It’s early afternoon on Christmas Day, 2026, which Russia celebrates on January 7th. In Moscow, New Year’s lights are still twinkling as light snow is falling. The scene is a luxury apartment valued at over 3.3 billion rubles within the cluster of skyscrapers known as Moscow City. There, the Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia are over having tea with the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his lovely wife Asma. “Dictatorship has its privileges,” they laugh as they sample from a tray of Russian petits fours.

Meanwhile, on the wrong side on the planet, Trump is lying in bed making his feet dance. The TV is on (it is always on) and Fox News seems to be covering the “correct” version of the Venezuelan kidnapping story. According to the “legend” (a technical term), Delta Force heroically extracted the dictator and his wife from their bedroom at Palacio de Miraflores in Caracas in a hale of bullets and transported them to a jail in Brooklyn to be put on a kangaroo trial on trumped up drugs and weapons charges.

The trial will be presided over by the 92-year-old Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, whose brain has by now shriveled to the size of a Mamon Fruta, a.k.a. Mamoncillo or Quenepa, a small green orb with sweet-tart, translucent pulp similar to lychee, often sold by street vendors in Caracas. This made him the perfect choice: he is quite unlikely to be able to take into account even the simplest of facts which should force him to dismiss this case with prejudice. One of these facts is that Maduro and his wife are (according to the “legend”) victims of a cross-border abduction, not a lawful arrest, and are being wrongfully detained. Another such fact is that, being foreign nationals, they are not subject to US laws and could not have been charged or arrested by US officials while not on US territory. Yet another is that Maduro has sovereign immunity from prosecution as the head of a sovereign state. The two actors hired to play Maduro and his wife during the kangaroo trial are off duty until March 17, 2016, which is the first date old Alvin could pencil them in for a hearing.

The reason for the Venezuelan fracas is Trump’s great new plan, which he formulated while laying in bed making his feet dance. It is to resurrect something called the Monroe Doctrine. Trump is wise enough to have realized that the US is no longer a match against the combined power of other great nations (Russia, China, India) but might possibly still stand a chance at international dominance if it limited itself to just the Western Hemisphere.

The original Monroe Doctrine, declared by US president James Monroe in 1823, warned European powers against further colonization or interference in the Americas. The US was at the time quite puny, primarily agricultural and pre-industrial and a supplier of raw materials and commodities to rapidly industrializing Europe. In this context, Monroe’s “doctrine” could have been considered the stuff of comedy except for the fact that at that time the Europeans were at each others’ throats. A character who called himself Napoleon was rampaging across Europe and, two years later, even found himself, briefly, in Moscow. Thus, Europe was not in any position to interfere in the Americas at the time, giving the US an opening to project power beyond its borders.

Imagining how the Monroe doctrine would apply in 2026 is definitely the stuff of comedy. The US is no longer dominant in much of anything other than debt. It produces a lot of oil, but it consumes even more oil than it produces and is forced to import heavier grades of oil in order to make jet fuel and diesel. It is still a major liquefied gas exporter but most of its gas production is from fracking and that resource has reached a plateau and is expected to start trending down. There is also a fanciful dream of the US becoming an “artificial intelligence superpower” but AI is just a financial bubble — a virtual repeat of the dot-com bubble of 2000. AI does not pay for itself and produces garbage. Consequently, Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2025 was “slop” — low-quality digital content produced by AI.

None of this bodes well for the renewed ability of the US to dominate the Western Hemisphere. But then Trump heard that Venezuela has “the world’s largest oil reserves.” Now, if the US could grab that oil from the Venezuelans… Unfortunately, Venezuelan oil is not oil at all; it is tar. It has to be forced out of the ground together with sand or steamed out of the ground. It then has to be thinned with lighter hydrocarbons such as naphtha in order to form a liquid that can be transported by oil tankers. The oil is high in sulfur, which corrodes pipes and other equipment and causes environmental problems. Venezuela’s oil industry is old and decrepit. It can currently produce around 1 million barrels of heavy crude a day. It has been estimated that increasing this amount to 3 million barrels a day would require an investment of $10 billion a year for close to a decade… at which point the Venezuelans may very well renationalize their oil industry just like they did under Hugo Chavez, once again leaving the investors with nothing.

Well, never mind all these boring technical details! What Trump seems to have latched onto is the estimated 300 billion barrels of oil claimed to be Venezuela’s total oil reserves. They are not reserves but resources — and may never be produced — but that’s another one of these technical distinctions Trump doesn’t care about. The point is, if the US were able to list “300 billion barrels of oil” as collateral on a loan application, then it just might be able to borrow a few more trillions of dollars, to add to the already staggering pile of debt and to push off national bankruptcy past the midterm elections.

The problem is, in spite of the mock abduction, Venezuela is not Trump’s. Trump may think that Venezuela is in his very own hemisphere, but economically it is China’s and militarily it is Russia’s. These two countries are not going to simply let him have it. The US Navy has been able to blockade Venezuela, but it is unclear how well that’s going to work now that oil tankers are switching to flying the Russian flag and hosting private military companies while the Chinese are equipping their cargo ships with rocket launchers. Trump is allergic to the idea of war. His motto seems to be “Make television, not war!”

So, who does the Western Hemisphere really belong to? To make up your own mind, please look at the map below.