What Venezuela reveals about modern regime change, internal betrayal, and why Haiti must read the warning clearly.

Geopolitics | The Haitian Pulse Editorial Team | January 1,  2026

From the very outset, it is impossible to ignore what is truly unfolding before our eyes: the Monroe Doctrine has been reactivated—openly, unapologetically, and without uncertainty. What many believed to be a relic of 19th-century imperial thinking has returned as an operational doctrine guiding modern power in the Western Hemisphere. What happened to Venezuela is not an isolated episode. It is a message.

The Monroe Doctrine was never about protection. It was about control. It declared the Americas a sphere of influence where sovereignty was tolerated only as long as it aligned with U.S. interests. The events in Venezuela signal that this logic is no longer theoretical—it is being enforced. The removal of a sitting president without resistance, under the cover of night, sends a clear message to Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Global South: sovereignty is conditional.

Aggression against sovereign nations has not merely resurfaced—it has been normalized. Not through declarations of war, but through precision removals, internal orchestration, and the exploitation of institutional weakness. This is warfare adapted for an era where optics matter more than legality and silence is mistaken for consent.

At approximately one o’clock in the morning, a sitting president was removed without resistance. No firefight. No defensive mobilization. No visible attempt to protect territorial sovereignty. The operation unfolded smoothly, efficiently, and without retaliation. To some, this was framed as relief. To others, as progress. To those who understand how states function, it was something far more troubling.

For Haitians, it was hauntingly familiar.

President Jovenel Moïse was killed in his own home, also in the dead of night. The institutions charged with protecting him failed to respond as a functioning state should. No immediate alarm. No coordinated defense. No institutional reflex consistent with a sovereign nation under attack. Haiti woke up to a completed operation, not an unfolding crisis. The difference between Haiti and Venezuela is not the method—it is the outcome. One president was assassinated. The other was extracted. Different endings. Same script.

This is not coincidence. It is methodology.

In modern geopolitics, the night is chosen deliberately. Darkness limits witnesses, suppresses public reaction, and compresses response time. More importantly, it depends on one decisive condition: internal cooperation. Presidents do not fall quietly unless the state surrounding them has already been neutralized from within. Leaders do not disappear at night because enemies are overwhelmingly strong. They fall because the guardians of sovereignty are absent, compromised, or willing to stand aside.

This reality forces a difficult but necessary conclusion. What occurred in Venezuela was a cowardly act on two fronts. It was a cowardly act by the United States, which chose covert manipulation over transparency, orchestration over law, and indirect extraction over accountability. If a leader is accused of crimes, international law provides mechanisms—investigation, indictment, extradition, and multilateral adjudication. Bypassing those mechanisms through a nighttime operation is not strength. It is avoidance. True power does not need shadows.

But the deeper wound lies within Venezuela itself. This was also a cowardly act by those inside the country who sold out the president of their own nation. No state loses its leader quietly unless insiders open the gates. Security does not evaporate by chance. Institutions do not forget their mandate accidentally. Silence at such moments is not neutrality—it is complicity. Sovereignty is never taken solely by force; it is first surrendered.

In the aftermath, many questioned why Venezuela’s allies—particularly China and Russia—did not intervene. This question misunderstands how sovereignty and alliances function. Neither China nor Russia is responsible for the personal security of Venezuela’s president. Allies are not guardians. The first responsibility for defending a head of state and maintaining territorial sovereignty lies with a country’s own institutions, especially its armed forces.

This point is decisive because there was no military resistance from Venezuela’s own army. No defensive mobilization. No counteraction. No visible assertion of national authority. When a nation’s own military stands down, allies are effectively neutralized before they can act. No ally can intervene to defend a sovereignty that the sovereign state itself is not actively defending.

Alliances are not automatic triggers for war. They are conditional, reactive, and bound by law, politics, and timing. For China or Russia to intervene militarily in a situation where Venezuela’s own armed forces did not resist would have meant throwing the first blow and transforming an internally facilitated collapse into an international war. No rational state does this without a formal request for assistance, visible internal resistance, or a clear external invasion.

There is a dangerous illusion being promoted—that because no shots were fired, the operation was clean or legitimate. History rejects this without hesitation. A coup does not require tanks in the streets. Treason does not require explosions. In fact, the most effective regime changes are the quiet ones, executed through compromised chains of command, negotiated loyalties, and purchased silence. The absence of resistance is not proof of consent; it is proof of institutional decay.

Reports of celebration in Venezuela should not surprise anyone. A population exhausted by sanctions, scarcity, and uncertainty will celebrate anything resembling change. But emotion is not strategy. History demands restraint. The removal of a president is never the end of a nation’s struggle. More often, it marks the beginning of external management. Power vacuums are never neutral. They are filled quickly by those with the resources to do so.

For Haiti, this is not foreign news. It is a mirror. Haiti did not lose its president because it lacked courage. It lost him because its institutions were hollowed out, its loyalties fragmented, and its sovereignty treated as negotiable. Venezuela is now confronting a similar truth. The most dangerous condition for any nation is not external hostility—it is internal betrayal normalized by silence.

Sovereignty does not live in speeches, flags, or historical memory. It lives in institutions. When institutions fail, sovereignty collapses even if borders remain intact. A nation whose security forces stand down at decisive moments is not sovereign. A nation whose elites negotiate personal survival instead of defending institutions is not free. A nation where betrayal carries no consequence is already lost.

Media plays a decisive role in this collapse. When the word “war” is avoided, when “coup” becomes “transition,” when betrayal is reframed as pragmatism, the public is conditioned to accept the unacceptable. Media does not simply report power—it legitimizes it. Haiti understands this too well. A country without narrative control is a country without agency.

What this moment demands from Haitians is not blind loyalty to leaders or ideological alignment. It demands seriousness. Sovereignty is not protected by history alone. It is defended by functional institutions, collective responsibility, and the refusal to normalize betrayal. When leaders fall in the dead of night without resistance, the most important question is not who removed them—but who allowed the conditions to exist.

The Haitian Pulse maintains that sovereignty is not symbolic; it is structural. It is defended through institutions, loyalty, and collective responsibility. When doctrines of dominance are reactivated, Haiti must decide whether it will remain a spectator—or finally build the internal strength required to protect itself.