Imperial theater and the world-systemic self-coup

January 2026

In 1954 the CIA was planning to overthrow the president of Guatemala, and a New York Times reporter figured it out. It was not exactly a secret, in Central America, that Washington was trying to destroy the liberal Jacobo Árbenz. But one journalist, Sydney Gruson, was carrying out investigations that the Agency believed to be especially “harmful.” Worse, he was actually publishing them. CIA Director Allen Dulles got in touch with his friend, New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and told him about the problem. Sulzberger moved Gruson to another story. The coup plotters, the golpistas, succeed in toppling Árbenz in June.

The people on the ground certainly got the message. And one Argentine who had been living in Guatemala City, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, watched the extermination of the left and came to the conclusion that the United States would never allow moderate social reform in Latin America. The only possibility, he reasoned, was a revolutionary project with the capacity to withstand the inevitable imperialist attack. But when it came to its own citizens, the United States government did everything in its considerable power to hide what the CIA had done.

In 1970, before democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende had even taken office, the CIA and President Richard Nixon planned to strangle the economy, and hoped that that this would force the Chilean government to become authoritarian. It is easy to demonize and isolate a “police state” that is cracking down on real or perceived counter-revolutionary forces.¹ Nixon admitted, in secret, that the nightmare scenario for Washington would be a socialist project in the hemisphere that was both truly democratic and obviously successful. This would only lead the rest of the hemisphere to try to imitate them.

In 2007, I accidentally became a journalist, while living in Caracas. I arrived in the country five years after the first time the United States backed a coup in order to derail and destroy the Chavista project. That attempted golpe de estado, which saw Hugo Chávez arrested and business leader Pedro Carmona briefly installed as president, immediately received the backing of George W. Bush and the New York Times. Even though Chávez had clearly won election in 2000, the coup was (obviously) justified on pro-democratic grounds. Embarrassingly, Chávez quickly returned to power and easily won another election in 2006.

I was just one year out of university when I arrived in Venezuela, and thought I would be doing some work abroad (first in Berlin, then in Caracas) before going back to school (to do a PhD in Political Theory). I didn’t really have much interest in journalism, until a friend of a friend randomly connected me with an English-language newspaper that needed someone who could report in Spanish and write in English, and that would actually pay me enough to live there for a while.

Over 2007 and 2008, I got to know a lot of different Venezuelans, with a lot of very different opinions on the Chavista movement. Many loved him, some hated him, but it was pretty clear to most everyone that he had very solid support in the country, especially among the working class.

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Three months ago in October 2025 I wrote that there was no plan for “regime change” in Venezuela — either the government would survive, or Trump would simply destroy the country. I still believe this to be the case, but at the beginning of this year we saw the addition of a spectacular third element that I certainly did not expect. This phenomenon, a bombastic piece of imperial theater, is strangely compatible with either of the two outcomes I outlined last year. The Donald Trump regime bombed three locations in Caracas, killing dozens of people, and kidnapped the acting president of Venezuela along with his wife. This time, they did all of this in the most public way possible.

Two more things were stunning about the operation. First, Donald Trump did not pretend that this was about democracy; he said we were going to take the oil. How much of this is classic Trump, in that he says out loud what everyone else sought to hide, and how much is a qualitatively new phase in U.S. empire? We do not know. Second, the President of the United States turned around and threatened the rest of the hemisphere: not just Cuba, but Colombia and Mexico. Look what we can do to you; you better get in line. If the goal was to intimidate and coerce everyone else, then perhaps all that was needed was the spectacular humiliation and decapitation of a rival state. Was the decision to avoid the “regime change” stage — pretending to try to give the country to Maria Corina Machado, which would have been a disaster — based on those strategic considerations? Or was it simply the preference of a man who loves producing great entertainment but hates long-term commitments, and holds a serious grudge against anyone who gets between him and a fancy award? We do not know. Seemingly invigorated by the success in Caracas, the Trump administration turned its attention to Greenland, Iran, and Minnesota.

