The Caracasian Cut

Regime decaptitation and the consequences of competence

In the age of simulations and simulacra, every action is also a symbol. Within the hyperreality of discourse the semiotic content of a public event is primary to its physical, political, or economic import. This is true of war as much as anything else; war in this age takes place first and foremost in the psychic realm, at the level of meaning, of hermeneusis. Warfare is psychological, not only in the sense of bolstering morale or breaking the will of the enemy to fight, but in the more fundamental sense of affecting the minds of those caught up in its spectacle by inserting new ideas that change the way that they think. This is most effective, as any magician or hypnotist or marketing executive will tell you, when those effects are left implicit, that they might operate directly upon the collective subconscious, in the shadow realm of instinct and intuition from which all political impulse springs.

With that in mind we might ask, in the spirit of an augur inquiring after the flight of a dove at daybreak, a circling hawk at high noon, or the cold gaze of a crow in the gloaming, what is the meaning of the Caracas raid? We do not need to assume that the meaning we look for in this action is intentional, though we should not rule this out, either; what matters is how the act will manifest symbolically, how it will be interpreted in the minds of onlookers, which it will do regardless of intention.

The superficial import of the action is clear enough. America has seized control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, the largest in the world, and at a stroke applies crippling pressure to the economies of China, Iran, and Cuba (who were Venezuela’s best grey-market customers), as well as to the economies of its adversary Russia and its wayward sibling Canada (both of which depend for their prosperity upon high oil prices). Both China and Russia have been deprived of a key New World ally, and thus the Monroe Doctrine is reasserted, and foreign powers pushed out of Washington’s sphere of influence. A hostile communist government has been decapitated, opening the way for the millions of Venezuelans displaced by Bolivarian tyranny, refugees whose presence has destabilized Venezuela’s neighbours for many years now, to return home.

To be sure, there is still great uncertainty. Hugo Chavez’ tomb may have been destroyed, but his Bolivarian regime is still largely intact, his apparatchicks remain in control of Venezuela’s state apparatus and military, and his terrorist colectivos still control the streets of Caracas.

Trump’s declaration that America now owns Venezuela’s oil feels a bit premature. Can one really claim control, without boots on the ground? I confess that it is not at all clear to me exactly how this is all supposed to work. Perhaps it is meant to function through pure intimidation: whoever ends up assuming power in Venezuela, they will know that if they don’t do as they’re told, they might be next, and perhaps will not be given the grace of an arrest and a show trial but simply executed without warning by drone; meanwhile, America offers itself as the sole legitimate customer for Venezuela’s sole marketable product, while providing its oil industry engineers to rebuild (and assume control of) infrastructure fallen into disrepair following Chavez’ nationalization and subsequent decades of neglect and mismanagement. Trump holds out one hand in an offer of assistance and mutual benefit, while holding back his other curled in a mailed fist, a threat made plausible by the fact that he just punched them hard in the mouth.

Still, all of this is nothing more than realpolitik, the hard edges of power in the material world.

The real meaning, the symbolic importance, lies deeper. It is not measured in dollars or barrels of oil. It is a message.

So what is that message?

Certainly a strong message was sent to China. Their radar systems were utterly powerless to track American air power. Some say that this must have been because they were ordered to stand down, but is that a chance Beijing is willing to take, when it’s also plausible that American stealth technology, electronic countermeasures, or cyberwarfare did the trick? Invading Taiwan probably looks like a much riskier proposition to the People’s Liberation Army, now. China has an off switch, after all.

The message to Washington’s European vassals is that America is playing hardball, again. The rules-based international order is a thing of the past. America will do what it is in America’s interests to do, because America has the power to do it. To start with, Greenland is on the table again. The US probably won’t take it from Denmark at gunpoint, although it easily could, and if it has to it will, which the Danes are now acutely aware of. Acquiring Greenland is a matter of national security: virtually every flight path from Eurasia to North America passes over the island. Much more likely than annexation, however, is that the US will woo Greenland’s Inuit population, offering them cash money and citizenship in exchange for recognition of American sovereignty ... which America already de facto has, given that the infrastructure and military installations on the island are all American in any case. As for the Danes – who have done nothing whatsoever with the land mass since the early Middle Ages – they would be well advised to take whatever Trump offers in trade, and be grateful. They’ll still be able to visit, not that many of them have ever bothered.

Those messages are still rather superficial, however.

