombardment of Ukrainian cities, or further damaged the electrical power grid of that unfortunate country with additional drone strikes.
The Russian forces have been making continual progress on the battlefield, but the war will soon enter its fifth year, and willing or unwilling Ukrainian cannon-fodder backed by Western money and weapons seems likely to continue the conflict for quite some time. For years, various military experts have regularly predicted the imminent collapse of the Ukrainian front lines, and they have always been proven wrong.
My own rather contrary perspective has been that NATO actually represents the soft underbelly of Ukrainian military resistance. Without the financial, political, and military equipment support of the countries in that alliance, the Ukrainians would have long since thrown in the towel or their country’s government would have collapsed.
Putin was trained as a lawyer and according to all accounts, he tends to have a very legalistic approach to matters of war and peace. But under international law, the NATO countries have obviously become co-belligerents in the conflict, and the Russians would have the perfect right to target NATO militarily if they decided to do so. And if the right sort of blow were carefully delivered, it might shatter the alliance and end the Ukraine war at a stroke.
The loss of cheap Russian energy has caused severe economic hardship in many of the European NATO countries, and the popularity of most of their current leaders has plumbed serious depths, with approval ratings barely above single digits for Keir Starmer in Britain and Emmanuel Macron in France, while also being rather dreadful for most of their colleagues.
However, the Western media-propaganda complex has been extremely powerful and effective, successfully convincing a very large majority of the EU elites and most of the ordinary population that Russia constitutes a terrible danger to their countries, perhaps seeking to invade and conquer them, despite there being absolutely no evidence whatever in support of such nonsense.
One reason for this contradictory situation is that European governments and the EU superstate have turned almost totalitarian in their willingness to repress dissenting opinions. In an absolutely stunning development, former longtime British politician George Galloway, one of his country’s biggest independent media figures, was forced to flee into exile after criticizing the Ukraine war, as he explained in an interview with Tucker Carlson a month ago:
Or consider the more recent case of Col. Jacques Baud, a Swiss military and intelligence expert, who had spent decades working for the United Nations and other highly respected international organizations. Over the last several years, he had gained a wide audience for the cautious and cogent views he has presented in his numerous interviews on popular podcasts, with his expertise allowing him to provide a great deal of insight on the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Then at the very end of 2025, he was suddenly “sanctioned” by the EU authorities, who absurdly declared him a Russian propagandist merely for expressing views that were different from their own.
Although he was never even accused of having broken any law let alone been convicted of anything, the remarkably harsh administrative penalty he received immediately froze all his bank accounts and banned him from traveling, and that penalty was subject to no explanation, appeal, nor judicial review. That strikingly Kafkaesque punishment effectively impoverished and imprisoned someone who had committed no crime.
In a recent interview, Baud noted the bizarre nature of the current situation. The notion of inflicting severe penalties purely through administrative decisions without any involvement of courts or lawyers harks back to the pre-Enlightenment era of the seventeenth century, a time when an absolute monarch could simply inflict punishments at will or at whim, with no legal recourse available to the victims.
Baud had spent his early career in military intelligence during the Cold War, and he noted that during all those decades, Pravda and other Soviet publications were freely sold at all local book stores, with no one ever suggesting that they needed to be banned, while local pro-Soviet Communist Parties remained equally legal. The Western political establishment of that era was self-confident enough to permit such things, but its present-day successors seem to believe that on many matters their case is so weak that they must rely upon extreme ideological repression, much like the countries of their old Warsaw Pact foes of the past had sometimes done at the time. Although characterizing today’s EU as the “EUSSR” is obviously satirical, there is actually a considerable grain of truth behind it.
Thus, through a combination of powerful media propaganda and the censorship or repression of many of the more effective dissenting voices, most of the European public and its political leadership has been kept ferociously hostile towards Russia and in lockstep support for the Ukraine war. They apparently believe that without Ukraine’s continuing resistance, Russia might soon attempt to control or destroy them.
One obvious means of dispelling that belief would be to prove that for years, Russia has already possessed the capacity to do whatever it wanted to those countries. Indeed, despite America’s immense military budget and the additional hundreds of billions annually spent by its European vassals, all of NATO combined would have been unable to mount any effective defense against such Russian attacks. If that can be demonstrated, then lack of intent rather than lack of capability must explain why no such aggressive Russian action had previously taken place.
For the last year or two, I had regularly argued that this might best take the form of a Russian demonstration attack targeting the central symbol of its NATO adversary, but probably inflicting few if any casualties. I consider this approach the least-bad option that Russia could take, far less dangerous and escalatory than a massive-casualty strike let alone crossing the nuclear threshold.
As I explained last year:
Russia currently has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, with the estimated number of its warheads somewhat outnumbering America’s total. Much more importantly, it also deploys a very powerful suite of unstoppable hypersonic missiles as either conventional or nuclear delivery systems. Despite our own gargantuan annual military budget, comparable in size to that of the rest of the world combined and many times greater than what Russia spends, all American efforts to develop these same sorts of advanced missile systems have been marked by years of repeated, embarrassing failure.
A few months ago, Russia also successfully demonstrated its revolutionary new Oreshnik hypersonic missile system, which even in its purely conventional version provides striking power similar to that of a nuclear warhead, thus allowing Russia to inflict unprecedented destruction without crossing the nuclear threshold…
Every objective observer recognizes that the current conflict amounts to a NATO proxy-war with Russia, with NATO supplying the massive financial support, advanced weaponry, training, targeting intelligence, and even key personnel that have allowed Ukraine to give Russia so much trouble. With such full NATO backing, the Ukrainians have frequently inflicted stinging losses upon Russia’s far superior forces. Indeed, by the standards of international law, NATO had long since already become a co-belligerent in the conflict, though for geopolitical reasons the very cautious Russians have refused to publicly declare that reality and take retaliatory measures.
