Venezuela and the Politics of Anticipation - Geopolitics of a weary world

Venezuela and the Politics of Anticipation -
Geopolitics of a weary world

We have arrived at the future, this is undeniable. A world in which science fiction and dystopia walk side by side along the avenues of the present. Technological and medical advances coexist with access to information that, until recently, seemed unimaginable. We follow the world from the palm of our hands, convinced that the simple act of scrolling grants us some degree of control over our own destiny.

Yet beyond these carefully cultivated illusions, reality is far less comfortable. We live amid the ruins of an economic project that reached its peak and that, to some extent, offered meritocratic relief to a segment of the population, now benefiting from the spoils accumulated over decades. Outside these circles, and especially beyond the core countries, hardship is structural. Amid recurring crises and the accelerated rise of artificial intelligence, most people are merely trying to survive in a world undergoing collapse. Without resorting to any form of artificial optimism, everything suggests that relief is not on the horizon. Major global actors are preparing themselves, and the United States, under the discourse of urgency and grandeur characteristic of Trumpist logic, seeks to reposition itself advantageously on the international chessboard.

It is within this context that Venezuela’s return to the center of the international radar cannot be interpreted as an isolated event, nor as a simple diplomatic course correction. Rather, it represents a preparatory move in the face of a deepening global financial crisis. Trump’s interest emerges at a specific moment in economic and geopolitical history, marked by structural indebtedness, erosion of trust, and the growing difficulty states face in sustaining long-term narratives.

It is no historical novelty that the growth of certain nations occurs at the expense of others. Geopolitics has never been neutral. While some prosper, others suffer. Looking at recent history, especially the period following the two world wars, we see a world propelled by financial and technological expansion. Although it is possible to say that a portion of the global population achieved improved living conditions, this progress came at the cost of the structural impoverishment of peripheral nations and, crucially, an unprecedented level of global indebtedness.

The myth of money continues to sustain the contemporary world. While individuals devote most of their living hours to fulfilling the aspirations imposed by the system, governments print currency according to political necessity. Since the dollar severed its parity with gold, the deception has become evident: the system functions up to the threshold of crisis, only to then resort to state printing presses and flood the economy with inflated money. To varying degrees, this pattern repeats itself across virtually all contemporary economies.

It is in this scenario that, in recent years, Venezuela has come to inhabit an economy in which inflation has ceased to be an episodic phenomenon and has become a permanent condition—a continuous background noise of uncertainty. Even after the slowdown of the hyperinflationary peak at the end of the 2010s, price instability remained high. The IMF, in its World Economic Outlook of October 2025, still records annual inflation at extreme levels and similarly elevated short-term projections, revealing a fragile monetary normalization dependent on provisional arrangements. This backdrop helps explain why poverty has consolidated itself as a social structure rather than a temporary consequence of recession. It is estimated that in 2024, 56.5% of households were living in multidimensional poverty, considering access to services, education, housing, employment, and income. The Venezuelan case shows that the issue is not simply one of “getting worse” or “getting better,” but of reorganizing everyday life at a lower level of stability and access.

Although the Cold War officially ended and the Berlin Wall was torn down, polarization between right and left has transformed into a global feud, often sustained by biased discourses with little empirical grounding. In this context, both Trump’s justifications and the rhetoric of Maduro’s supporters operate within a sterile symbolic confrontation, while the concrete weight of the crisis falls upon the Venezuelan population. The crisis is simultaneously economic and political. Material degradation has been accompanied by a narrowing of political space, turning conflict into a method of governance. Arbitrary arrests, restrictions on civil liberties, and persecution of opposition figures and activists appear recurrently in international assessments—both in the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission and in governmental reports such as the United States’ Country Report, particularly in the recent electoral context.

