US President Donald Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has taught me a lesson: that if you think you have a scoop, you file it immediately, not only to get the story out first but to warn the world if it’s about something bad that might be coming.

Shortly after Trump bombed Nigeria on Christmas day, I wrote an article that said his real aim was to send a message to Maduro and that among the options he was entertaining was a SEAL-type operation to capture or kill Maduro.

How did I come to this conclusion? I have no assets in the US intelligence community. I was completely running on instinct, and my instincts told me that the egomaniac Trump wanted to eclipse Obama’s feat in sending in the SEALS to kill Osama bin Laden in Abbotabad in 2011, just as he wanted badly to get the Nobel Peace Prize that Obama got.

But it was the holidays and, out of consideration for the folks that run my stories, who deserved a New Year’s break to be with their families, I sat on it after I finished it on December 27 and only sent it to Foreign Policy in Focus on January 2, eight hours before the Caracas operation that kidnapped Maduro, in violation of all the norms of civilised conduct among states.

But though out-scooped by Trump, I still think that there are elements in the unfiled article that could be useful in helping us anticipate what could unfold in the days and weeks ahead. So here’s the scoop that wasn’t.

Trump strikes Nigeria but real target is Venezuela
The Trump regime’s air strikes on Islamic State targets in Nigeria on Christmas Day may have had symbolic significance but no strategic value. There will likely be no impact on the efforts of the militant group called Lakurawa, allied to ISIS, to establish a base in Sokoto state.

Many have been puzzled by the attacks that involved the use of Tomahawk missiles, especially given the relatively minuscule space given to Africa in the recently released National Security Strategy (NSS) 2025. That brief section focuses on transforming the US relationship with Africa from one based on aid to trade, though it does say, “we must remain wary of resurgent Islamist terrorist activity in parts of Africa while avoiding any long-term American presence or commitments.”

It is likely that the attacks were carried out for reasons unrelated to Africa. One is to appease Trump’s Christian evangelical base. As Joshua Keating, an expert in crisis areas, has noted, “Trump’s sudden interest in Africa’s most populous country was likely motivated less by any particular event there — these are all longstanding issues — than by developments in Washington. Though it doesn’t get a ton of mainstream media attention, the plight of Christians in Nigeria has been a galvanising issue for evangelical Christians in the US in recent years.”

On his internet platform Truth Social, Trump has cited figures from the international Christian rights NGO Open Doors, claiming that of the 4476 Christians killed for their faith globally in 2024, 3100 were in Nigeria.

In her recent book on the key groups that make up the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, Furious Minds, Laura Field says that non-establishment Christian groups have an outsized influence in the Trump administration.

With the Republicans struggling in the lead-up to the mid-term elections in 2026, these groups’ muscle on the ground can determine whether the Republicans will continue to control the House of Representatives.

The main target: Venezuela
However, the main goal of the strikes, in my view, had to do mainly with developments thousands of kilometres away. It was to signal to the government of Nicolás Maduro that it will face not just attacks on Venezuelan boats at sea but also air attacks on ground targets. This interpretation would be consistent with NSS 2025.

NSS 2025 is an iconoclastic document. It literally dumps the 80-year-old strategy of liberal containment that guided the United States from the post-Second World War years through the Cold War years to the post-Cold War years, which was to meet challenges to global capital wherever and whenever the US state saw its interests threatened or challenged.

Next to its overthrowing the 80-year-old American “Grand Strategy,” the most significant departure in NSS 2025 is its break with the key assumption of US security policy since the presidency of George W. Bush (2001-2008), including the first Trump administration (2017-2021): that Washington must focus its resources on containing China, which was defined as the principal US strategic competitor.

Replacing China and the Asia Pacific as the main US concern in the Western Hemisphere, the document comes out with a reiteration of the Monroe Doctrine, but one fortified with what it calls the “Trump corollary.”

It states that Washington “will deny non-hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our hemisphere.” There is no more stark expression of the rude replacement of the liberal containment doctrine by a “spheres of influence” approach.

