Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Cold War 2.0: How Venezuela Became a Pawn in a US-China Power Struggle
13 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What recent actions has the US taken in Venezuela?
The US recently invaded Venezuela and arrested their sitting president in the dead of night. If someone did that to us, I guarantee we would consider it an act of war. Many in the international community have said this is without question an unprovoked act of illegal aggression. But what's really going on?
How does a country with fewer than 30 million people become the obsession of the most powerful country on Earth? Is this really about drugs, as Trump claims, or even oil as so many others around the world are saying? The answer is obviously not. America already produces more energy than we use, and we are already currently exporting our unused energy.
So doing this for oil would make no sense whatsoever. And Mexico sends us way more drugs than Venezuela ever will. The real reason we invaded Venezuela is far simpler than people realize and far more dangerous. To understand what's really happening, we've got to go back in time and understand just how dramatically the world is changing right now.
While everyone is focused on AI as the agent of change, we've lost sight of the real shift. Namely, the post-World War II era of peace and prosperity has ended. We're now back in the dog-eat-dog world of great power politics, which we haven't tasted in any real way since the Berlin Wall fell.
But we're back in the thick of that now, and Venezuela's catastrophic collapse under socialism turned it into a sacrificial pawn in the life and death chess game between the US and China. The how of it all is going to shock you, but if you don't understand, what comes next is going to catch you completely off guard, and that is something that none of us can afford right now.
Back in the 1970s, Venezuela, The country that's currently in the middle of one of the largest humanitarian crises ever as people fled the country long before the US came. They used to have the fourth strongest economy in the world when measured on a per person basis.
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Chapter 2: Why is Venezuela significant in the US-China power struggle?
Now? Well, in 2023, after nearly 25 years of socialism, their poverty rate skyrocketed to over 80%. Between 2013 and 2021, Venezuela's real GDP fell by more than 75%, one of the largest peacetime collapses on record. Venezuela also suffered one of the world's highest hyperinflation rates, with Reuters reporting the IMF's official projection of their 2018 levels at a staggering 1 million percent.
All of that catastrophe made them a very compelling target for China's Belt and Road Initiative. And in 2018, Maduro officially signed on, effectively inviting China into the US's backyard. To understand the level of aggression that this move ultimately triggered, however, we have to go back even further to the 1960s and talk about what happened in Cuba.
It was a literal bloodbath that walked us all up to the brink of nuclear annihilation and showed the world just how far America would go to protect its sphere of influence and keep a rival from having weapons in its backyard.
In 1961, Cuba had just fallen to Fidel Castro, a revolutionary who promised land reform and freedom, and like all socialist dictators before him, delivered nothing but poverty and oppression. But what really triggered the US was that he aligned himself with America's mortal enemy at the time, the Soviet Union.
So the CIA came up with a plan that seemed simple, train a small army of Cuban exiles, land them on a beach, spark a popular uprising, and overthrow Castro. And in April 1961, they launched the invasion at a place called the Bay of Pigs. It was a spectacular disaster. Castro's forces were waiting. The Cuban people did not rise up. And within days, the invasion collapsed.
The rebels were all killed or captured. And Castro not only survived, he became convinced the United States was going to try again. So he asked the Soviet Union to protect him, and they were all too eager to comply. Just one year later, in October of 1962, American spy planes flying over Cuba spotted something absolutely unthinkable.
Soviet nuclear missile sites were under construction just 90 miles from Florida. With a flight time of only minutes, they could strike New York, Washington, or Chicago. For 13 days, the entire world held its breath as the two nations escalated towards nuclear war. The US Navy blockaded Cuba. American forces went to DEFCON 2, which is one step away from nuclear war.
Soviet ships steamed towards the blockade line. Nuclear submarines lurked just beneath the waves. Multiple times, individual commanders on both sides were just seconds away from launching preemptive strikes that would have ended civilization. Finally, through public and private negotiations between JFK and Khrushchev, a deal was reached and both nations stepped back from the brink.
Despite the fact that disaster was averted, historians overwhelmingly view the Cuban Missile Crisis as one of the clearest modern examples of what's known as the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine is the rule that no rival superpower can have military or strategic footholds in the Americas. And the US will enforce that rule violently if necessary.
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Chapter 3: How has Venezuela's economy changed over the years?
