An ‘Iraq’ in Latin America? Venezuela’s strategy to deter a US attack

Image shows US President Donald Trump (L) in Washington, DC on July 9, 2025, and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro (R) in Caracas on July 31, 2024. AFP/Jim Watson Fearing a US military operation to overthrow the government, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro ordered the mobilization of civilians and military personnel for defense national. As expected, the official channels of the Bolivarian government went into overdrive shortly after the first US attacks on Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean. However, the content of the messages broadcast in recent days regarding national defense draws attention. ✅ Follow the g1 international news channel on WhatsApp In one of the videos, plainclothes civilians receive training in anti-tank weapons systems if they have to “neutralize armored systems”, explains an officer from the Bolivarian National Armed Force (FANB). In recent weeks, a cascade of journalistic reports reported the distribution of weapons to civilians committed to defending Venezuela from an “undeclared war” by Washington. These messages are far from a conventional war scenario, evoking forms of resistance rooted in the support of the civilian population – a territorial defense doctrine developed over the last 20 years that could be about to be tested for the first time. Announcing the activation of the so-called “Communal Units” of the Bolivarian Militia, on 5/9, President Nicolás Maduro highlighted the influence of two works that “fed our military doctrine” — both, teachings on the foundations of asymmetric warfare by the former revolutionary leader and president of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, and the Viet Cong general, Vo Nguyen Giap. “Today we are taking a transcendental step, a step for all of Venezuela (…) to join together in defense of the right to peace, in defense of Venezuela, in defense of territorial integrity, of natural resources,” said Maduro. “And for this we have to unite, as Ho Chi Minh said, unite everyone against the main enemy.” Asymmetric, popular and prolonged war Who are Maduro’s militiamen? The current Venezuelan military doctrine has its origins in the post-coup scenario of 2002, when the George W. Bush administration and the American military classified Chávez as one of the greatest “threats to American interests” in the hemisphere. Understanding that the greatest threats to Venezuelan integrity were an asymmetric conflict with the United States or a conventional confrontation with Colombia – at the time an ally of Washington –, Chávez undertook a transformation of the Venezuelan armed forces. This included the expansion, modernization and armament of defensive capabilities to face traditional threats, in addition to a series of innovations based on popular war precepts to face asymmetric threats. The “prolonged popular war” is a Maoist strategy, widely theorized and applied by Vietnamese revolutionaries, whose principle of asymmetry and irregular formations determine battlefield strategies. To cite one of the adaptations, while traditional warfare involves control of positions, asymmetric warfare accepts the loss of territory at first in order to arm resistance and engage the enemy in a long-term war of attrition. The objective is not to win in one blow, but to make the war unsustainable for the enemy, like the conflicts in Iraq and Vietnam. To this end, this strategy blurs the boundaries between battlefield and society, between soldier and citizen. “The most vigorous war can be fought with little money, but only with a lot of courage and good will,” wrote the famous Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz about the so-called “small wars” (kleinkrieg) and the “people’s war” (volkskrieg). “Fighting for the country” is the greatest motivation for the soldier, stated Clausewitz, whose reflections on this type of conflict are less known than his great treatise on “great wars”. In Latin America, the Marxist guerrillas that emerged after the Second World War were somewhat influenced by this conception, although a large part was also influenced by the “Foquism” of Che Guevara, who believed that it was possible to carry out the revolution only from a revolutionary vanguard like the one that came down from the Sierra Maestra in January 1959 and overthrew the government of Fulgencio Batista. In modern Cuba, however, the asymmetry of the American threat – as well as the success of asymmetric warfare strategies in the 20th century, from Vietnam to Afghanistan under Soviet occupation – explain why it has become a pillar of Cuban military doctrine. READ ALSO: CIA secret invasion, bomber overflight: signs that Trump is willing to overthrow Maduro in Venezuela Nuclear capacity and ‘backbone’ of the US Air Force: get to know the B-52 bomber, which flew over the coast of Venezuela Maduro criticizes ‘CIA coups d’état’ after Trump authorizes covert operations in