From Fentanyl-as-WMD to Naval Blockade – How US Think Tanks, Sanctions Guilds and Neocon Operators Scripted a War Zone.

Donald Trump’s December announcements about Venezuela sound, on the surface, like wild improvisation: first declaring illicit fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction” and then ordering a “total and complete blockade” of all sanctioned oil tankers going to or from Venezuela. As the Independent framed it in “Trump declares fentanyl a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ in escalation of Venezuela drug war”, it looked like a lurch from drug panic into WMD territory in 24 hours.

Read as part of an elite script cycle, though, these moves look less like erratic outbursts and more like the “reset enactment” phase of a story that U.S. think tanks, sanctions architects, and security pundits have been writing for years. And if you lay that Venezuela script on top of the operator maps in The Operators, Part 1: Neocons, Part 3: The Financial Governors, and Part 4: The Policy Framers, you get the full circuitry: neocon security framers + legal guild + sanctions governors + think-tank scriptwriters, all converging on the Venezuelan theatre.

This exposé keeps the structure we just walked through, but now plugs it into that operator map: from Trump’s WMD-and-blockade week, back through RAND, CSIS, Carnegie and their financial-governor counterparts, and forward into what the next phase of the script looks like.

Act I: Declaring Drugs a Weapon and Oil a Battlefield

On 15 December 2025, Trump signed an executive order designating illicit fentanyl and its precursor chemicals as weapons of mass destruction, arguing they could be used for “large-scale terror attacks” by organized adversaries. U.S. media dutifully repeated that framing: fentanyl not as a public-health and policing failure, but as a chemical weapon deployed by “cartels” and hostile states. Pieces like the Independent’s WMD write-up and UPI’s coverage of the order treated this as a major escalation in an already-declared “drug war” against Venezuela.

The White House fact sheet framed fentanyl as “closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic” and explicitly pulled the Pentagon and DHS’s counter-WMD arm into the game alongside Justice. The order invited the Department of Defense to support interdiction and “threat reduction,” and tasked DHS’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office with targeting the “threat networks” behind fentanyl smuggling. This is not ad-hoc; it’s exactly the counterterrorism switch we’ve seen before: upgraded labels → upgraded toolset.

Twenty-four hours later, Trump announced via social media and then through outlets like UPI and AP that he was ordering “a total and complete blockade” of all sanctioned oil tankers to and from Venezuela, backed by a substantial U.S. naval buildup in the Caribbean. The coverage has him boasting that “Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America,” while officials quietly stress that the “blockade” applies to vessels already under U.S. sanctions and is justified by drugs, terrorism and “stolen” oil.

A follow-up news cycle in mid-December 2025 almost slips into confession. On 18 December, Trump tells reporters, “You remember they took all of our energy rights… we want it back,” while aides brief that Chávez’s 2007 oil nationalisations were “the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property” – eliding the fact that nationalisation of subsoil resources is a recognised sovereign right under international law, even if it triggers arbitration. In the same breath, coverage notes that Washington has already seized control of CITGO and U.S. fuel revenues and that London still refuses to release Venezuela’s gold at the Bank of England, so both sides now accuse the other of “stealing” assets while using state power to grab or freeze them; the new no-fly zone over Venezuelan airspace closes the ring.

Over a handful of tightly packed news cycles, the story jumps from:

• Drugs → WMD
• Traffickers → narco-terrorists
• Financial sanctions → naval encirclement, a no-fly zone, and kinetic enforcement of the sanctions architecture
• “Stolen oil” accusations → duelling expropriations and counter-seizures (CITGO, frozen reserves, blocked gold)

Twenty-four hours later, Trump announced via social media and then through outlets like UPI and AP that he was ordering “a total and complete blockade” of all sanctioned oil tankers to and from Venezuela, backed by a substantial U.S. naval buildup in the Caribbean. Coverage such as UPI’s “Trump orders ‘total and complete’ naval blockade of Venezuela” and AP-syndicated headlines like “Trump orders blockade of oil tankers into Venezuela” spelled out the move: warships in the Caribbean, P-8 patrols, maritime interdiction of “sanctioned” crude headed mostly to China.