But the reality is, this is just a return to normal. Most people get lost in the slogans of the day that we're living in right now. America first.
great again but the honest answer is those are just the surface level slogans that politicians use what's really at play is that the world is already and always has been a very dangerous place and when two great powers collide lines are drawn there are no referees and actions are taken at least when you have action-oriented leaders and love or hate trump and g they are both men of action to
To actually understand what's happening now, you have to understand something absolutely terrifying about history. Peace is the exception, not the rule. For most of human existence, the world has been defined by conquest, slaughter, and power struggles between rising and falling empires. Genghis Khan and the Mongol invasions killed roughly 10% of the entire world's population.
That is a level of slaughter so dramatic that global CO2 levels were measurably reduced. In modern Russia, Stalin created a famine that wiped out entire generations, not to mention all of the people that he simply had murdered. Not to be outdone, Mao Zedong instituted policies in China that led to the deaths of more than 45 million people.
That's not even to mention the tens of millions, more that were lost to war in the 20th century alone. Adolf Hitler dragged the world into a war that killed roughly 85 million people. And Pol Pot managed to kill a staggering share of his own country in just four years.
History is a bottomless bottle of black pills, violence, domination, conquest, corruption, sabotage, murder, slavery, subjugation, and a whole lot more. Great powers will do whatever they think they can get away with to advantage their own people. And when two such nations collide, God help us all. So why are so many people so confused by what's happening in Venezuela right now?
Because briefly after World War II, something changed. Historically, wars were limited in scope by an army's ability to travel and the rate at which one human could hack another to death with a sword. Then World War I hit. And we saw just how many people could die and quickly.
Then that ended only for the troops to bring home the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed another roughly 50 million people worldwide. Then just 20 years after all of that death, another 85 million people were killed in World War II. And that included hundreds of thousands of people being instantly vaporized by nuclear weapons. By the end of all of that, the world was just tired and broken.
Anything for a break. And so on the back of the US, coming out unscathed and with a manufacturing base that turned them into the world's strongest economy, the world entered an unprecedented period of stability and prosperity. Global trade exploded. The US helped people rebuild. And for a few generations in the West, life got safer, richer, and more predictable than it had ever been before.
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Chapter 4: What historical events shaped US-Venezuela relations?
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While America fought wars in the Middle East, outsourced jobs to China, deficit spent its way into grotesque inequality and argued with itself at home. China absorbed technology, capital, and leverage. Hundreds of millions were pulled out of poverty. Supply chains were rerouted. Influence was massively expanded.
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Chapter 5: How does the Cuban Missile Crisis relate to current events?
Now, I expect this to be deeply discomforting to people all over the world. And Lord knows, I hope we avoid the unimaginable tragedy that is war. But any country that is not prepared to defend its way of life against its adversaries will fall. The question is, where do we go from here? Trump has deposed Maduro, but Maduro's VP has been sworn in as president.
Trump has made it clear that America is in charge and a fate worse than Maduro's awaits the new regime if they don't obey. Given all of that, Venezuela is now essentially a vassal state for the US. But that's going to require a lot of management. And for a president who ran on America first and who has plenty of problems to deal with here at home,
it may become politically difficult very quickly to apply the kind of focus on Venezuela that it's going to require to keep them from falling into disarray or even civil war. Regime changes are at best hit or miss, and at worst, total catastrophes. If we burn money and American lives in Venezuela, Trump will see the populace turn on him even more than they already have.
Everything now hinges on one question. Does Venezuela still remember democracy? If there's still enough institutional memory, competent bureaucrats, engineers, oil workers, judges, business leaders, then there's a path forward. A hard path maybe, a painful one to be sure, but a path nonetheless. In that scenario, the U.S. can help stabilize, supervise, rebuild, profit from,
and then eventually step back with a mutually prosperous relationship between the two countries. If that happens, this operation will be remembered as a brutal but decisive move that prevented China from locking in permanent influence in our own hemisphere.
But if that memory is gone, if corruption is too entrenched in Venezuela, if trust is too broken, if violence fills the vacuum, or the US oil companies come in and enrich Americans and leave Venezuelans impoverished, or if America simply doesn't know when to step back, then this becomes something else entirely.
The other massive concern is that Venezuela is just the first of a long list of countries that America plans to take over, run, and unjustly influence. The rhetoric around Colombia and Greenland are already making a lot of people nervous that Trump's aggression will overextend us and alienate our allies, putting us in a weaker position.
People like historian Neil Ferguson have warned for years that empires have a long track record of overreaching, miscalculating, and ultimately financially bleeding to death by trying to fight everyone everywhere all at once. And that's the danger. we're going to have to wait and see how this all plays out. Right now though, one thing is clear.
The United States will enforce its sphere of influence again, openly, forcefully, and without apology. This will certainly slow China's ambitions in our own backyard, but it may also destabilize the region and begin an acceleration of our financial woes. Or,
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