The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - January 05, 2026


PREVIEW： Realpolitik #28 ｜ Gunboat Diplomacy Trump Edition


Episode Stats

Length

14 minutes

Words per Minute

147.61774

Word Count

2,144

Sentence Count

134

Hate Speech Sentences

7


Summary

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was captured by the United States and taken away from his own residence. What does this mean for the Venezuelan people and for the rest of the world? And why is this a good thing?


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to another episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Maadad.
00:00:05.740 This is the first episode of the new year, and there's been some surprises. The Americans went
00:00:12.280 ahead and just grabbed the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, from his own residence, apparently.
00:00:20.460 We're going to talk about the operational details. We're going to talk about what this means for
00:00:25.620 other countries. We're going to talk about who benefits, what does this change. We're going to
00:00:29.920 talk about some of the conspiracy theories that people have had. We're going to go into a lot of
00:00:35.060 detail here, but let's start with what we know so far, right? What we know so far is that something
00:00:42.260 like 32 Cuban guards of Maduro got killed during this operation, meaning that his key personnel,
00:00:53.040 the people guarding him, were not Venezuelans. They were Cubans. And this sort of shows you the extent
00:00:59.140 to which there is deep mistrust within this regime. Now, mind you, there had been reports that the
00:01:08.300 vice president of Venezuela, who is now acting as president, her name is Rodriguez, I believe,
00:01:16.440 Garci Rodriguez, Darcy Rodriguez, something like that. She was in negotiations with the Americans
00:01:23.340 in Qatar, with UAE mediation, etc., etc., talking about the terms of exit of Maduro. And if you
00:01:31.680 remember, there were all kinds of stories in the media saying that he pretty much agreed to hand over
00:01:38.800 all of the oil. He'd hand over the natural resources. He'd distanced himself from China.
00:01:45.340 But the Americans insisted, no, no, no, no, no. We want you to hand over yourself. You are going to
00:01:53.300 come here and be tried, and then maybe the regime can survive. And he said no. He went around partying.
00:02:00.980 There are videos of him online playing the DJ and basically making fun of Trump and saying that
00:02:08.600 the Americans aren't going to do anything. And then the Americans show up. They killed his bodyguards
00:02:15.000 and they capture him. Now, on the tactical stuff, it's also worth remembering the following.
00:02:21.160 It's worth remembering that the Americans are saying that 150 different aircraft were involved.
00:02:26.760 The Venezuelans have Chinese radars. They have Russian air defense systems. They have the S-300s.
00:02:34.160 They have mid-range systems. They have the low-range systems like the IGLA-S. None of these seem to have
00:02:41.340 done very much. It seems really that one of the helicopters was damaged by low-level air defense.
00:02:48.660 The rest pretty much didn't have an impact. And what this tells us is that these 150 aircraft that
00:02:55.160 were used by the United States were used to suppress all of the Venezuelan air defense instantly
00:03:02.060 so that none of it could actually function. We haven't seen satellite imagery yet telling us
00:03:08.800 which bits of kit were destroyed, which bits of kit were silenced with electronic warfare.
00:03:16.280 We don't know the full operational details of what was hit and with what.
00:03:21.000 But what it shows you that is that pretty much no country other than maybe Russia and China
00:03:28.000 have air defense systems that can really be an obstacle to the Americans.
00:03:34.360 And what this also says is that if you have this kind of limited air defense capability where you
00:03:40.520 bought some equipment 10 years ago, 20 years ago, it's just not enough. You've got to stay up to date
00:03:47.080 with this stuff. And the only way to stay up to date with it is to actually use it in battle.
00:03:52.360 That's what the Russians are doing. So in Ukraine, their air defense works against all kinds of
00:03:58.780 systems that have been provided by the Americans, but it also regularly fails. And these are the new
00:04:06.060 rules. Air defense only buys you this much security. What actually buys you real security up to a point
00:04:13.480 is the ability to constantly build and update your own systems and test them in battle against realistic
