The Regime-Change Playbook: From Syria to Venezuela

One Year After Syria’s Destruction, the Regime-Change Playbook Is Being Reused

In December 2024, the United States, Israel, NATO, and their European allies completed what they had pursued for more than a decade: the destruction of Syria as a sovereign, anti-imperialist state. This warmongering was marketed to Western audiences as a “liberation.” One year later, in December 2025, the results are undeniable.

Syria is not free.

Syria was dismantled.

What followed the fall of Damascus was not peace, democracy, or self-determination, but mass violence, sectarian fragmentation, economic plunder, and foreign domination. Syria today stands as a living case study of what regime change actually produces—and as a warning of what awaits Venezuela if the same imperial playbook is allowed to run its course again.

What Regime Change Really Is

Regime change is not a response to dictatorship. It is a long-term Western imperial strategy designed to destroy political sovereignty and force independent nations into submission.

The countries targeted for regime change share common characteristics:

• They assert control over their natural resources
• They pursue nationalization or socialist-oriented development
• They reject U.S./European/NATO military alignment
• They build multipolar relationships outside Western control
• They resist Israel and Zionism

Syria and Venezuela were not targeted because they were uniquely authoritarian. They were targeted because they were independent.

Before December 2024, Syria was a central pillar of the global anti-imperialist camp and the Axis of Resistance. Venezuela remains one today.

Regime change exists to replace governments that serve their people with governments that serve Western capital, Western militarism, and Western geopolitical interests.

The Regime-Change Playbook: Syria and Venezuela

Syria did not fall overnight. It fell through a multi-stage imperial process—the same process now clearly being deployed against Venezuela.

Step One: Demonization of Leadership

In Syria, Bashar al-Assad was transformed into a singular embodiment of evil. Every social and economic hardship was reduced to his personal existence. Context, history, and imperial interference were erased.

In Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro is treated the same way: caricatured as a “narco-dictator,” stripped of political complexity, and framed as an illegitimate obstacle to progress.

This step is essential. Once a leader is dehumanized, anything done to the population becomes justifiable.

Step Two: Sanctions as Collective Punishment

After demonization comes economic warfare.

In Syria, sanctions devastated civilian life long before the state collapsed—destroying healthcare, food systems, infrastructure, and livelihoods. The suffering produced by sanctions was then blamed on the Syrian government itself.

Venezuela has endured the same strategy. Sweeping sanctions have strangled the economy, blocked trade and finance, weaponized shortages, and punished the working class. The misery they create is then cited as “evidence” that regime change is necessary.

Sanctions are not diplomacy.

They are siege warfare by economic means.

Step Three: Propaganda, Atrocity Narratives, and Psychological Warfare

Once sanctions weaken society, propaganda intensifies.

In Syria, years of atrocity narratives—many selective, exaggerated, or fabricated—created a permanent moral panic in Western consciousness. Complex realities are flattened into a simple story of good (white) people versus evil (Brown) people.

Venezuela is now subjected to the same information war. Every hardship is framed as internal failure. External sabotage and US economic warfare are erased. The purpose is to manufacture public consent.

Wars cannot proceed without it.

Step Four: Fake Opposition and Reactionaries

No regime-change operation succeeds without reactionary collaborators, especially within diaspora communities in the West.

The United States and Europe consistently uplift exiled elites—often from wealthy, Westernized, or comprador backgrounds—who lost power after anti-imperialist revolutions and now advocate sanctions, coups, and foreign intervention under the language of “freedom” and “human rights.”

In Syria, the so-called opposition was ultimately embodied by figures like Ahmad al-Sharaa (Jolani) and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)—former Al-Qaeda and ISIS leadership rebranded as legitimate rulers by the West.

In Venezuela, this role has been played by figures like Juan Guaidó and now María Corina Machado—unelected, Western-aligned actors whose politics reflect U.S. corporate and geopolitical priorities, not the will of the Venezuelan masses.

These figures function as US and Western imperial proxies, laundering regime-change narratives through cultural familiarity. Identity is weaponized to obscure politics. The Western left is targeted for confusion, fragmentation, and paralysis.

This is how Syria fell.

This is how Venezuela is being targeted.

Step Five: Escalation Toward Open War

Sanctions and propaganda are not the endpoint. They are preparation.

Syria’s regime-change war escalated over more than a decade—from information warfare to proxy conflict to full-scale destruction. The West waited patiently until conditions were favorable.

Venezuela is now facing that same trajectory.

Syria Before and After Regime Change

Before December 2024

Syria was a sovereign state aligned with the global Axis of Resistance. It supported Palestinian resistance factions, facilitated material support to Hezbollah, resisted Israeli occupation, rejected normalization with Zionism, and maintained national control over key sectors of its economy. It functioned as part of a broader anti-imperialist front against US imperialism and Zionism.

After December 2024

Today, Syria is engulfed in chaos.

Under HTS and al-Sharaa:

• Sectarian massacres and ethnic cleansing have devastated minority communities
• Women from religious and ethnic minorities have been kidnapped, raped, and trafficked
• Entire populations have been forcibly displaced
• National institutions have been hollowed out
• Economic assets have been seized and privatized
• Israeli forces have expanded their occupation unopposed

Al-Sharaa has openly aligned himself with the United States, Europe and Israel, holding meetings with Western officials and negotiating Syria’s future as a subordinate client state. He expelled Palestinian resistance organizations, dismantled their political and military infrastructure, and blocked weapons flows to Hezbollah and Palestinian resistance fighters.