At this point it almost reads like someone in the West Wing is speed-skimming RAND and CSIS PDFs between news hits—pulling a new justification off the think-tank shelf every 24 hours and bolting it onto the same blockade. Read in isolation this looks like Trump waking up and deciding to cosplay 1980s drug-war maximalism with a WMD twist. However, read through The Operators, Part 1: Neocons and the Addendum case studies, it looks like the security arm of the Operating Class finally closing a circuit that’s been open since the Chávez seizures, weaponising both the terror frame and a long corporate asset fight.

Within this script the Operators can be seen to be doing what they always do:

• Upgrade the label (fentanyl → WMD; Venezuela → narco-terror and terror-linked state)
• Activate the legal and military rails (DoD + DHS WMD office; naval blockade and airstrikes)
• Narrate it as defence and responsibility (protecting Americans from WMD, defending democracy in the hemisphere)

To see how prepared this move really was, we need to drop into the PDFs.

Act II: The Narrative Infrastructure – PDFs Behind the Blockade

a) Terror and Crime: Venezuela as Node in the War-on-Terror Stack

The terrorism frame didn’t appear overnight; it’s been under construction for years.

In 2024, Benjamin R. Young published “It’s Time to Designate Venezuela as a State Sponsor of Terrorism” in the National Security Journal, branding Venezuela a “sanctuary for terrorist organizations” and highlighting “deepening ties” with Iran and Hezbollah. He pushes explicitly for State Sponsor of Terrorism (SST) status, arguing that such a label would “unlock” more powerful sanctions and legal tools.

RAND’s “Hezbollah’s Networks in Latin America” (Mar 2025) by Marzia Giambertoni slots directly into that storyline. It maps Hezbollah-linked fundraising in the Tri-Border Area and Venezuela and ties this to U.S. homeland security, warning that Latin American networks could be used to move funds and people toward the U.S.

Taken together, these reports fuse narco-crime and counterterrorism into a single narrative: Venezuela isn’t just a corrupt petro-state; it’s a hemispheric terror-crime hub, wired into Iran and Hezbollah.

This is precisely the fusion logic mapped in The Operators, Part 1: Neocons and the Abrams case study in Addendum 1b: the same proxy-war operators who laundered Central American death squads through “democracy” rhetoric now repurpose terror labels to widen the legal battlespace.

Once you accept that logic, a fentanyl-as-WMD order and SST-style language toward Caracas are not radical—they’re implementation details.

b) Great-Power Competition: Air Force Scenarios and the RAND Chessboard

Layer two is the great-power competition script.

RAND’s 2023 report “Great-Power Competition and Conflict in Latin America” (part of a series for the U.S. Air Force) explicitly frames Latin America as a flank in U.S.–China–Russia rivalry, with Venezuela a key node given its oil, Russian kit, and ties to Beijing. Specific chapters model scenarios of conflict that include Venezuelan flashpoints and call for attention to Air Force posture in the Caribbean.

If you’ve read Geopolitika: RAND’s Russian Propaganda Audit as Narrative Camouflage, you’ve already seen the pattern: RAND quietly rewrites the map so that every region becomes an extension of the Russia/China story, then produces “analytic” inputs that just happen to justify U.S. forward deployments and alliance hardening. Venezuela is folded into that same map—an oil-rich Russian/Chinese partner in “our” hemisphere, too strategically important to leave alone.

c) Regime Change as Governance Laboratory

A third strand is the regime-change / reconstruction narrative.

Foreign Affairs and RAND both ran “After Maduro” pieces—what a post-Maduro Venezuela should look like, how to design transitional justice, institutional reform, humanitarian relief. The question is never “Should the U.S. be orchestrating this?” but “How do we do it more intelligently than Iraq or Libya?”

