Venezuela in the Axis of Resistance’s Global Imagination
How the Axis of Resistance pre-framed Venezuela as a test case for American power, before Washington ever moved.
Nicolás Maduro is in American custody. According to US statements, he and his wife Cilia Flores were extracted from Fort Tiuna military base in Caracas in a pre-dawn operation on January 3rd. He’ll be arraigned in the Southern District of New York on narco-terrorism charges. Trump told Fox News he watched the operation live; it looked, he said, “like a TV show.”
Whether the action was the right course is not the question this analysis is asking. What I examine is how the U.S.–Venezuela confrontation was framed from the Axis’ perspective, at a point when Abdul-Malik al-Houthi was already instructing his followers on how to understand it.
In a televised religious sermon on December 27th, the Houthi leader told his followers: “Look at what America is doing these days toward Venezuela. The American continuously plunders a third of Venezuela’s oil production… He wants complete control over the largest oil reserves there, perhaps the largest of any country, or at least in the Americas.” The drug war rationale? A pretext: “The biggest country trafficking drugs is America. The biggest country where drugs spread is America. The biggest country producing and promoting drugs is America. Then he makes this headline an excuse to try to control Venezuela. He says: ‘drugs’. then seizes oil tankers loaded with oil, not drugs.”
Al-Houthi’s verdict: قرصنة، بلطجة، نهب piracy, thuggery, theft.
Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, and other Axis countries were saturated with language that elevated Maduro as a symbol of resistance to the West, and countries such as Russia and China were concerned about the legality of U.S. intervention, a framing that the Axis echoed faithfully.
Understanding how adversary information systems construct solidarity narratives is important. These frameworks shape how populations interpret American action, and they’re being built faster than Washington notices.
Messaging Synchronization
Within hours of the January 3rd strikes, the Axis spoke in concert, and the full network responded, not just states.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei posted on X: “What’s important is when one realises an enemy wants to force something on one’s govt. or nation with false claims, they must stand firmly against that enemy. We won’t give in to them.” This wasn’t a statement about Venezuela. It was a statement through Venezuela, addressed to Tehran’s restive streets, where protests have been roiling for days, and Trump just yesterday warned he was “locked and loaded.”
The Houthi Supreme Political Council condemned the “criminal aggression,” denouncing violations of “national sovereignty and freedom,” calling it “a direct threat to all independent states that refuse to submit to dictates.”
Hamas condemned “in the strongest terms the American aggression against the Republic of Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Maduro and his wife,” calling it “a serious violation of international law” and “an extension of unjust American policies and interventions that conceal imperialist ambitions.”
Hezbollah issued an even more elaborate statement denouncing the “terrorist aggression and American thuggery,” calling it “a flagrant and unprecedented violation of national sovereignty” and “confirmation of the pattern of hegemony, arrogance, and piracy practiced by the American administration.” The statement explicitly linked Venezuela to “Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, and its creation of terrorism, and its support for its protégé ‘Israel.’”
The Iranian Foreign Ministry “strongly condemned” the attack as a “clear violation of the basic principles of the United Nations Charter.” Russia called for a UN Security Council meeting. China pronounced itself “deeply shocked” over the U.S hegemonic acts.
The language is functionally interchangeable. The framing is identical. Venezuela is Yemen is Iran is Cuba. The Axis of Resistance has discovered it doesn’t need geographic proximity to claim ideological kinship. They’ve built a solidarity network that operates through information space and it includes not just states but movements.
Ideological Kinship
The coordination didn’t emerge from nothing. The groundwork was laid weeks earlier, in text rather than rhetoric.
On December 2nd, 2025, a full month before American helicopters descended on Caracas, the Houthi-controlled Saba News Agency published a 21-page strategic analysis paper on Venezuela. Titled “American Aggression Against Venezuela: The Limits of Imperial Power in a Changing World Order,” it arrived with all the genre conventions of a Western think tank product: scenario modeling, dependency theory citations, Monroe Doctrine footnotes. The paper warned that economic pressure alone would fail and that escalation toward military intervention was a serious possibility.
