US air strikes in Venezuela and Africa. Trump's 'peace' means war in 2026

The new year has begun with a new war. The United States carried out strikes inside Venezuela on Saturday, hitting multiple targets. 

US President Donald Trump said that the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife were “captured and flown out of the country”.

The strikes, apparently a regime change operation, followed others on Christmas Day, when US President Donald Trump authorised air strikes on Nigeria and Somalia, and a CIA drone strike on Venezuela .

On 29 December, Trump stood in Mar-a-Lago, the southern palace of the would-be US emperor, with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. 

“There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” Trump told the media while standing next to the Israeli prime minister, referring to the first land-based strike on Venezuela, one anticipated by months of deadly attacks on fishing boats in the Caribbean. Trump claimed the victims of those strikes were drug smugglers. Members of Congress say they look like war crimes. No matter. 

The strikes on Nigeria - the first by the US against alleged militants in the country - were announced to the media, while those on Somalia went unannounced and unreported. Somalia has been a target of escalating US strikes since Trump returned to office, another long-running military intervention that the western media barely reports on.

As for Israel, Trump repeated exactly what Netanyahu wanted to hear. Like a dummy speaking the words of his ventriloquist, Trump claimed with a straight face that Israel had “100 percent” abided by the terms of his 20-point “ceasefire” in Gaza, while Hamas had violated it by not unilaterally disarming.

In reality, Hamas has handed over all living and dead hostages bar one since 13 October, as agreed, despite daily Israeli violations, an aid blockade, and countless strikes that have killed over 400 Palestinians. The occupied West Bank is being annexed by the day. 

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics released its end-of-year report showing the Gaza Strip had experienced a “sharp and unprecedented population decline of approximately 254,000 people”, representing a decrease of 10.6 percent of the population compared to before the genocide began in October 2023.

With estimates that just over 150,000 Palestinians have left Gaza since 2023, this accords with a recent German demography report that says more than 100,000 were killed during Israel’s two-year onslaught.

Failed peace efforts

Also in Mar-a-Lago, Trump once again met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for another round of fruitless talks to solve a war that Vladimir Putin shows no sign of wishing to end, as Russia pounded Kyiv with drones.

In return, Ukraine - whose drone and missile strikes are guided by intelligence from the CIA - struck a cafe and hotel on a Russia-occupied Black Sea resort, killing 24 and injuring 50 celebrating the New Year.

Just like all of Trump’s peace efforts, including Gaza, this Ukrainian-Russian one is going nowhere, a dodgy real estate deal with Trump as a dishonest broker. Trump’s deals, going back decades to his New York Epstein party days, fall apart as soon as he leaves the building.  

Protests erupt in breakaway region of Somaliland after Israeli recognition

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Christmas also saw Israel recognise the breakaway region of Somaliland in a normalisation deal with the region’s prime minister, a widely condemned deal in which Somaliland reportedly agreed to receive more than one million Palestinians from Gaza, and allow Israel to establish a base on the crucial Bab al-Mandal strait overlooking Yemen.

Thousands of Somalis took to the streets in protest at the deal, with many waving Palestinian flags in a show of Somalia’s historic support for the Palestinian cause.

Ahmed Moalim Fiqi, Somalia's defence minister, said that Mogadishu would “under no circumstances” accept Israel's recognition of the northern region. “Any discussion of forcibly displacing the Palestinians or relocating them to [Somali] territory is completely unacceptable [and] violates their fundamental right to live on their own land,” he added. 

Somalia’s UN ambassador excoriated his Israeli counterpart at the UN, following claims by Israel’s ambassador in New York that the former Siad Barre regime had committed genocide, as he justified Israel’s unilateral recognition of Somaliland.

“To come to this place and lecture us [on] humanity and genocide, human rights, and independence and democracy… We know what you [are] doing on a daily basis, it’s just an insult.”

A new Monroe Doctrine

Trump’s attack on Venezuela, and his African air strikes are reflective of the new US National Security Strategy (NSS) released in November. That strategy document outlined a stark new nationalistic and neocolonial vision for US empire in the second quarter of the 21st century. It gave an official stamp to the end of the post-war transatlantic era of western unity under US leadership. 

The document sees a pivot back to the 20th century when Latin America was Washington’s backyard and it intervened at will to maintain its economic and political grip

Further, the National Security Strategy makes it clear that Western Europe - not Russia - has been downgraded from historic ally to problematic region where the US will intervene by “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” from anti-migrant “patriotic” parties. It warns the continent could face “civilisational erasure” due to migration, an explicit endorsement of the great replacement theory in America’s key strategic document.

The document also sees a pivot back to the 20th century when Latin America was Washington’s backyard and it intervened at will to maintain its economic and political grip through backing authoritarian, pro-US regimes, from Cuba to Chile.

“We will assert and enforce a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine,” it says, deploying “where necessary the use of lethal force to replace the failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades”, and “Establishing or expanding access in strategically important locations”.

Trump has openly said he wants to “take back our oil” from Venezuela, which nationalised its vast oil reserves decades ago, and consolidated state control under Maduro's predecessor, Hugo Chavez. It has been in US crosshairs ever since, facing crippling sanctions against its oil exports. 

Far-right candidates have been winning power, with US support, across Latin America, first in El Salvador during Trump’s first term, and more recently in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and now Chile and Honduras, creating a string of pro-Trump allies. Still, the region’s giants - Brazil and Mexico - are, for now, firmly in the hands of democratic left governments.

Doctrine’s fatal flaw

But there is one major, perhaps fundamental, flaw to this new America First doctrine as outlined in the NSS: Israel and the Middle East.

As veteran journalist Jeremy Scahill told Middle East Eye’s Ashfaaq Carim in Doha last month, since the 9/11 attacks and the George W Bush administration, “it is a mistake to see the US and Israel as separate political entities”. The US is chained to Israel in Washington across executive and legislative branches, but as Scahill says, “Israel is a serial killer pretending to be a nation state” with “a PhD in violating ceasefires” that Trump, like Biden before him, cannot and will not see. 

As Scahill says, 'Israel is a serial killer pretending to be a nation state' with 'a PhD in violating ceasefires' that Trump, like Biden before him, will not see 

Trump saved Israel from itself by ending its war of annihilation against Gaza, only to replace it with a hybrid war of recolonisation of Gaza and the West Bank. As long as the US administration does the bidding of Israel, it will have to enable and cover for Israel’s endless war crimes and colonial expansions in Lebanon and Syria, and inevitably be drawn into more conflict. 

Netanyahu was once again urging the US to attack Iran during interviews on his latest US tour, linking Tehran to Venezuela’s socialist president. 

The global response to a US doctrine of supremacy and nation-state sovereignty means that any power or group of states can deploy the same doctrine of force, as American allies already are: from the European rearmament plan against Russia, to the Emirati new Red Sea empire, to Saudi Arabia attacking the UAE’s assets in Yemen. That is what the death of multilateralism looks like.

And with the latest attack on Venezuela, the world in 2026 is already looking more dangerous than ever.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Middle East Eye.