In the case of Venezuela, we can imagine two scenarios that bookend a range of possibilities. It could be that nothing really changes, except that people in Caracas are scared and traumatized. Trump tells his base he “got the oil,” whatever that means or to whatever extent it is true, but Venezuela proceeds with a different Chavista in charge and the government intact. On the other end of the spectrum, you have state collapse, which might come as a result of the January 3 attack or something else. I don’t know if Trump really cares. I think that Marco Rubio wants state collapse in Cuba, and that parts of the U.S. government — and Israel — want Iran smashed into thousands of pieces.

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In South America everyone knows there are many types of coup d'état, and there are words for all the different flavors. When it comes to state overthrow, Iberian languages are like that thing that they say about Inuit languages and snow that is not really true: Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries, being so familiar with the phenomena, have a bunch of words for them. The United States has traditionally subjected other countries to the coup, rather than experiencing it at home; the English language doesn’t even have one word for it — thus the italicized import from French. In Spanish and Portuguese, however:

First, there is the golpe militar, the classic military coup that is most prominent in the anglophone imagination, and which describes well what happened in Chile in 1973. There is the golpe parlamentar, in which parliamentary action is decisive; this is often the term used to describe the 2016 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. I bet you can guess what a golpe judicial is. (After the 2020 election, some of us noticed that Donald Trump had attempted all three, without much commitment or knowledge of how they work). You can have an intentona or a quartelada or a golpe de oficiais that might even push the country to the left, or closer to democracy than it had been. I could go on.

But there is also the autogolpe, or “self-coup.” To carry out an autogolpe, you must already be in power. Traditionally, there are two reasons that you might destroy, ignore, or violate the infrastructure of a state you already control. You might think that your true power is limited by the structures that exist, and you can grab more. Or, you might be desperate, and afraid that you are about to lose your power. So you strike first, seeking to neutralize the forces that threaten you.

When Donald Trump this month attempted an autogolpe at the level of the capitalist world-system, what was the reason? Whatever his motivation, this truly shocked European allies who had gone along with imperialist adventures in places like Iraq. The man threatened to wage economic warfare against Western Europe to steal a piece of land; the man threatened to invade NATO. I am pretty sure I have never seen a self-coup tried internationally; but MAGA has seemingly embarked on a torturous and confusing attempt to replace U.S global hegemony with naked domination.

The United States emerged from World War II as the most powerful state in human history. In the years after 1945, Washington oversaw the creation of a set of institutions and relationships that cemented its position at the top of the global system. I am not the only one to argue that this world order has greatly benefited the country that shaped it, and that much blood was shed in its construction and maintenance. I view the coups of Guatemala 1954 (as well as Iran 1953) and the mass murder of Indonesia 1965, Chile 1973 — I could go on forever — as part of this story. But Donald Trump seems to believe that the capitalist world-system is a scam perpetrated against the United States of America? That it sucks money out of our nation, instead of pouring super-profits into the coffers of our corporations? I think he really believes this? Even if he could successfully use threats and violence to extract more benefits for the United States in the short term, what are the long-term consequences? Can you actually pull off an autogolpe imperial?

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In the days after the attack on Caracas and throughout January, I got in touch with most of my Venezuelan friends. Some live in Caracas; some left the country over the last ten years and are now elsewhere in South America; some left the country in the really bad years, but then moved back. I had a lot of questions: first, "how are you?” but I would then quickly ask, what do you think happened, what do you think of the attack and the arrest, what do you think will happen next? Across the board, regardless of their views on Maduro, I got a very similar type of response. Even when I thought it was clear I was asking about geopolitics, they spoke about something else. “I can’t sleep at night,” and “we are afraid of an another invasion” or, “my family back in Caracas is safe for now, thank God, but they are considering leaving for Colombia,” or (in three ways, from three different people): is there any way you could send some money to me or a relative? One friend, who still lives in the same Caracas apartment we shared in 2007, told me: “I was sure, that night, that I was going to die.”

What I learned was not really anything about Nicolás Maduro, Delcy Rodriguez, Donald Trump, or the future of Venezuela. The overwhelming sense that I got, from these conversations, is how terrifying it is to wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of bombs, to see that the power has been wiped out but that the sky is on fire; just how shocking and traumatizing it is to have your city attacked from above. For a long time, we didn’t expect that kind of thing to happen in the Americas.

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1. They would “condemn Chile to utmost deprivation and poverty,” Ambassador Edward Korry told Kissinger, hopefully “forcing Allende to adopt the harsh features of a police state.”