Americanets  January 4, 2026

The likely primary goal of the Venezuelan operation was to serve as a warning shot to potentially sovereign states in the Western Hemisphere. This is easily provable because of multiple public warnings from the Trump administration to leadership in Cuba and Colombia in the wake of Maduro’s “abduction.” If successful, the virtual operation will be highly economical, with minimal expense, no casualties, and close to zero risk from the beginning of the campaign against supposed narco traffickers to the moment American helicopters made their exit from Caracas.

The issue with virtual warfare is that it can only succeed as long as the intended target (which is never the actual co-combatant) mistakes the artificial facade for reality. Will Cuban leadership, for example, fail to see through what was an obviously pre-planned spectacle? Even the domestic American audience already seems confused. Operations like Fordow and Prosperity Guardian have seemed to fall out of public consciousness due to the difficulty of parsing them after subsequent events.

Those who attained political consciousness during the GWOT era are equally befuddled. Expecting a decades-long quagmire with mass casualties like Iraq, we’ve instead been confronted with an unintelligible two-hour sideshow in which perhaps 40 Venezuelans were killed in total. Victory has been declared despite the situation remaining fundamentally unchanged. This morning, Marco Rubio said the US won’t be running Venezuela at all, and will pressure “changes” through an oil blockade. This is precisely the status quo. And how can the US impose a blockade on the oil it just stole for itself?

Read full piece at link below:

https://www.amerikanets.com/p/virtual-war