Over the last several months of military buildup in the Caribbean, many have issued dire predictions of the inevitable boondoggle that would result if the US allowed itself to be drawn into an invasion and occupation of Venezuela. A repeat of Iraq and Afghanistan, or worse yet Vietnam, an ugly guerrilla war in the steaming tropical jungle that would drain American blood, treasure, and will into the fetid third world swamp in tragicomic counterpoint to MAGA’s promise to drain the swamp at home. There was excellent reason for this cynicism. Every military adventure of the GWOT has been a debacle. Trust is as thin as ragged tissue paper.

Calmer heads pointed out that there was little prospect of an invasion: the forces being assembled in the Caribbean could land at most a few thousand troops, enough for a punitive expedition but hardly sufficient for an occupation. The plan, therefore, was clearly something other than an occupation, though exactly what it was no one could say for sure. My personal guess was that they were simply intending to squeeze the Venezuelan communists to death, enforcing the embargo on oil exports by interdicting contraband tankers flying under the false flags of countries they weren’t actually registered in, and watching from a safe distance as the unpaid military and unfed people turned on one another like starving jackals behind their besieged walls. Ugly, with an immense human cost, but effective.

I certainly never expected them to simply descend like Odin with the Wild Hunt and snatch the country’s president in a lightning raid.

Neither, of course, did anyone else expect such an audacious manoeuvre. Which was the point.

Rather than attempting to grind their way through tens of thousands of Venezuelan soldiers, with all the carnage and wreckage that would entail, the US military simply conducted a decapitation strike. They cut the head off of the snake, and with that one act threw not only the Venezuelan government, but governments all over the world, into terrified disarray.

If the Americans can do that in Venezuela, after all...

The theme of decapitation is not only found in the raid’s climax, but in the very conditions that made it possible.

Consider the technical prowess that the raid on Caracas required, the flawless coordination of a huge number of moving parts, each of which had to play its role impeccably.

CIA intelligence assets infiltrated the country months beforehand: they had to gather detailed intelligence on Maduro’s movements, habits, and defences, while evading detection.

Cyberwarfare units shut down the electrical grid in Caracas and essentially switched off the Venezuelan military, opening the path for air assets – F-18 Superhornet, F-22 Raptor, and F-35 Lightning strike aircraft; EA-18G Growler electronic warfare planes; E-2D Hawkeye airborne early warning systems; B-1B Lancer bombers; RQ-170 Sentinel drones; MH-60M Black Hawk attack helicopters; and MH-47G Chinook heavy lift special operations transport helicopters – to converge in the dead of night from multiple points of origin, with each of the over 150 aircraft required to arrive precisely on location and exactly on schedule in order to assemble the kill chain and cast the surveillance net that would provide smooth ingress for the Delta Force ninjas to reach Maduro’s presidential palace and exfiltrate the dictator.

The 160^th Special Operations Aviation Regiment “Night-Stalkers” spent months training on a 1:1 mock-up of Maduro’s residence, endlessly drilling procedures for entering the compound, blasting their way through steel doors, clearing resistance, and reaching el presidente before he could hide or escape. This was no cake-walk. Maduro was guarded by dozens of supposedly elite Cuban officers; America’s spec ops team cut them down in minutes, without taking a single casualty.

The absurdly complex operation was executed with smooth perfection. It is probably the most impressive feat of combined arms that has been seen in living memory. It was both a tactical coup and a strategic masterpiece, rearranging the geopolitical chess board in America’s favour with one decisive cut. Not only that, but it was incredibly civilized. For all the mewling about violations of fictive international lawl, no one could help but notice that casualties were kept to an absolute minimum. Not a single American death; Venezuela and Cuba combined lost some 50 or 60 military personnel; there were only 2 civilian casualties.

This is the same American military that spent twenty fruitless years fighting to replace the Taliban with the Taliban, climaxing with a humiliating route from Kabul in which billions of dollars of military equipment were abandoned to the very Taliban that the military fought so hard to replace the Taliban with.

It is the same American military that, until just a year ago, was struggling to fill its ranks, because the warrior class had concluded that it was not a military worth belonging to, that a government which held them in such contempt was not a government worth fighting for.

Only one thing changed: a year ago, when Trump won the election, the American state was decapitated.

Because Trump won the election, he could fire the fat bureaucrat Lloyd Austin as Secretary of Defence, and appoint in his place the energetic, muscular young Hegseth as Secretary of War. Because Hegseth was the Secretary of War, he could begin eliminating the dross of the Cancelled Years and refocus the American military on its actual mission.