Venezuela ‘Prolonged people’s war’ Venezuela begins military exercises on Caribbean island amid tensions with the USA In Venezuela, the concept was articulated from 2004 through the so-called “New Military Thought”, under the specter of the Iraq invasion in 2003. It is no coincidence that one of the influences on Venezuelan military thought at the time was the Spanish political scientist Jorge Verstrynge, whose book on Islam and peripheral warfare was distributed to dozens of thousands of Venezuelan officers. German sociologist Heinz Dieterich defined Venezuelan doctrine as “a sui generis son of the same midwife of history who engendered the military theories of the ‘protracted people’s war’ of Mao Tse Tung and Ho Chi Minh/Vo Nguyen Giap in Asia, and of the ‘war of the whole people’ in Cuba.” The Bolivarian Militia, officially created in 2008 following the expansion of military reserve forces in previous years, is, in theory, the incarnation of this doctrine. The Militia incorporates the civilian population in tasks of revolutionary mobilization and national defense, using a principle contained in the 1999 Constitution on the “co-responsibility” of civilians and military personnel for national defense. From 1.6 million members in 2018, according to official figures, it increased to 5 million in 2024. In August 2025, the government announced that the goal is to mobilize a total of 8.5 million citizens, although the number of troops ready for combat will probably be in the tens of thousands. But the objective of this force is not to duplicate the conventional power of the Armed Forces, but rather to offer capillarity to the territorial defense system, taking advantage of the communities’ detailed geographic knowledge to reinforce resistance at a hyperlocal level. In the event of a conflict, it is likely that a large part of the militiamen, instead of taking up arms, would dedicate themselves to what the government calls “popular intelligence” – especially older enlisted personnel. In this context, it is necessary to interpret the images that circulate of elderly militiamen clumsily handling rifles not as an illustration of the military power of the FANB, but rather as a communicational resource to project the notion of “guerra de todo el pueblo” – the war in which the entire society participates. As a Venezuelan officer told me during my visit to Caracas in 2024, every militiaman has an MAL: mission, weapon and location. It may be that the weapon of the old men and women in the photos “is not the rifle”, explained the officer. “Maybe it’s intelligence.” Uncertainties President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, applauds Special Forces soldiers during a ceremony in Caracas, Venezuela, on August 28, 2025. Presidency of Venezuela via Reuters There are, of course, enormous uncertainties about a US-Venezuela conflict scenario, because several factors lack definition on both sides. On the Venezuelan side, civil-military coordination in a conflict scenario is an extremely complex task. Military exercises such as the Bolivarian Shield, which mobilizes hundreds of thousands of troops from conventional forces, the Bolivarian Militia and police personnel, simulate likely actions such as foreign incursion, sabotage and emergencies, but this logistics has never been tested in practice. Another uncertainty is about the cohesion of combatants in a conflict scenario. Factors such as degree of professionalization, ideological commitment, patriotism, discipline and organization are decisive. Each determines, in its own way, the behavior of troops on the battlefield. Can the ideological commitment of the militia members compensate for their lack of professionalism? Would the junior officers of the professional troops be willing to defend a government accused of subverting a legitimate electoral result? Would there be a risk of a coup? On the American side, there is no clarity about what Trump’s plan for Venezuela would be. Assuming that Washington’s objective is to install an Edmundo González or Maria Corina Machado government in the Miraflores Palace, how can we guarantee the survival and viability of such a government in the days, weeks and months following the seizure of power? How to ensure that there would be no counterattack or blow within the blow? It is difficult to imagine a conflict scenario that does not involve a good dose of chaos and possibly a new Venezuelan refugee crisis on the continent. It is worth remembering that Trump was responsible for ending the American presence in Afghanistan in 2021. The logic of the Bolivarian doctrine is that the prospects of opening a new Iraq in Latin America serve as a deterrent to avoid an attack. Pablo Uchoa does not consult, work with, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that could benefit from the publication of this article and has not disclosed any relevant ties beyond his academic position. See the videos that are trending on g1

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