The Houthis know what American targeting looks like. They’ve buried a prime minister and members of their cabinets to an Israeli strike. They’ve watched military commanders disappear into craters. When they look at Venezuela, at the escalating pressure campaign, the naval buildup in the Caribbean, the boat strikes killing over 115 people, the tanker seizures, they see a pattern they recognize intimately.
The paper’s thesis: Venezuela represents a “test case” for the limits of American power in what was once its uncontested sphere. They argued that the US can pressure but cannot compel and that the “besieged state” can survive through military-institutional cohesion, alternative support networks, and the development of parallel economic systems outside the dollar-based order.
The paper states explicitly that the Venezuelan crisis is no longer an internal political dispute, nor a counternarcotics operation, but part of a wider confrontation between Washington and the “rising powers, China and Russia, in the geopolitically sensitive space of the Caribbean.”
In Houthis’ media telling, Venezuela survives because the military remains unified with the state, the opposition holds social presence but lacks institutional capacity, and external patrons such as China, Russia, Iran can provide alternative financing and trade networks that blunt the sanctions regime. The parallel to Yemen is left unstated but unmistakable. This is the Houthis looking in a mirror. The scenarios they model for Caracas are the scenarios they inhabit in Sanaa.
Dependency Theory as Authoritarian Cover
The paper explicitly invokes nazariyyat al-taba’iyya (dependency theory), the anti-colonial critique of center-periphery relations developed by Latin American Marxists like André Gunder Frank.
But watch the ideological sleight of hand.
Dependency theory was designed to explain economic exploitation: how peripheral economies are structured to serve metropolitan interests in ways that reproduce underdevelopment. It’s a materialist critique with Marxian roots.
The Houthis have repurposed it for political legitimation. The argument is that, because the US seeks hegemony, resistance to US pressure is inherently emancipatory. Therefore, any state resisting American pressure is on the side of the global oppressed, regardless of its domestic practices. And this is how you launder a Shia-transnational militia that detains UN personnel, arrests civil society figures by the hundreds, and systematically eliminates political alternatives as part of a transnational liberation struggle. The critique of imperialism becomes a permission structure for domestic authoritarianism.
But the ideological work goes deeper than rhetorical cover. What binds these actors isn’t just geography or theology; it’s the belief that American pressure is proof of legitimacy, not a problem to be solved. For the Axis, resistance to Washington is the ideology. Survival under siege becomes the only victory that matters, and Venezuela’s refusal to collapse makes it legible as kin. The Houthis don’t see Caracas as an ally. They see it as a mirror.
Abdul-Malik makes this explicit in religious terms in his last televised sermon on December 27th; the theological framing is explicit. Venezuela becomes evidence of what he calls طاغوت العصر (the tyranny of our age) - American-Israeli power as the contemporary manifestation of the oppressive forces the Quran commands believers to resist. When he dismantles the drug war rationale as pure pretext, "the biggest country trafficking drugs is America," he's not making a legal argument. He's making a religious one: the enemy uses false pretexts to justify plunder, exactly as the Quran describes. The framing universalizes the struggle. So Venezuela isn't Muslim, but it's resisting the same tyranny that seeks to subjugate the Muslim world. This is how the Houthis transform a Latin American sovereignty dispute into a chapter of sacred history.
The framing also appeared visually. In December, Houthi-affiliated outlets circulated a cartoon depicting the United States as a pirate riding a barrel of Venezuelan oil. Few Yemenis follow Venezuelan politics closely, but oil provides a familiar frame: a powerful state extracting resources from a weaker one. The image collapses counternarcotics or democracy justifications into something simpler—plunder.
The timing matters. This wasn’t reactive propaganda. It was a counter-narrative built in advance, preemptively framing any U.S. action as theft before Washington offered a justification. The irony is obvious. A movement that attacks commercial shipping in the Red Sea calls the United States a pirate. But the inversion is deliberate. In the Axis imagination, their maritime blockade is resistance; American military operations are extraction.
None of this is to deny the centrality of oil. Oil, of course, is critical to this confrontation because all sides have placed it there. American officials, including Trump, have spoken openly about Venezuela’s energy reserves as a strategic asset. Russia and China, in turn, have every incentive to keep that fact front and center. Which is why an intervention framed through American interest in oil is no longer a debate over sanctions enforcement or otherwise; it just becomes a story of extraction. That is the frame Beijing and Moscow prefer, and it is the one the Axis information apparatus reliably amplifies.
Crucially, this framing did not originate with the Houthis. It was articulated first by Russia. In December, well before the current escalation, Russia’s Foreign Ministry publicly compared U.S. pressure on Venezuela to “piracy,” “robbery,” and “banditry,” accusing Washington of reviving lawlessness in the Caribbean through blockade and seizure.
The oil framing of the conflict works because it is selective by design. American interest is treated as self-evident proof of predation, while Russian and Chinese energy ambitions, along with their own extraction practices and sanctions-evasion networks, are rendered invisible. In this telling, a multipolar power competition collapses into a morality play in which only one actor is capable of exploitation. Everything else recedes into background noise.
From Iran’s perspective
For Iran, the relationship isn’t merely rhetorical.
Venezuela has been a sanctions-evasion partner since at least 2020, with Iranian tankers running oil to Caracas and Venezuelan crude flowing to China via Iranian intermediaries. The “Bella 1” tanker that fled US Coast Guard interception in December was Iran-linked. When the crew painted over its identifying marks, they painted a Russian flag.
This is the “grey zone” (منطقة رمادية) the Houthi research paper describes: states operating between American power and emerging alternatives, using the overlap between Russian, Chinese, and Iranian networks to create maneuvering room. The paper frames Russia’s involvement as “breaking the American encirclement” (كسر الطوق الأمريكي), not through Caribbean supremacy, but through enough military-technical support and UN diplomatic cover to constrain American freedom of action. On China, the Houthis are explicit: Beijing’s interest is energy security (أمن الطاقة) and building alternative financial networks (شبكات بديلة خارج النظام المالي الغربي) through long-term economic tools, financing, infrastructure, trade, that expand Venezuela’s room to maneuver without offering full protection.
What’s Actually Happening Here
The Houthi information apparatus isn’t just propagandizing. it’s teaching resistance through case study. The Venezuela paper functions as a survival manual for domestic consumption: This is how besieged states survive. This is what solidarity looks like. This is our model. When the paper concludes that Venezuela will become a “دولة صمود” a state of resilience, not victorious but unbreakable, it’s aspirational modeling drawn directly from the Houthi, Iranian, and Cuban experiences of surviving under pressure.
When Hezbollah links Venezuela to “Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Iran,” it’s not engaging in rhetorical excess but it’s constructing a unified field of what is essentially an American threat to them in which all resistance is the same resistance.
However, there are some things to consider. The Trump administration has now validated one of the Axis’s core claims: that American power, when unconstrained by law, will reach wherever it pleases. For Khamenei, watching the Caracas operation unfold as Iranian protesters fill the streets, the lesson is explicit. He stated it plainly: Stand firmly against the enemy.
For the Houthis, who have learned through fire what American and Israeli targeting campaigns look like, the lesson confirms their worldview.
What Venezuela shows is not that the Axis is expanding territorially, but that it has learned how to globalize grievance itself and turn any confrontation with the United States into ideological property. That is harder to sanction, harder to deter, and far harder to roll back, because it does not rely on territory, only on repetition.
A final note: What the Axis has already done matters strategically. What the United States has now done legally also matters: seizing a sitting head of state through military force, without congressional authorization, bypassing extradition, outside any internationally recognized legal framework, is extraordinary. France called it a violation of the principle of non-resort to force. Brazil said it crosses “an unacceptable line.” The UN special rapporteur on human rights called it “illegal aggression” and “illegal abduction.” Whether one views Maduro as a narco-terrorist or a legitimate president, the precedent this sets for sovereignty and due process should concern anyone who thinks about international order. I haven’t written this piece to adjudicate that question. Nothing in this analysis should be read as endorsing U.S. intervention or suggesting that its consequences could be mitigated through better messaging; the point is that the use of force itself generates predictable ideological effects beyond Washington’s control. The Axis has already addressed it for its audiences and answered it weeks ago.
This piece has been in development for weeks. The events of January 3rd turned a slow-burn research project into an urgent publication. Sometimes the moment chooses you…