It turned out to be that simple. Change the leadership, replace the dance troupe of hollow men and men in dresses that has cavorted through the halls of power for far too long with platoons of competent men, and allow the competent men to do what they know how to do, without interference from politicians, lawyers, and ideologues. Just point them in the right direction and get out of their way.

Elite circulation is the Fix Everything switch.

And that is the semiotic payload this action has delivered to the collective subconscious of the world’s population.

Chris Bray is the first person I’ve seen to intuit the meaning encoded in the thematic symmetry of regime decapitation that bookends the drama of Caracasian raid, and its illumination of the essential paradox of brilliant failing institutions:

A bunch of extraordinarily capable people inside the services just put their heads down and kept going. A military that couldn’t plan or execute…could. The Mark Milleyfication of the American armed forces was imposed and discardable, a Potemkin transgendered village. ... This is both heartening and tragic to see. It means that we’re in better shape today than we thought we possibly could be, but it also means that a brutal twenty-year shambles was entirely avoidable. ... The weight of the symbol machine could always just be tossed aside. We didn’t have to put up with any of this.

This applies much more broadly than the US military.

For decades now we have known nothing but decline. Decline in living standards, in civil liberties, in the quality of goods and services, in the reliability of institutions, in the trustworthiness of information, in our fertility, in the career prospects of the young, in the social cohesion of our communities. Even our entertainments have become uninspiring and insipid. The trajectory of everything has been relentlessly downwards, to the degree that our plummet has seemed like a consequence of some gravitational law of history, a recapitulation of the Fall of Rome, just another catabolic collapse of civilization, another entree to a long and dismal dark age about which we can do nothing save set our jaws and prepare our heavy hearts to endure.

Now the truth is plain.

Decline is a choice.

A choice being made, every day, in every way, by the usurpers and pretenders who insinuated themselves into the key nodes of power and influence in our societies so that they could murder our civilization with malice aforethought while claiming that it is succumbing to natural causes in its senesence.

Mass third world invasion is a choice. Economic sabotage in the name of preventing the weather from changing is a choice. Ruining the lives of young men with DEI is a choice. Blackwashing our history and mythology is a choice. Predatory taxation is a choice. Overregulation is a choice. Brainwashing the young to hate themselves is a choice. Yasslighting the young women into choosing girlbossery over family is a choice. Sacrificing the lives of the young to the fears of the old during the COVID lockdowns was a choice.

Allowing the incompetent to run things in the name of ‘social justice’ is a choice, and the contrast between the litany of inept fumbles that has resulted in and the smooth professionalism on display in the Caracasian raid has thrown the consequences of that choice – and the consequences of its alternative – into sharp relief.

And all we have to do to reverse the decline is decapitate the beast, put the right men in charge, and everything will follow naturally from there. Nature will begin to heal, as surely as Yellowstone’s ecology repaired itself once wolves were returned to their rightful place at the predatory apex.

That is why leaders across the Western world are squealing so loudly.

Canadian liberals, for example, are not actually worried that a Delta Force team will rappel down from an MH-47G Chinook Special Operations Helicopter to blackbag Prime Minister Mark Carney from 24 Sussex Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, K1M 1M4, and not only because the inadequate security of the traditional prime minister’s domicile has motivated Carney to instead take up residence at Rideau Cottage, 1 Sussex Drive, where he is usually home by 9 pm with his wife Diana. The concern is much more general: that the beleaguered Canadian people, along with those of the rest of the rotting West, will look at the remarkable results obtained by regime decapitation in the United States, and start getting ideas.

Want to fix the United Kingdom, and make Great Britain again? Sweep the traitors of the Labour Party out of Parliament, remove that pusillanimous android Two-Tier Queer from power, put Nigel Farage and 300 Reform MPs in their place, and watch as they invoke the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy to cast off three decades of Blairite Fabianism in a Great Repeal Act that frees the British state to remigrate the foreign invaders, rebuild the country’s industry, and revive the British military.

Want to fix Europe? Cast down the old women in Brussels – they have no popular legitimacy in any case – and remove their creatures, like Macron or Merz, who keep their peoples yoked to the suicidal EUrocracy. Raise up nationalists in their place – Le Pen, the AfD – and watch as Europe’s natural creative genius and martial spirit reasserts itself. No more Net Zero incapacitating industry, no more European Court of Human Rights preventing invaders from being remigrated, no more Digital Services Act censoring the Internet, no more micromanagerial bureaucratic overregulation strangling the economy.