Syria has been forcibly removed from the Axis of Resistance.

This is not organic chaos.

This is the outcome regime change was designed to produce.

Venezuela Today: Resistance, Not Collapse

Venezuela now stands where Syria once stood—but with one critical difference: the outcome is not yet decided.

Despite years of sanctions, coup attempts, sabotage, and military threats, Venezuelan society has not collapsed. Workers, communes, unions, and popular militias are organized. Large majorities of Venezuelans openly reject foreign intervention and have expressed readiness to defend their country with arms if necessary.

President Nicolás Maduro is not merely surviving imperial pressure—he is coordinating national resistance, strengthening alliances with other sanctioned nations, defending sovereignty, and preparing the population for collective defense.

This is precisely why Venezuela is being targeted now.

Regime change does not attack weak societies.

It attacks resistant ones.

How the United States Is Attacking Venezuela Right Now

When we say that Venezuela is under attack, we are not speaking metaphorically. The United States is actively waging a multi-front campaign of economic, political, psychological, and military aggression against the Venezuelan people.

Economic Warfare Through Sanctions

The primary weapon being used against Venezuela is economic siege.

U.S. sanctions are designed to:

• Block Venezuela’s access to international banking and credit
• Prevent the sale of Venezuelan oil on global markets
• Seize Venezuelan state assets abroad
• Criminalize third-country trade with Venezuela
• Collapse public revenue used for food, healthcare, housing, and wages

These sanctions have deliberately deprived Venezuela of tens of billions of dollars, restricting access to medicine, spare parts, food imports, and infrastructure maintenance. This is collective punishment, not diplomacy.

The humanitarian suffering produced by sanctions is then cynically blamed on the Venezuelan government itself—exactly as it was in Syria.

Extrajudicial Killings and Militarization of the Caribbean

U.S. aggression has also taken a directly lethal form.

Under the pretext of “counter-narcotics” operations, the United States has expanded its military presence in Caribbean and South American waters, carrying out airstrikes and lethal airstrikes that have resulted in extrajudicial killings of civilians, including fisherfolk and maritime workers, without evidence, trial, or accountability.

These operations are not about drugs. They are about:

• Militarizing the region surrounding Venezuela
• Controlling strategic shipping routes
• Normalizing U.S. military violence near Venezuelan territory
• Creating regional instability and fear

This mirrors the early military pressure applied to Syria before its collapse.

Open Threats and Resource Seizure

U.S. officials—including Donald Trump—have openly threatened Venezuela and asserted imperial entitlement over its resources. Trump has repeatedly stated that Venezuela’s oil “belongs” to the United States, making clear that regime change is about resource theft, not democracy.

When an imperial power publicly claims ownership of another nation’s resources, that is colonialism in plain language.

Political Sabotage and Parallel Governments

The United States has repeatedly attempted to overthrow Venezuela’s government outside any electoral process by:

• Recognizing unelected figures as “president”
• Freezing and stealing Venezuelan state assets
• Encouraging military defections
• Supporting coup attempts
• Funding destabilization campaigns

These efforts failed because they were rejected by the Venezuelan people—not because U.S. hostility ended.

Psychological Warfare and Information Operations

Alongside sanctions and threats, the U.S. wages continuous psychological warfare:

• Saturation media campaigns portraying Venezuela as a “failed state”
• Atrocity narratives stripped of context
• Erasure of US sanctions from public discourse
• Promotion of regime-change messaging through diaspora elites

This is designed to demoralize Venezuelans, fracture international solidarity, and prepare Western audiences to accept escalation.

Taken together, these actions constitute a state of undeclared war.

Reactionaries, Collaborators, and the Weaponization of “Human Rights”

Every regime-change operation depends on internal collaborators.

Western governments deliberately elevate reactionary Syrians and Venezuelans in the diaspora—often from elite backgrounds—who advocate sanctions and intervention while claiming to speak for “their people.” These figures whitewash imperial crimes, legitimize collective punishment, and translate U.S. propaganda into the language of identity and humanitarianism.

Women’s rights, minority protection, and queer liberation are selectively weaponized—not to help oppressed people, but to justify sanctions, destabilization, and war. This is not solidarity. It is psychological warfare.

The people most harmed by sanctions—women, children, the poor, and marginalized communities—are always the ones the West claims it wants to “save.”

The Responsibility of Anti-Imperialists in the West

Syria fell not because the truth was unknowable, but because too many people in the imperial core accepted imperial narratives—or treated the destruction of a sovereign nation as distant or inevitable.

Anti-imperialism cannot be outsourced solely to the Global South.

Venezuela is already resisting. The responsibility now lies with those of us living inside the imperial core: to oppose sanctions, reject propaganda, expose regime-change lies, and resist our own governments’ war projects.

The US Wants to do to Venezuela What it did to Syria

Syria was not the first victim of regime change, and it will not be the last.

But Syria shows, with brutal clarity, what happens when this imperial strategy succeeds.

Venezuela now stands at the same threshold.

The playbook is the same.

The sequence is the same.

Only the target has changed.

If Syria teaches us anything, it is that silence, confusion, and misplaced neutrality are forms of complicity.

Venezuela will not fall because it failed to resist.

It will fall only if people inside the imperial core fail to resist their own empire.

And that is the lesson we cannot afford to ignore.

source: Bronx Anti War

abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=…#bronxAntiWar #imperialism #iran #venezuela

(URL replace addon enabled for X, YouTube, Instagram and some news sites.)