Such caution is not unwarranted. Taken together, the countries of the NATO alliance have a combined population of nearly one billion, their recent annual military spending is 54% of the world’s total or about $1.3 trillion, and their aggregate GDP is nearly $50 trillion. By contrast, Russia’s population is only 138 million, its military spending is $145 billion, and its total GDP is $2 trillion. So Russia seems outmatched roughly 7-to-1 in population, 9-to-1 in military spending, and 25-to-1 in GDP. All these financial figures were given in nominal dollars and use of much more realistic PPP dollars would shrink these ratios by a factor of two or more, but a huge imbalance would still remain. Similarly, the inclusion of Russia’s close ally China would more than equalize these figures, but China’s military forces are almost entirely pointed towards the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, and other nearby coastal areas, so its vast power cannot be easily brought to bear in the European theater, where Russia confronts NATO…
Given that NATO’s total population and industrial base is so many times greater than that of Russia, if the alliance holds firm, Russia might eventually be ground down over time. What was originally intended as a very limited punitive attack against Ukraine lasting just a few weeks has now gone on for well over three years, producing huge causalities on both sides, and it must be brought to an end. Meanwhile, the lack of any sufficiently strong Russian retaliation against NATO has merely emboldened the Western leaders to take more and more reckless and provocative actions, actions that at some point might result in a catastrophe for the world.
One strange aspect of this current conflict is that Russia has essentially been fighting NATO with both hands tied behind its back. NATO missiles using NATO targeting intelligence and key NATO personnel—legally laundered through the fig-leaf of its Ukrainian proxy—have regularly struck deep inside Russia, inflicting many serious blows, including sinking the flagship and other vessels of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, but Russia has refused to respond in kind. So in effect, the NATO countries have constituted a safe haven for producing and assembling the military hardware and systems used to equip Ukraine’s forces without suffering any risk of Russian retaliation. Russian cities have been struck by NATO missiles but NATO cities and their populations have not faced any similar threat…
The idea is a simple one. Russia should publicly declare that it now considered NATO a co-belligerent in the Ukraine war and that Russia would therefore retaliate against the Western alliance. But instead of any lethal attack against NATO armed forces, the retaliation would initially take the form of a live demonstration of superior Russian strategic military power.
The Russians could announce their plans for a hypersonic missile strike against the NATO headquarters building in Brussels, Belgium, with the attack scheduled for 12 noon in three days’ time.
That sort of advance warning would attract enormous international attention and coverage, certainly becoming the world’s top news story during the several days that followed, and easily penetrating any obfuscating layers of Western media. Providing NATO with plenty of time to evacuate the building and those nearby would prove that Russia sought to absolutely minimize any loss of life, thereby refuting years of inflammatory Western propaganda.
Given the intent of the operation, the Russians could publicly suggest that NATO defend its HQ by ringing it with all of its best anti-missile defense systems, thereby allowing a real-life test of the two competing technologies. NATO leaders and highly paid military contractors who had spent years or decades boasting of the great effectiveness of their enormously expensive anti-missile systems could prove the sincerity of their convictions by courageously locating themselves in the targeted HQ building at the time of the attack.
Assuming that the multi-missile strike still succeeded in totally leveling the NATO HQ, the result would be few if any unnecessary human casualties along with a simultaneous demonstration that Russian hypersonics were indeed unstoppable by any NATO defenses, with obvious political implications for the citizens of the Western alliance. The city of Brussels would have acquired a huge new hole in the ground, a very visible local landmark that would surely appear on the front pages of every newspaper in the world, perhaps even eventually converted into a permanent political monument.
The Russians could then announce that their next retaliatory strikes would sink several of our aircraft carriers, a warning that American military leaders would now be forced to take very seriously.
Under such circumstances, both the political leaders and electorates of the West might draw some important conclusions from that very high-profile military demonstration. If despite such considerable advance warning, NATO still proved completely unable to defend its own headquarters from total destruction in a Russian attack, the perceived value of that military alliance would crumble, perhaps causing it to dissolve, as should have happened after the end of the Cold War more than thirty years ago.
It would also be difficult for Western media outlets to continue demonizing a Russian government that had gone to such great lengths to minimize any human casualties, while the extreme effectiveness of Russian hypersonics would have been proven by the wreckage and craters suddenly appearing in the heart of Brussels. Taken together, this would constitute a velvet glove on an iron fist.
Many Americans might ask themselves why they were annually spending a trillion dollars on their military if our defense contractors were unable to produce hypersonic weapons or to successfully defend against those produced by the Russians.
And American political and military leaders would probably recognize that if despite such advance warning they were unable to defend their own NATO headquarters from destruction, our aircraft carriers would have little hope of surviving a Russian attack. Our country’s global power-projection relies very heavily upon these carriers, whose military credibility supports our inflated US dollar. If several of those carriers were easily sunk, that credibility would be lost, probably causing a collapse in the dollar. Our ruling political regime might collapse along with it, much like the Japanese victory in 1905 had triggered a revolution in Czarist Russia.
More than three decades ago, the mighty Soviet Union crumbled and dissolved with almost no bloodshed. Under the right circumstances, I think that the Russian destruction of the NATO headquarters building might lead to an equally bloodless and long overdue dissolution of that military alliance.