Meantime, the debate goes on in Trump administration on whether a ground invasion of Venezuela is the best way to implement the Western-Hemisphere-first strategy. Air strikes are one thing, boots on the ground are another, and one opposed by much of the MAGA base that is tired of the “forever wars”.

The “Molotov Cocktail” throwers in that base have made known their opposition or disquiet regarding a Venezuelan adventure.

Laura Loomer, an influential firebrand, has challenged Trump’s rationale for the attacks on Venezuelan boats, which is to prevent the opioid fentanyl and other drugs from being shipped to the United States.

“Fentanyl isn’t being manufactured in Venezuela,” she said, urging that the Pentagon target the Mexican drug cartels responsible for most shipments instead. She has also criticised María Corina Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize awardee for 2025 and the leader of the opposition in Venezuela, for “actively stoking and promoting violent regime change”.

Steve Bannon, a key official in the first Trump administration, said “neoconservative neoliberals” like Secretary of State Marco Rubio are pushing for a Venezuelan intervention that would derail the administration from its domestic priorities. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the volatile Georgia congresswoman, has posted on X that “People voted in 2024 against foreign intervention and foreign regime change as we have seen far too many times how that’s turned out, it’s not good, and people are so sick of it.”

My fearless forecast
Trump will limit attacks on his perceived adversaries globally to air strikes or naval bombardments to keep them off balance and not risk triggering another forever war with a ground invasion.

Of course, Trump’s people are probably weighing a SEAL-type special op — like then-President Obama’s killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbotabad in 2011 — to murder or capture Maduro, but Maduro is likely to be already very well prepared for such a contingency. He’s not stupid.

Frankly, if you ask me, Washington has dug itself into a hole with its focus on Venezuela, one from which there is no easy exit.

If one gives a broad interpretation to Che Guevara’s dictum that the best way to defeat the United States was to create “two, three many Vietnams,” then Venezuela has the potential for becoming the third phase of the death rattle of the empire, Vietnam being the first and bin Laden’s dragging Washington to eventual defeat in the Middle East the second.

Dr Walden Bello is co-chair of the board of the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South and senior research fellow at the sociology department of the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is also author of Global Battlefields: My close encounters with dictatorship, capital, empire, and love (2025). This article was first published by Foreign Policy in Focus and is republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

“Only the struggle counts . . .  death is nothing.”  Éloi Machoro — “the Che Guevara of the Pacific” — said this shortly before he was gunned down by a French sniper on 12  January 1985.

Machoro, one of the leaders of the newly-formed FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) — today the main umbrella movement for New Caledonia’s indigenous Kanak people — slowly bled to death as the gendarmes moved in.

The assassination is an apt metaphor for what France is doing to the Kanak people of New Caledonia and has been doing to them for 150 years.

As the New Zealand and Australian media fussed and bothered over tourists stranded in New Caledonia over the past week, the Kanaks have been gripped in an existential struggle with a heavyweight European power determined to keep the archipelago firmly under the control of Paris.  We need better, deeper reporting from our media — one that provides history and context.

According to René Guiart, a pro-independence writer, moments before the sniper’s bullets struck, Machoro had emerged from the farmhouse where he and his comrades were surrounded.  I translate:

“I want to speak to the Sous-Prefet! [French administrator],” Machoro shouted. “You don’t have the right to arrest us.  Do you hear? Call the Sous-Prefet!”

The answer came in two bullets. Once dead, Machoro’s comrades inside the house emerged to receive a beating from the gendarmes.  Standing over Machoro’s body, a member of the elite mobile tactical unit said:  “He wanted war, he got it!”

Weeks earlier, New Zealand journalist David Robie had photographed Machoro shortly before he smashed open a ballot box with an axe and burned the ballots inside. “It was,” says Robie, “symbolic of the contempt Kanaks had for what they saw as the French’s manipulated voting system.”

