Operation Absolute Resolve

We keep hearing about America's decline: rising debt, losing ground to China, political dysfunction at home. But on January 3rd, 2026, the US reminded everyone what it still has plenty of: raw military power.

At 10:46 PM Eastern Time, President Trump gave the order. Within hours, 150 aircraft launched from 20 bases across the Western Hemisphere. By 2:01 AM, US helicopters touched down at President Nicolas Maduro's compound in Caracas. By 3:29 AM, American forces were back over international waters with Maduro and his wife aboard the USS Iwo Jima, headed to New York to face federal narco-terrorism charges.

The entire extraction took about 2.5 hours.

I can't think of another country on earth that could pull off something like this. Not Russia. Not China. Certainly not the EU. This is the kind of operation that gets studied in military academies for decades.

But here's what interests me more than the tactical execution: why now?

Maduro is expected in Manhattan federal court today (January 5th) on charges related to narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation, and weapons offenses. The Trump administration frames this as a law enforcement operation: taking down a drug kingpin who happens to run a country. That's the story. Nobody believes it.

Trump didn't even try to hide it. At his Mar-a-Lago press conference, he said: "We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”

Venezuela has 303 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, roughly 17-20% of global reserves. The largest in the world. But if this is just about oil, why take such drastic action? The US produces over 13 million barrels per day domestically. Oil prices have been falling, down nearly 20% in 2025 to around $57-60/barrel. Venezuela currently produces less than 1 million barrels per day. It would take years and tens of billions to restore their production capacity. So why bomb Caracas for this?

There's another angle that keeps coming up in my research: the petrodollar system. Since 2018, Venezuela has been accepting yuan, euros, and rubles for oil sales, not just dollars. They applied for BRICS membership in 2024. They've built direct payment channels with China that bypass SWIFT entirely. Meanwhile, the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve sits at just 409 million barrels, its lowest level since inception. I don't fully understand the mechanics of how the petrodollar system works or why it matters so much. But watching the US response to Venezuela suggests this is more important than I realized. I need to dig deeper into this.

Seeing the US capture a sitting head of state in a military operation changes my baseline for what's possible. Things I previously dismissed as too extreme now seem on the table. Capital controls to prevent dollar flight? Financial repression forcing bond purchases? Gold revaluation at Fort Knox? Aggressive intervention in currency markets? I used to think these measures were too radical, that the US would find less disruptive solutions. But if you're willing to bomb a foreign capital and kidnap its president, those other options suddenly don't look so extreme by comparison. The US just showed its hand: it will do whatever it takes to defend the dollar system. That recalibrates everything.

The real story of Operation Absolute Resolve isn't about removing a dictator or seizing oil fields. It's about demonstrating that the United States will use its military dominance to protect the financial system that allows it to maintain global hegemony despite massive debt levels. Whether this works long-term is another question. But Venezuela just learned what happens when you have the world's largest oil reserves and start pricing them outside the dollar system.