For a significant portion of the Venezuelan population, life within the country has become unsustainable. When politics closes in and the economy offers no horizon, migration ceases to be a choice and becomes an infrastructure of survival. UNHCR estimates that the total number of Venezuelan refugees and migrants has reached nearly 7.9 million globally, while the regional R4V platform reports approximately 6.9 million in Latin America and the Caribbean (as of November 2025). This constitutes one of the largest displacement crises in the contemporary world. The result is a society stretched between inside and outside: families fragmented by borders, remittances serving as a pillar of subsistence, and a form of citizenship lived provisionally.

In the face of this scenario of poverty and uncertainty, despite the country’s immense material wealth, Venezuela has become a recurring target of international criticism. Capitalizing on this image, Trump merely had to accentuate the features convenient to his narrative, cloaking the crisis in the language of drug trafficking, a symbolic enemy central to U.S. political discourse. Thus, beyond internal collapse, the Venezuelan issue came to be framed, at least rhetorically, as a matter of international security.

It is in this context that the recent movement of the United States toward Venezuela acquires meaning, not as a demonstration of strength, but as a gesture of preparation. The hypothesis, though uncomfortable, is straightforward: decisions that appear pragmatic are in fact anticipatory responses to a broader systemic crisis involving financial, energy, and monetary dimensions. Venezuela ceases to be merely a peripheral problem inherited from the late Cold War and assumes the position of a strategic asset in a world constrained by material and accounting limits.

What lends the scenario an almost apocalyptic tone is the hyperinflated global financial system. Major economies, as well as large corporations, operate within bottlenecks sustained by fictitious capital and continuous debt rollover. Global debt now functions as a silent geopolitical force, rarely mentioned in official discourse, yet decisive in strategic choices. With U.S. public debt exceeding 120% of GDP and high interest rates turning debt servicing into one of the largest budgetary items, room for maneuver narrows. Highly indebted states become less ideological and more operational. The criterion shifts away from discursive coherence toward access to energy, minimal supply stability, and rapidly reactivatable assets. Once again, Venezuela reemerges as a central piece, not due to political affinity, but systemic necessity.

This movement unfolds alongside a deeper transformation of the international order. Contemporary geopolitical fragmentation goes beyond rhetoric. The world is moving toward functional blocs, defined less by shared values than by supply chains, energy security, and the capacity to absorb shocks. Sanctions, once conceived as durable instruments of pressure, have become unstable and costly. Maintaining permanent enemies now demands resources that heavily indebted states no longer possess in abundance.

Oil, in turn, regains political centrality. The slowdown of the energy transition, combined with conflicts in the Middle East, instability in the Red Sea, and logistical bottlenecks, has brought fossil energy back to the core of national strategies. Venezuelan heavy crude, technically complex and environmentally inconvenient, becomes relevant again precisely because of its singularity. In contexts of relative scarcity, environmental discourse gives way to pragmatism. Not due to an abandonment of transition, but because of the inability to sustain it fully in the short term. The stability of financial fiction comes to outweigh the health of the planet.

More than an energy reserve, Venezuela functions as a laboratory for a specific type of collapse: prolonged, managed, and without definitive rupture. A corroded currency, persistent sanctions, continuous economic contraction, and yet, institutional survival. The state does not disappear; society adapts to lower levels of consumption and expectation. This model interests a world that is beginning to confront relative impoverishment not as an exception, but as a horizon. At this point, Venezuela ceases to be merely an object of regional analysis and begins to operate as a mirror, anticipating dynamics that other countries are starting to experience, such as the normalization of scarcity and coexistence with crises that do not resolve, but merely stabilize.

When bubbles burst and crises erupt, headlines overflow. Even so, for most people, the mechanisms of the system remain a distant abstraction. In parallel, there are those who seek to position themselves in advance. The United States has made clear that Venezuela has become part of its strategy, just as Trump has signaled the possibility of interventions in other territories, such as Greenland. Pieces are being moved globally. The peak of the crisis will hardly come as a surprise. The windows of the future remain open, but none point toward full stability.