On January 3, 2026, the United States launched a military operation in Venezuela, striking strategic targets in the capital, Caracas, and other areas with missiles. According to the US administration, President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were captured and transferred to the United States.

It’s clear that at this point (this article was written on January 4, 2025), the fog of war has not yet completely lifted, and the author is not a Latin American expert, so I won’t discuss regional specifics. However, comparisons between Caracas and Pyongyang are all too obvious, and we will discuss them, as the political trajectory of the two countries inspires a number of comparative lessons.

Lesson One: Starting Positions and What Has Been Done to Strengthen the Country.

The two countries have roughly the same population: 25-28 million people, but 87% of North Korea’s territory is mountainous, placing it in a risky agricultural zone. Furthermore, North Korea lacks mineral resources that it could effectively export, ensuring a steady profit. Since the 1990s, the country has been developing under a severe energy crisis. Venezuela has no such problems, and, unlike North Korea, it has vast energy reserves—it is claimed that these are the largest oil reserves in the world.

Both countries are subject to sanctions, but the level of sanctions against Venezuela, until recently, was nowhere near a total embargo. In the 21st century, particularly in the early 2020s, the country has never experienced such a hardship as three years of self-isolation. Nicolás Maduro has been in power since 2013, a term comparable to that of Kim Jong-un. However, during his 10 years in power, the young North Korean leader has made strides in virtually every area, primarily in military development, making North Korea a regional power, breaking through the wall of international isolation, and relatively raising the standard of living and quality of life for the people.

In Venezuela, however, we see no serious innovative projects, and the quality of life has been improved primarily through social assistance packages without improving the relevant infrastructure. Relatively speaking, foreign loans or American petrodollars were spent not on refineries or the military-industrial complex, but on gifts to citizens. Infrastructure projects in Venezuela were undertaken under Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, but they ended with the era of high oil prices and were drowned in endemic local corruption, which, like the high crime rate by regional standards, the state was slow to suppress.

As........

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