In Geopolitika: Carnegie – A Legacy for Regime Change, we already walked through how Carnegie Endowment papers on Syria, Libya, and Ukraine serve as legacy-laundering for intervention doctrine: admit “mistakes,” double down on the underlying template, present future regime change as learning-driven, not structurally predatory. The Venezuela cluster does the same: use think-tank gravitas to turn “toppling a government and redesigning its institutions” into a respectable governance seminar.

d) CSIS: Attention Engine for the Hemisphere

CSIS’s 35 West podcast and Americas Program supply the media-friendly packaging.

Episodes on Venezuelan migration and the ICC case against Maduro frame the crisis through human suffering and legal accountability, while consistently centering “U.S. engagement” as the natural axis of solution. The same house line appears in CSIS commentary on “drugs and terrorism” in the hemisphere—Venezuela is a case study that justifies U.S. managerial permanence.

In The Operators, Part 4: The Policy Framers, we labelled CSIS, RAND, Carnegie, and the Atlantic Council as “doctrine forges”: RAND program directors move from scenario model → costed options → acquisition language; CSIS figures like Mark Cancian translate op-plans into Hill talking points; CFR and Carnegie supply the “responsible elite” veneer. The Venezuela papers are exactly that runtime, just in a different theatre.

Put all this together and the think tank papers becomes clear: it’s the sorting phase of the script, where the Operating Class decides what narrative frame Venezuela will live in for the next decade.

Act III: From PDFs to Blockade – The Script Cycle

In the Operators series and the sanctions pieces “The Financial Governors” and “Extending the Collapse”, we described a simple loop:

Collapse → Panic → Sorting → Reset → Ritualisation

The chains of papers presented by think tanks like Carnegie, RAND and CSIS, plus Trump’s December moves fit this loop almost too neatly.

1. Collapse (structural, then erased)

The collapse phase is Venezuela’s long arc: oil dependence, internal corruption, IMF/bank debt games, then the sanctions hammer—all converging into hyperinflation, state decay, and mass flight. In Extending the Collapse we showed how sanctions and financial rail cut-offs don’t just punish regimes; they extend and deepen collapse until populations and neighbouring states are trapped in permanent emergency.

In the think-tank narrative, this becomes background noise. Misrule and “authoritarian socialism” are foregrounded; sanctions, dollar exclusion, and debt mechanics are either abstracted away or treated as secondary tools that can be “fine-tuned.” That’s classic Financial Governors behaviour: the sovereign and infrastructural governors quietly shut the valve while the narrative guild blames the drought.

2. Panic (moral and security)

The panic phase is a rolling, reusable asset: images of starving Venezuelans, stats on refugee flows to Colombia and Brazil, horror stories from the border, plus warnings about cartels, Hezbollah, and Iranian front companies. These become the threat-deck slides for hearings and op-eds—“something must be done.”

This is where the neocon/policy-framer cadre from The Operators, Part 1 shows up in past and present personalities: Abrams as Trump’s special envoy; Bolton as National Security Advisor; Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio as Senate champions. They recycle the same panic grammar they used for Iraq and Iran, now wired into the Venezuela crisis.

3. Sorting (think-tank papers and policy memos)

Our earlier diagnostics tagged the think tank papers as the sorting phase:

• RAND & Giambertoni sort Venezuela into the terror-crime axis.
• RAND’s great-power report sorts it into the China/Russia competition axis.
• Carnegie and Foreign Affairs sort it into the “regime-change then reconstruction” axis.
• CSIS sorts it into the “U.S. engagement / drugs / terrorism / migration” axis.

Internally, the field fights over emphasis—CT-first vs democracy-first vs migration-first—but all of it lives inside one big assumption: the U.S. is the system manager, and Venezuela is a managed theatre. That’s exactly the pattern we mapped in The Operators: Addendum 4 – Think Tankers: RAND scenario directors, CFR consensus managers, and CSIS campaign-mappers as a joint “policy-framing guild.”

4. Reset (WMD order + naval blockade)

The WMD order and blockade are the reset itself: the point where narrative sorting crystallises into legal architecture and hardware.

