We do not yet know what Venezuela’s next chapter will look like, what exactly the Americans will do, or how deeply they will intervene. But one thing is already becoming clear: if the country ends up functioning as an American client state, the composition of its local ruling class is largely predictable.
It will be built from three familiar components.
First, former members of the secret police and high-ranking officials of the old regime. These are the people who know how power actually works — how to control institutions, manage loyalties, and suppress disorder. It is no accident that Washington is willing to work with figures such as Delcy Rodríguez, who previously oversaw repressive security structures.
Second, émigrés who made their way to the United States, earned the trust of American elites, and now present themselves as experts on their homeland — whether or not their expertise is genuine. Their exuberant celebrations already suggest that they understand perfectly well what kind of opportunity has opened before them.
Third, a layer of media personalities and public celebrities, useful for optics and messaging, even if they often have little grasp of the real mechanics of power.
What is striking is how closely this mirrors the way the ruling strata were formed in the Czech Republic and across much of the former Soviet bloc. We once naively believed this was our own failure — that we had mishandled the reckoning with the communist past, that we lacked moral rigor, that we compromised too easily. In reality, it was simply the standard pattern of entry into the American sphere of influence.
People are not judged by what they represented yesterday, but by how useful they are to the new order today. And paradoxically, the most useful people are often precisely the former functionaries of the communist regime.
This logic did not operate only at the level of government. In major American technology corporations operating in Central Europe — IBM, Microsoft, and others — prior cooperation with the former secret police was often an informal prerequisite for higher managerial positions, unless the candidate was an émigré sent directly from headquarters abroad.
Some could not stomach this arrangement. Enough others could.
And perhaps now it becomes clearer why the “free world” insists that communism must be confronted relentlessly. Not because of slogans or moral posturing, but because the habits, networks, and personnel of communist power prove astonishingly adaptable — capable of serving almost any master who knows how to use them.