Want to fix Canada? The answer is the same: sweep Ottawa’s traitorous liberals out, and replace them with patriotic nationalists who will put an immediate end to the replacement of Canada’s people, purge the government of foreign influence, cease obstructing Canadian industrial development in the name of warm weather and Chief Gambling Elk’s tendentious land claims, end the practice of packing the permanent bureaucracy with diverse mediocrities chosen for ideological loyalty rather than ability, eliminate the corrupt electoral patronage schemes that squander the nation’s wealth to buy liberal votes, and revive the Canadian military by doing all of the obvious things that Ottawa’s political class is ideologically incapable of doing.

Obviously, regime decapitation is not an immediate fix. At first, bureaucracies, universities, media organizations, and judicial systems will all remain full of partisans of the ancien régime. So long as the top leadership remains in the hands of Western civilization’s enemies, however, it is wholly impossible to replace those further down in the org charts, because those at the top will block any such attempt. Regime decapitation is an iterative process: circulate the upper leadership, and task them with replacing the people immediately below them, who replace the people immediately below them, and so on until the system has been flushed.

Equally obviously, regime decapitation alone is not a solution at all. It is not sufficient simply to remove bad leaders: bad leaders are removed routinely in democracies, and are then as a rule replaced with worse leaders. They must be immediately replaced with the right kinds of people. This is the key difference between Trump’s ill-fated and largely ineffectual first term, and his transformative third. When Trump took possession of the Oval Office for the second time, he had a full roster of effective operators to appoint to key positions. Not a perfect roster, by any means; many of them, such as Bondi or Patel, have been disappointments. But overall he has been much more successful than he was the first time around, and that is because this time he went to Washington prepared. Preparation is extremely important: another lesson of the raid on Caracas.

A final point: the US military is almost certainly a unique case, in that its underlying competence remained relatively untouched through the Great Awokening: nothing more than a new coat of rainbow paint, that did not corrode the armour underneath and expose the mechanisms it protected to the elements. Other institutions are almost certainly not so fortunate. The rust and rot in the universities, for instance, is extensive; there is good reason to suspect that they simply cannot be reclaimed, that the decay is too deep, that the cancer goes all the way to the bone. The same is probably true in much of the corporate sector. Here too, though, a change in political leadership is critical. With executive power in the hands of men who are not friendly to failing institutions, but instead happy to lend a helping hand to Nietzsche’s dictum “that which is falling should also be pushed”, the institutions that can’t be saved can be demolished all the more quickly, and the wreckage plundered for the raw material to build something functional. The laborious task of rebuilding and reconstituting is much easier if it is not being stymied from the political summit.

A final final point. One of the primary criticisms that has been made from the right is that Trump should not be indulging in foreign adventures when there are pressing issues at home: deportations moving at an unacceptably sluggish pace, Somalis ripping off the taxpayer to the tune of tens of billions of dollars as the tip of what is probably a multi-trillion-dollar fraud iceberg, a judicial holding action bent on frustrating his every move, a leftist political establishment moving rapidly towards open insurgency, and a base of angry young white men who have not yet been made whole after a lifetime of institutional and economic abuse and who are increasingly impatient of that fact. This is all true, but consider this: Trump has just handed the military its first unambiguous victory since Operation Iraqi Freedom rolled over Saddam’s military over twenty years ago, and he did it without, it seems, getting the US sucked into a quagmire. There is nothing the troops like more than a victory, particularly one that comes at no cost in blood, and which improves the circumstances of their country in numerous and obvious ways. Trump was already popular with the trigger-pullers; in the afterglow of Operation Absolute Resolve, they are probably burning incense to his effigies in the barracks. As Roman history tells us, the support of the legions is often politically decisive on the home front, particularly when there are influential enemies at home with whom the sovereign can deal only by declaring a state of exception.

Thank you, all of you who have read this, for taking the time out of out your busy lives to read this rambling stream of consciousness. I hope you found it interesting, or at least entertaining, as the attention you have given this article is a non-renewable resource which I do not want to waste, and it means an immense amount to me that you consider my words worthy of your investment. As always however, my most abundant gratitude is directed to those of you who support this blog. Your generosity is what keeps these essays free for everyone else to read, and in exchange for it you get very little, aside from my most profound appreciation. If you would like to be a recipient of gratefulness (and have the chance to read my short stories Hector Saves His Dad and Homo Prometheus, which are the only things I keep behind the paywall), you can do so for the equivalent of buying me a beer once a month.