From the financial-governor perspective in Operators Part 3, these are classic Rail/List/Weight moves:

• List – illicit fentanyl and precursors moved from “drug” to “WMD” list; Venezuelan oil flows further trapped in expanded sanctions lists.
• Rail – naval forces and Coast Guard assets physically enforce what used to be spreadsheet-level embargoes; SWIFT/correspondent rails already throttling payments are now backed by guns.
• Weight – insurers, banks, and traders re-price Venezuelan exposure as war-zone / WMD-zone risk, collapsing liquidity and pushing the economy from sanctioned to strangled.

The move looks like a Trump flourish; it’s actually the security and financial arms of the Operating Class locking in the high-coercion baseline the think-tank papers imply.

5. Ritualisation (the phase we’re entering)

Once reset is enacted, the system moves into ritualisation:

• SOUTHCOM and DHS issue regular press releases about “WMD doses interdicted” and “narco-terror vessels neutralised.”
• RAND and CSIS publish after-action and “lessons-learned” reports on the blockade, modelling “Hezbollah adaptation” and “Chinese evasion tactics.”
• Treasury and OFAC quietly expand the sanctions mesh on shipping, insurance, and trading firms—standard Addendum 3a/3b sanctions-governor behaviour.
• Congress holds hearings that debate degrees of escalation, not the legitimacy of militarised economic siege.

The theatre becomes permanent, and the rituals keep it alive.

Act IV: The Omitted Story and the Structural Charge Sheet

The analytic work from the think tank papers, The Operators, and the Geopolitika pieces gives us enough to write a charge sheet—what the system is structurally doing in Venezuela, not what it says it’s doing.

Charge 1: Locking Venezuela into a Forever Security Theatre

The first charge is straightforward: Venezuela is being turned into a permanent security theatre, an interchangeable stage for terror, cartel, WMD, migration, and great-power dramas.

This is a textbook move from The Operators, Part 1: Neocons: once you turn a country into a theatre (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria), you never really shut it down—you just rotate storylines. Venezuela is now:

• Terror node (Hezbollah, Iran, terror finance)
• Crime node (cartels, narco-state, now WMD-fentanyl)
• Competition node (China oil, Russian military kit)
• Democracy tragedy (stolen elections, humanitarian crisis)

Beneficiaries:

• Pentagon/SOUTHCOM and intelligence agencies gaining mission scope and budgets.
• Think tanks whose scenario models and recommendations get commissioned and re-commissioned.
• Defense and border-security contractors feeding on interdiction, surveillance, and AI-driven “information operations.”

Harmed:

• Venezuelans trapped under both internal authoritarianism and external siege.
• Neighbouring states absorbing refugees and spillover violence.
• Regional projects (CELAC, ALBA, BRICS-adjacent initiatives) whose attempts at autonomy are drowned in security-crisis framing.

Charge 2: Importing the War on Terror Into the Hemisphere

The second charge: the War on Terror’s legal and discursive toolkit is being grafted onto Latin America using Venezuela as the anchor.

The Hezbollah/Iran narrative, the push for State Sponsor of Terrorism designation, and now the WMD-fentanyl move are all part of this. It’s exactly the sort of CT–sanctions fusion The Operators, Part 3: The Financial Governors and Addendum 3a dissect: treasury officials and sanctions architects (Juan Zarate types) convert foreign policy into XML lists, and SWIFT/Refinitiv/Bloomberg propagate them into automatic exclusion.

The novelty here is simply geography:

• Terror designations → Western Hemisphere
• WMD framing → drug flows and oil routes

The same toolset—SDN lists, secondary sanctions, rail cut-offs—now sits over Caracas and the Caribbean.

Charge 3: Erasing Structural Financial Warfare, Branding Coercion as Care

Third charge: the structural role of sanctions, financial warfare, and infrastructural exclusion in causing Venezuela’s collapse is suppressed, while further coercion is sold as humanitarian response.