Every year on January 12, the anniversary of Machoro’s killing, people gather at his grave. Engraved in stone are the words: “On tue le révolutionnaire mais on ne tue pas ses idées.” You can kill the revolutionary but you can’t kill his ideas.  Why don’t most Australians and New Zealanders even know his name?

Decades after his death and 17,000 km away, the French are at it again. Their National Assembly has shattered the peace this month with a unilateral move to change voting rights to enfranchise tens of thousands of more recent French settlers and put an end to both consensus building and the indigenous Kanak people’s struggle for self-determination and independence.

Thanks to French immigration policies, Kanaks now number about 40 percent of the registered voters. New Zealand and Australia look the other way — New Caledonia is France’s “zone of interest”.

But what’s not to like about extending voting rights?  Shouldn’t all people who live in the territory enjoy voting rights?

“They have voting rights,” says David Robie, now editor of Asia Pacific Report, “back in France.”  And France, not the Kanaks, control who can enter and stay in the territory.

Back in 1972, French Prime Minister Pierre Messmer argued in a since-leaked memo that if France wanted to maintain control, flooding the territory with white settlers was the only long-term solution to the independence issue.

Robie says the French machinations in Paris — changing the boundaries of citizenship and voting rights – and the ensuing violent reaction, is effectively a return to the 1980s — or worse.

The violence of the 1980s, which included massacres, led to the Matignon Accords of 1988 and the Nouméa Accords of 1998 which restricted the voting to only those who had lived in Kanaky prior to 1998 and their descendents. Pro-independence supporters include many young whites who see their future in the Pacific, not as a white settler colonial outpost of France.

Most whites, however, fear and oppose independence and the loss of privileges it would bring.

After decades of calm and progress, albeit modest, things started to change from 2020 onwards. It was clear to Robie and others that French calculations now saw New Caledonia as too important to lose; it is a kind of giant aircraft carrier in the Pacific from which to project French power. It is also home to the world’s third-largest nickel reserves.

How have the Kanaks benefitted from being a French colony? Kanaks were given citizenship in their own country only after WWII, a century after Paris imposed French rule.   According to historian David Chappell:

“In practice, French colonisation was one of the most extreme cases of native denigration, incarceration and dispossession in Oceania. A frontier of cattle ranches, convict camps, mines and coffee farms moved across the main island of Grande Terre, conquering indigenous resisters and confining them to reserves that amounted to less than 10 percent of the land.”

It was a pattern of behaviour similar to France’s colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.  Little wonder the people of Niger have recently become the latest to expel them.

Deprived of education — the first Kanak to qualify for university entrance was in the 1960s — socially and economically marginalised, subjected to what historians describe as among the most brutal colonial overlordships in the Pacific, the Kanaks have fought to maintain their languages, their cultures and their identities whilst the whites enjoy some of the highest standards of living in the world.

David Robie, author of Blood on Their Banner – Nationalist Struggles in the South Pacific, and a sequel, Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific, has been warning for years that France is pushing New Caledonia down a slippery slope that could see the country plunge back into chaos.

“There was no consultation — except with the anti-independence groups. Any new constitutional arrangement needs to be based around consensus.  France has now polarised the situation so much that it will be virtually impossible to get consensus.”

Macron also pushed ahead with a 2021 referendum on independence versus remaining a French territory. This was in the face of pleas from the Kanak community to hold off until the covid pandemic that had killed thousands of Kanaks had passed and the traditional mourning period was over.

Macron ignored the request; the Kanak population boycotted the referendum. Despite this, Macron crowed about the anti-independence vote that inevitably followed: “Tonight, France is more beautiful because New Caledonia has decided to stay part of it.”

Having created the problem with actions like the disputed referendum and the current law changes, Macron now condemns today’s violence in New Caledonia.  Éloi Machoro rebukes him from the grave: “Where is the violence, with us or with them?” he asked weeks before his killing. “The aim of the [law changes] is to destroy the Kanak people in their own country.”  That was 1985; as the French say: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same thing.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz