Articles

In a Time of Helicopters, by Ben Gidley – 7 January 2026

In September, Donald Trump signed an executive order changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, and posted an image (right) of himself as Apocalypse Now‘s Lt. Col. Kilgore unleashing the Vietnam war on the citizens of Chicago. “‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’ Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR 🚁🚁🚁”. The helicopter emoji has long been currency in the meme culture of the American right: in 2021 “the Intercept published an illuminating article about the rise of the ‘Hoppean snake’ among far-right extremists… the Hoppean Snake in its various forms usually depicts a serpent wearing the military hat of the American-backed Chilean dictator Gen Augusto Pinochet in the foreground while figures are dropping out of helicopters to their death in the background.” In 2024, a Republican congressman joked about an alleged migrant who resisted incarceration in New York: “we could buy him a ticket on Pinochet Air for a free helicopter ride back.” On the second day of this year, in the pre-dawn darkness, US helicopters were over Caracas. The Guardian reported: “Citing US officials, CBS News reported that Maduro had been seized by members of the elite army unit Delta Force, which was responsible for the 2019 killing of the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. There was speculation the raid had been conducted with help from an elite army helicopter unit called the Night Stalkers, whose pilots were involved in the 2011 killing of the al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.” What war are we in? Are we back in Vietnam, the war on terror, or the dirty war in which the US backed dictators like Pinochet? Or is it the first act of the coming war? What we can be certain of is that the global left, in its response, is still fighting the last war with out-of-date weaponry.

The words “regime change” have become swearwords for the “anti-imperialist” left. Yet when regimes are bad, isn’t it good that they change? Instead, the term’s association with the US-led disaster in Iraq (it seems to have entered the political lexicon in the late 1990s when Madeleine Albright used it to talk about the plan for Iraq) leaves it irredeemably tainted. But perhaps, with dictatorships such as Maduro’s, the left should be owning the idea of regime change. However, the regime change we want is regime change from below – mass democratic action by the people living under authoritarian rule – and not external military intervention.

In reality, though, the rulers of the capitalist core have often been less keen on regime change than their “anti-imperialist” critics insist. Libya 2011 is a second place candidate (after Iraq 2003) for poster child for failed regime change. Yet Western intervention followed rather than preceded a mass popular uprising against the brutal regime there. It’s worth remembering that during the Iraq war, Tony Blair had travelled to Tripoli and declared a “new relationship” with Gaddafi (who already had a close friendship with Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, who had given the regime $5 billion to stop African migrants crossing the Mediterranean), while MI5 and the CIA assisted Libyan spies in the kidnapping of dissidents on foreign soil, and that on the eve of the 2011 revolution the cops of the Libyan dictatorship were being trained by the British police.

Similarly in Syria, where the mass of the population thirsted for regime change under the Assad dynasty while the white “anti-imperialist” left accused them of being proxies for the West. Analysts such as Joseph Daher, Omar Sabbour, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Danny Postel, Yassin al-Haj Saleh and Michael Karadjis long argued that successive US governments, not least Trump 1.0’s, pursued the aim of regime preservation rather than regime change in Syria, sacrificing the head of the snake to preserve its body.

Ironically, in a spectacular example of what we can call confusionism or diagonalism, many of the “anti-imperialists”, as well as paleocon and America First isolationists, actually thought that Trump was a candidate of peace while the Democrats were the party of regime change; Glenn Greenwald told us Trump had “a non-interventionist mindset” while the ex-left Grayzone YouTubers Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate went on the Tucker Carlson show to promote Trump as an anti-war figure.

In reality, though, Trump has proved a war-monger — but without the charade of just cause. Trump shows us that conservatism as we knew it in the last century is dead. Instead of posing as the world’s policeman, maintaining order so the market can flourish (as in the age of Cold War and neoconservative interventions), Trump’s America is a global gangster, expending blood and treasure to maintain the wealth and honour of the capo and his courtiers.

Perhaps liberalism as we knew it in the last century is dead too, or there surely would have been more resistance from the institutions when, on day one of his second term, Trump literally declared a state of war in his executive orders. On his first day of office, the president signed orders declaring the US under invasion from an amalgam of migrants, narco-terrorists and criminals, and enabling criminal organizations and drug cartels, including “Tren de Aragua“, a Venezuelan gang whose danger the right-wing media exaggerated, be named “foreign terrorist organizations.” Linking foreign governments to migrants and drug traffickers radicalised the war on terror and hostile environment, further blurring the distinction between the external enemy and internal threat and stretching the limits of US territorial jurisdiction. The paranoid fantasies seeded by reactionary digital entrepreneurs has led us to war.