In Extending the Collapse we walked through sanctions as collapse-extenders: once the Financial Governors close dollar rails (OFAC lists + SWIFT access + correspondent de-risking), the economy doesn’t just “get pressured”—it disintegrates. Layer on sovereign debt traps, index exclusions, and ratings downgrades, and you get a self-feeding death spiral.

None of that is allowed to be the main story in the think tank papers. Instead:

• Misrule and “socialist policies” take centre stage.
• Sanctions are a technocratic side-note or a “necessary pressure” that can be “better targeted.”
• The naval blockade and kinetic enforcement are wrapped in language of protecting Americans and rescuing Venezuelans from narco-terrorists.

What you’re watching is the Financial Governors + Legal Guild choreography from The Operators Part 2 and Part 3: lawyers and central bankers format illegible violence into clean-looking instruments—Executive Orders, OFAC bulletins, Basel-aligned risk write-downs, index rebalancing notices.

The story told to the public is humanitarian and democratic; the underlying mechanism is managed strangulation.

Where We Are in the Script—and What to Watch Next

Taken together, the think tank papers, the WMD/blockade week, and the operator maps from The Operators series put us here in the script cycle:

1. Collapse – real, structural, with sanctions and financial exclusion as accelerants.
2. Panic – securitised storylines about terror, crime, migration, and Chinese/Russian presence.
3. Sorting – think-tank and media infrastructure aligning around “Venezuela as managed security theatre” while debating only tool-mix and optics.
4. Reset – WMD order + naval blockade + expanded sanctions lists, locking in a high-coercion baseline.
5. Ritualisation – the phase now beginning: metrics, hearings, panel discussions, and technical tweaks that normalise the theatre and make it durable.

From here, you should expect:

• Formal legal deepening – full State Sponsor of Terrorism designation for Venezuela and/or FTO labels for security organs, extending the terror toolkit; this is already scripted in state-sponsor advocacy pieces and SIPA-style briefs.
• Financial weaponry as default – more aggressive use of rail denial (SWIFT and correspondent cut-offs), list expansion (shipping, insurance, trading firms), and weight manipulation (haircuts, margin, index exclusion) directed at Venezuelan and third-country actors that don’t fall in line—straight from the playbook in Part 3 and Addendum 3b.
• Humanitarian rebranding – “safe corridors,” partial sanctions relief, and NGO-managed projects framed as corrective, not as band-aids over a crisis co-produced by the same sanctions governors and policy framers.
• Script export – the Venezuela theatre becoming precedent for similar moves against other “narco-authoritarian / terror-linked / China-aligned” states in the Global South.

None of this will be sold as an imperial project. It will be narrated, as always, in the language we mapped in The Operators:

• Neocons and policy framers: moral duty, democracy, and credibility.
• Legal guild: process, legitimacy, and the “rule of law.”
• Financial governors: stability, integrity, and risk management.
• Think-tankers: evidence-based policy and responsible leadership.

But structurally, the move is simple:

A collapsed petro-state on the wrong side of U.S. primacy gets turned into a forever theatre. Terror labels and WMD language unlock the CT toolkit; sanctions, rail cut-offs, and index exclusions extend the collapse; think tanks and media curate the story so that this looks like management, not predation.

Trump’s fentanyl-WMD order and Venezuelan blockade are not the start of that story. They are just the moment the Operating Class stops workshopping the script and takes it live.

Published via Mindwars Ghosted.
Geopolitika: Tracing the architecture of power before it becomes the spectacle of history.

—

Author’s Note
Produced using the Geopolitika analysis system—an integrated framework for structural interrogation, elite systems mapping, and narrative deconstruction.

Support: Mindwars Ghosted is an independent platform dedicated to exposing elite coordination and narrative engineering behind modern society. The site has free access and committed to uncompromising free speech, offering deep dives into the mechanisms of control. Contributions are welcome to help cover the costs of maintaining this unconstrained space for truth and open debate. If you like and value this work, please Buy Me a Coffee