00:04:21.880 adversaries. And that's how this thing works. So I wanted to mention that on the air defense.
00:04:29.300 Going back to the political dimension, again, as I said, the Venezuelans had pretty much capitulated,
00:04:36.660 even under Maduro, and told the Americans that we'll give you whatever you want. Just don't invade us,
00:04:41.540 don't bomb us, don't attack us. The vice president was engaged in these negotiations with the Americans
00:04:48.700 to figure out an exit strategy for Maduro and figure out how does power get handed over and what are the
00:04:56.460 Americans' actual terms. And then the U.S. decided we're just going to capture him anyway. We're just
00:05:02.840 going to take him anyway. And if you're a Venezuelan general or the defense minister or the interior
00:05:08.640 minister, and these are guys who are in command of forces that can launch an insurgency, that can fight
00:05:14.380 and keep an alternative government quite unstable, you realize that, yes, you can cause this kind of
00:05:23.480 damage and you can cause this kind of disruption and you can give the Americans a headache. For example,
00:05:28.500 by doing what the FARC Colombian narco-terrorists do in Colombia, which is they blow up pipelines and
00:05:37.360 they attack mining assets and they kidnap and kill soldiers here and there, and sometimes they take
00:05:43.160 hostages and they negotiate over them and this kind of thing. Okay, you can do that, but there's no
00:05:49.640 guarantee that the U.S. won't come and grab you personally. And really, this is a message across the
00:05:55.980 board to all of the leadership within the American sphere of influence. And I would say that that's
00:06:02.840 Europe, the Anglosphere, and Latin America that are the core of the American sphere of influence.
00:06:09.680 And the message is, look, you can cause us all kinds of headache, but you have a lot more skid in the
00:06:16.360 game than you realize. Meaning that if you do cause us these headaches, there is zero assurance,
00:06:23.380 as far as you're concerned, that we won't just show up one day, grab you, and you'll find yourself the
00:06:31.000 next day in shackles in New York being paraded around the streets, which the Americans did do.
00:06:40.240 They had Maduro's convoy parading in New York on his way to court. So you have real skid in the game
00:06:50.340 now. You yourself can be touched. And I think that the Americans wanted to send this message to
00:06:57.180 everybody in the Western hemisphere, but I'd argue also in Europe. The idea being that there is no such
00:07:06.080 thing as international law. I mean, from a technical perspective, this is obviously a violation of
00:07:12.620 international law, right? The U.S. is sovereign, Venezuela is sovereign. The U.S.'s jurisdiction
00:07:18.180 doesn't extend to Venezuela, and it doesn't extend to the president of Venezuela, who's the leader of
00:07:24.080 an independent state. So from, you know, international law, okay, yeah, this doesn't really fly
00:07:32.020 legally, but that's the point. Like, that's exactly the point. The point is that the Americans are saying
00:07:41.420 to all of those leaders, we don't give a toss about international law, and what we did to Maduro,
00:07:47.880 we can easily do the same to you. So if you're the prime minister of Denmark, and there's a chance that
00:07:55.100 you might be involved in, I don't know, corruption or censorship or whatever, and the Americans want
00:08:01.940 to take Greenland from you, well, part of the message here is that you have skid in the game.
00:08:07.180 You stand to personally lose everything, and wake up one day with American soldiers banging on your
00:08:15.040 door, grabbing you, putting you in cuffs and, you know, dark glasses and earmuffs so you can neither
00:08:25.300 see nor hear anything, and they'll just take you away. So this is a deliberate part of the strategy,
00:08:33.340 and it's intended to solve a particular problem as far as Venezuela is concerned, which is this.
00:08:38.740 It's really the Iraq problem. It's really the Iraq problem. If you take away the entire structure of
00:08:45.480 the regime and collapse it, and you go and invade the country, you get absolute and total chaos.
00:08:52.080 What you get is absolute chaos. Everybody starts killing everybody else. The security forces splinter.
00:08:58.840 There are different insurgency groups. Different communities want different things. They all get guns.
00:09:03.620 They're all involved in trafficking. Blah, blah, blah. The whole country falls apart.
00:09:08.720 So what do you do instead? You can't keep the regime as it currently stands, and you can't change it.
