Feb. 19—On Jan. 3, 2026, the United States of America invaded Venezuela, kidnapped its President, Nicolás Maduro, and today holds him hostage while dictating all major policy to the blackmailed government of interim President Delcy Rodríguez.
On Jan. 29, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order authorizing major tariffs on countries supplying oil to Cuba, a policy designed to strangle that energy-dependent island and turn it into “Gaza West,” unless they submit and agree to “regime change.” Like the Palestinians, it’s likely that Cubans will fight and endure hunger rather than be turned into a satrapy.
According to still unconfirmed reports, Washington will next force Venezuela to altogether abandon its national currency, the bolívar, on March 1, and replace it with the dollar.
What is confirmed is that precisely that policy of dollarization has been actively on the drawing boards in Washington and Wall Street since at least March 2025. The gameplan, as elaborated in brazen detail in a Feb. 12 article, “Ahead of the Future Fight, Washington Should ‘Enlist and Expand’ Regional Partnerships for Dollarization,” published in the Small Wars Journal, a military policy discussion forum which prides itself in having brought about “the intellectual transformation of the U.S. and allied militaries and national security communities,” proposes to:
• Use military and financial warfare to force the nations of the Western Hemisphere to drop their national currencies and dollarize. The case of Ecuador’s forced dollarization in 2000, after massive financial warfare against the country, is the prime case study promoted in the article as a model for today.
• Seize their raw materials and other natural resources to ensure that “the hemisphere is to function as a true rear area in great-power war” against China, and establish “resilient supply chains tied to the hemisphere’s industrial rear.”
• “Tether [these countries] to the U.S. financial system,” to guarantee that China does not “entrap governments under the guise of Belt and Road progress.”
The neocolonial policy of seizing the Global South’s natural resources by force is hardly a new policy. One of its modern versions was Henry Kissinger’s notorious 1974 National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200, which shamelessly called for Malthusian population-reduction in the planet’s most populous nations, so that the United States and allied West could seize and use their natural resources for themselves. NSSM 200 stated:
The important potential linkage between rapid population growth and mineral availability … flows from the negative effects of excessive population growth on economic development and social progress.… The real problems of mineral supplies lie, not in basic physical sufficiency, but in the politico-economic issues of access, terms for exploration and exploitation, and division of the benefits among producers, consumers, and host country governments.
Today that policy is being coupled with the de facto annihilation of the nation-state itself, as reflected in the dollarization policy.
The reader should not think that this policy is meant to apply only to the Western Hemisphere. In the Trump administration’s 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy document released on Dec. 4, 2025, the section discussing the entire Global South states: “With the world’s deepest and most efficient capital markets, America can help low-income countries develop their own capital markets and bind their currencies more closely to the dollar, ensuring the dollar’s future as the world’s reserve currency.”
In other words, the entire Global South is to be held hostage and forced to bear the burden of the $2.4 quadrillion speculative bubble which has metastasized across the entire trans-Atlantic financial system.
The renowned physical economist Lyndon LaRouche had some choice words to describe this policy of dollarization. On Jan. 23, 2000, two weeks after Ecuador’s announcement of dollarization, LaRouche warned that dollarization was imposed on Ecuador as an “intentional” policy of enforced “slavery” and “genocide.” It is “an intent to destroy the nation,” LaRouche said. “They were not merely out to impose conditions. The deliberate purpose, by people such as the Inter-American Dialogue, is to eliminate the existence of the nation-state of Ecuador. And if we don’t stop them, they’ll do it.”
And in a June 21, 2000 interview with Peru’s , LaRouche again warned that Wall Street’s “policy internationally is to push through dollarization in the hemisphere … and to impose increasingly limited sovereignty upon states in the region. You might call it neo-colonialism…. It will absolutely destroy the nation and its people…. What this amounts to is a straight looting of the people and the country, by means of manipulating a currency the people don’t control. It actually is a method of mass murder, in effect, if you look at what the inevitable consequences are.”
LaRouche continued: “Dollarization is just another way of trying to print fictitious currency, which they can put in the banks of the bankers, so the bankers can pretend not to be bankrupt for one more day. Otherwise, you can compare it to a John Law bubble from the 18th Century, or the Tulip Bubble from the 17th Century. It’s the same principle as is involved in dollarization.”
Kick Out China
The Trump administration is also in flight-forward to force China out of the hemisphere, in an apparent manifestation of the new “Trump Corollary” of the Monroe Doctrine. On Feb. 11, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff head Gen. Dan Caine and U.S. “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth summoned the Defense Ministers and top officials of 34 countries of the hemisphere to Washington for an all-day meeting with top U.S. military leaders. In his opening remarks, Hegseth informed them that the United States is “restoring American power and American strength in our hemisphere,” and that countries are expected to be “partners against our adversaries.” He specified that the United States expects joint training, operations, and exercises with the countries in the region, and for U.S. forces to be given access to their “intelligence, basing, overflight, you name it.” Hegseth also expects them to join the U.S. in its Operation Southern Spear sinking of unidentified little boats on the high seas.
The same day, an unnamed White House official reported to media that U.S. President Donald Trump had invited six Presidents from the region for a March 7 summit at the Trump National Doral hotel in Miami. The sole “geopolitical purpose” of the meeting is to form a regional bloc to drive China out of the region, according to , an Argentine daily known to be close to the U.S. Embassy. Initially invited were Argentina’s Javier “chainsaw” Milei, Paraguay’s Santiago Peña, Bolivia’s Rodrigo Paz, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, Honduras’s Tito Asfura, and Peru’s José Jeri.
However, another victim of the American jihad against Chinese “influence” in the region was claimed on Feb. 17, when President Jeri was impeached after flimsy corruption charges linked to Chinese business interests were leveled against him. This campaign, waged under pressure by the Trump administration, goes directly at Peru’s relationship to China, particularly in the wake of the enormously successful construction of the Chancay Port, built in collaboration with China and inaugurated in 2024.
The previous day, U.S. Ambassador to Peru Bernie Navarro posted on X a clear condemnation of Peru’s relationship to China. While the United States trades with China, “we would never give our critical assets to manage. Not our power grids, ports, or railways.”
But fortunately, the story doesn’t end there. The vast majority of the world’s population has no intention of surrendering their sovereignty or being told whom they can do business with, and they have every intention of putting an end to 500 years of colonialism in all its forms. If Wall Street and the City of London continue to destroy the value of the dollar through rampant speculation, and then try to shove that down the throat of every nation on the planet, starting with the Western Hemisphere, they will only hasten their own demise. Meanwhile, the Global Majority will create alternative trading patterns to foster their own development, and design a new credit system to ensure the flow of tens of trillions of dollars to urgently needed great infrastructure projects. The clear alternative is for the West to choose collaboration and a new era of peaceful development for all, and leave the oligarchical system behind for good.
—Stewart Battle contributed to this article