A war-monger, then, but not a regime changer. In Venezuela, while too early to call, it seems likely that Trump is pursuing familiar regime preservation tactics: removing the unpopular head of state but replacing him with a more pliant figure from within the regime, a managed intra-regime coup. As Red Mole put it:

What we are witnessing is not regime change but regime capture. The FANB’s immediate recognition of Delcy Rodríguez, the demobilisation orders, the “tense calm” in Caracas: none of this is consistent with a state resisting foreign aggression. It is consistent with a negotiated handover in which significant elements of the Chavista apparatus concluded that their institutional survival was better served by collaboration than resistance.

And in response, the “Bolivarian” machine, like the Axis of Resistance in Western Asia with which it is allied, has no interest in actually resisting American imperialism, only with maintaining their own power and privilege in the corrupt system. Maduro’s militais have done nothing to challenge the Americans, but instead have harassed civilians celebrating Maduro’s fall and detained journalists. The lesson: “anti-imperialist dictators are useless in the face of imperialism, which is only too happy to recycle their state apparatus, their rentiers, and their henchmen by putting them directly at its service.”

While the “anti-imperialist” left sees the world divided between the imperialist hegemon and the axis of resistance, a “new cold war” or a stark choice between war and peace…, reality is more complicated.

Maduro and Trump resemble each other more than they differ, much as they resemble the other authoritarian thugs increasingly ruling our world, from Orban to Modi. As Giuseppe Cocco, Murilo Corrêa and Allan Deneuville wrote in November 2024, “This complexity is clearly evident in the Lula government’s attempts to normalize the Venezuelan situation: the dictator Maduro, an ally of Putin, China, Iran and North Korea, has begun to use the same arguments as Bolsonaro supporters against the Brazilian electoral system.” In the Trump/Maduro playbook, dissidents are defined as terrorists; NGOs and philanthropists are defined as foreign agents fomenting colour revolutions (in Maduro’s case, the targeted “foreign agents” included the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation).

The participatory structures created in the early days of Chavismo have been fully repurposed to ensure regime loyalty through patronage and coercion, one of the factors that has led to the weakness of the independent left and the domination of the democratic opposition by the right. There’s not much difference between Maduro’s colectivos and Trump’s masked shabiha, whether in Federal agencies such as ICE or in non-state paramilitary groups such as the Oath Keepers.

Something specific Trump and Maduro have in common is the logic of extractivism: they are both fossil fuel authoritarians. Maduro “implemented profoundly neoliberal economic policies: labour flexibilisation, de facto dollarisation, openness to transnational capital, and dismantling of social protection”; the Bolivarian bourgeoisie, expanding from hydrocarbons and petro-business in the collapse of earlier cycles of extractivist dependency to predatory mining and minerals, redirected state resources away from social programmes to their own project of luxury consumption and capital accumulation. The despoliation of the Orinoco is the other side of the corruption and brutality of the regime.

Any illusion of a rules-based international order was already ripped up by the violence of liquid imperialism and the Assad regime in Syria, Russia’s war in Ukraine, Israel’s war in Gaza, the UAE’s war in Sudan, the extractivism-fuelled wars across Africa; Trump’s regime capture in Caracas incinerates its last shreds. We are back to warlords and spheres of interest. Yassin Haj al-Saleh reflects on this “Syrianized” world we live in:

For the political theorist Hannah Arendt, “worldlessness” is a condition in which we no longer share common institutions or systems of meaning with others. It is “like a desert that dries up the space between people,” in the words of the philosopher Siobhan Kattago. 

The resemblance of the extractivist gangsters and the termination of the legal distinction between external enemy and domestic criminal are both symptoms of what Marx called “real subsumption”, as Cocco, Corrêa and Deneuville remind us: contemporary capitalism no longer has an outside. Looking to the global South or the BRICS or the Axis of resistance or the Bolivarian revolution as an external alternative to the fossil fuel kleptocracy is a futile dead end.

But that doesn’t mean we should do nothing. In a time of wars, we don’t have the luxury of helplessness and hopelessness. In the Chipocalypse, America was already at war; Trump’s hemispheric ambitions stretch to Greenland and Canada; not just Ukraine but all of Europe is under attack from Russia. We need to prepare for the deepening war. We need to find ways of building infrastructures of solidarity and care for Venezuela’s barrios, its democrats, social movements, civil society, trade unions, peasants, feminists and indigenous people. We need to find ways of escaping our fossil fuel- and mineral-dependent economy. We need to renew and radicalise political democracy so it has a hope of enduring this age. If contemporary capitalism no longer has an outside, we have to find the cracks and fissures inside it where we can make new spaces of resistance.

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