00:09:16.220 So you decapitate the regime, and you demonstrate so much force and so much power telling the country
00:09:24.940 that we can shut down your air defense. We can attack your military assets. We can go to blow up your
00:09:34.800 most important symbol, like they blew up the grave of Hugo Chavez, who was the original communist
00:09:40.520 dictator of Venezuela. And we can grab your president, put him in chains, and he'll wake up the next
00:09:48.480 morning in New York. Now are you going to change? And the answer is, well, yeah, I guess.
00:09:55.020 You know, yes, we have no choice. As Elon Musk put it, speaking to Gustavo Petro, the president of
00:10:03.340 Colombia, who was also leading a sort of narco-terrorist state, plata o plomo, do you want silver or do you
00:10:10.520 want bullets? Which is the line that was famously used by Pablo Escobar, the sort of drug lord of
00:10:17.540 Medellin, who ended up controlling pretty much all of the cocaine trade into the United States in the
00:10:22.480 80s. So they're applying this particular logic that says to these leaders, maybe you can cause a
00:10:30.300 headache, maybe you can launch an insurgency, maybe you can buy equipment or air defense systems from
00:10:39.200 Russia or China, but it won't keep you personally safe. And therefore, you have enough to lose to
00:10:48.260 change your behavior based on what we tell you. And in case you have doubts, well, here's the example of
00:10:55.280 Maduro on the one side, but the former president of Honduras on the other side, who was convicted,
00:11:02.380 along with his brother and chief of police in American courts, of smuggling drugs into the United
00:11:08.780 States in partnership with the cartels, to the extent that his police forces were providing
00:11:14.080 protection for the cartels to move the drugs through his country, he gets captured, he gets
00:11:22.540 convicted by the United States, and then Trump pardons him. And the subtext here is that this is not about
00:11:28.760 drugs. I mean, drugs is the pretext. This is what Maduro is going to stand trial for, etc., etc. But drugs is
00:11:37.360 really just really just a pretext. The point that's being made is a strategic point. And it's actually
00:11:44.260 two points. One is the Western Hemisphere belongs to the United States of America. You govern at our
00:11:52.460 pleasure. And the second point is, if you forget that, we will physically remind you personally of that
00:12:03.500 reality. And we don't care how much it will cost us, we will fight, we will launch 150 aircraft at you,
00:12:10.980 plus Delta Force operators, plus drones, plus, plus, plus, we will disable your entire defense
00:12:18.700 infrastructure, personally grab you and throw you in a jail cell. And that is a lot more credible. And
00:12:26.620 historically, it's the way that things were done. So if you look back at, say, Islamic history,
00:12:32.740 you had the cult of the Hashashid, the assassins, who were operating out of the coastal mountains in
00:12:38.940 Syria. And the way that they kept the peace, one of the things that they did, they'd send an assassin
00:12:45.560 into a sultan's bedroom or into a crusader's bedroom and leave a knife by the bed and go.
00:12:56.320 And that prince, that leader, would immediately learn that there are personal consequences if he strays
00:13:05.640 from the line. And that kept stability for 100 years, a couple of hundred years. So that's exactly
00:13:13.540 what the Americans did here. Think of it as an update of gunboat diplomacy, but instead of gunboats,
00:13:19.240 you're using special forces. That's what happened. That's what's changed. And all of the bleating
00:13:27.320 about international law makes this even funnier if you're Trump. Because, like, no appeal to international
00:13:38.340 law is going to save Nicolas Maduro. He's in an American jail now, and they're not going to let him
00:13:44.660 go. And worse, while he is in an American jail, he's going to get deposed. So pretty much every president
00:13:53.240 with whom he had a relationship, from the Turks, who were buying Venezuelan gold and providing hard
00:13:59.340 currency in exchange, to the Cubans, who were getting Venezuelan oil and protecting Maduro in
00:14:06.920 exchange, to the Mexicans and all of the Central American leaders, who were probably somehow involved
00:14:15.700 in the drug business. Maduro has dirt on all of them because he's worked with all of them and
00:14:23.180 because this is pretty much how this thing functions. If you enjoyed this piece of premium content from
00:14:28.140 the Lotus Eaters, head to our website where you can find more.