Rash: Venezuela events foreshadow a turbulent 2026

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Nicolás Maduro’s ruthless regime killed, tortured and imprisoned many Venezuelans who opposed him. He stole elections and immiserated millions, creating an exodus that became one of the world’s worst refugee crises.

Outside of the few who benefited from his government’s corrosive corruption, most won’t miss the Venezuelan leader. But the world will miss the postwar rules-based international order that the U.S. largely led and benefited from — an order eroded further by the seizure of Maduro and his wife in a move that was condemned in the U.N. by adversary and ally alike.

“President Donald Trump’s administration is reviving and reinterpreting the logic of the Monroe Doctrine in its effort to assert power over the Western Hemisphere,” wrote Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, introducing its annual analysis of “Top Risks,” released Jan. 5. “Where the 19th-century doctrine warned external powers against encroaching in the Americas, Trump’s version broadens the concept. It seeks not just to limit China, Russia, and Iran in the Western Hemisphere, but to actively assert American primacy through a mix of military pressure, economic coercion, selective alliance-building, and Trump’s personal score-settling. In 2026, this posture will heighten the risk of policy overreach and unintended consequences.”

In a follow-up reporter briefing, Bremmer credited the precision of the operation, but said that “this is not regime change; it’s regime roulette. You spin the wheel and see what the next group of leaders around Maduro are going to be like.” The administration, Bremmer said, “had a plan for extraction and rendition of Maduro and his wife. They don’t have a plan for how we govern Venezuela.”

The military mission “was a remarkable step,” according to Richard Atwood, the executive vice president of the International Crisis Group, which, like the Eurasia Group, recently issued its annual “10 Conflicts to Watch.” (Like the “Top Risks” report, it proved prescient, listing Venezuela first.) But now, Atwood said from Brussels, “the big question is: What’s next? What it seems at the moment is a decapitation, but one that’s left the regime largely in place.”

And yet, Tom Hanson, a former diplomat and chair of the Minnesota Committee on Foreign Relations, said via email, “the Danes must be on high alert. What could prevent Trump from making an offer they ‘can’t refuse’ on Greenland … or failing that, simply seizing the thinly populated land for national security reasons.”

Hanson, whose Jan. 22 “2026 U.S. Foreign Policy Update” is described by organizer Global Minnesota as its “foreign policy event of the year,” added that both China and Russia “could react with caution in the face of Trump’s unpredictability and willingness to use military force not just in Venezuela, but also in Iran, Nigeria, etc.,” or “they could perceive the U.S. as increasingly distracted in the Western Hemisphere and the Middle East and sense an opportunity to assert their interests more aggressively in their own spheres. To the extent they perceive a sphere of influence approach from the U.S., they may underestimate how the Trump administration might react to overly aggressive moves, especially on Taiwan.”

Fellow Minnesotan Jon Olson, a retired commander who spent 21 years in U.S. naval intelligence who now teaches courses in national security at Carleton College and the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School, referred to how the president’s precedent will play in Beijing and Moscow when he asked via email: “Are we indeed returning to the ‘spheres of influence’ concepts once held by the imperial powers? Does the U.S. get the Western Hemisphere, Russia gets Europe, and China gets Asia and the Western Pacific?”

Trump, Atwood said, “aspires very clearly to a spheres-of-influence policy in the Western Hemisphere,” which he said was evident in its recently released National Security Strategy. “It’s easy to imagine, for example, Xi Jinping liking that sort of language. It’s easy to imagine Russia liking that sort of language. On the face of it this is the sort of politics that both leaders like in principle. But how it is exactly going to play out I think is quite hard to say.”

Bremmer, expounding on the Eurasia Group’s report, amplified the uncertain tone to 2026 by saying that “the backdrop here is that the United States, the most powerful country in the world, is driving the lion’s share of the geopolitical uncertainty, and that was never the case when we started writing these 20 years ago.” And yet, he said, “it is certainly the case right now, and that’s true for the United States at home, it’s true for adversaries of the U.S., and it’s also true for allies all over the world, very unsettlingly for many of them.”

Atwood also looked at the history of his organization for context by saying “since 1995, when the Crisis Group was founded, the plates are shifting in this sort of way where there’s big changes afoot; huge, sweeping changes.” And, Atwood added, “the traditional restraints on the use of force have been crumbling already for a decade.” Now the U.S. “seems to have removed them completely. So I think this combination of all these fires burning all over the place with these local conflicts and then the tectonic shifts that Trump is bringing to geo-competition among big powers, the combination of that, I think it’s hard to think of a moment post-Cold War that is this dangerous.”