In the first episode of The Sopranos, Tony Soprano confesses to his new psychologist, Dr Jennifer Melfi, whom he visits after experiencing a panic attack, that “it’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, and I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” While the fictional New Jersey mob boss is referring to the Mafia, it also serves as a metaphor for the anxieties of declining US imperial power in a world in which its hegemony is in marked decline. Donald Trump’s rise, fall, and return to power are, in large part, driven by this anxiety in its various forms — as is the racketeering style of his presidency in his second term — most obviously illustrated by the recent kidnapping of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores.

The episode was hardly unprecedented. Since 1989, the United States has kidnapped three sitting presidents, beginning with George H. W. “Pappy” Bush’s betrayal of his old partner in counterrevolutionary drug trafficking, Manuel Noriega, and continuing with George W. “Dubya” Bush’s abduction of Haiti’s democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. Noriega was left to waste away in a US dungeon, while Aristide was eventually granted asylum in South Africa. We will see in the coming months if the pathetic justifications for taking out Maduro hold any weight in a US court, though there is little reason to expect an impartial process. What distinguishes Venezuela is that it is not a small state dependent on the United States like Panama or Haiti. It has been treated as one of the US’s official enemies, with a target on its back since Hugo Chávez came to power. It is also a large country with a population of twenty-eight million and a military that is, at least on paper, capable of inflicting some damage in the event of an invasion.

The spectacle of the operation not only marked a clear end to any lingering idea of an international order premised on state-based sovereignty and international law; it also signaled, as I argued a few months ago, “a return to a conception of sovereignty premised on ‘the strong do what they will.’” Trump’s claim that the United States is effectively running Venezuela, consistent with his turn toward the crudest form of resource imperialism, offers further evidence of this. Given the fog of war, the frenzied hubris of MAGA agitprop, and the difficulty of assessing information coming out of Venezuela, any confident assessment of the future of Venezuelan politics or Chavismo is premature.