Monroe 3.0: Absolute Resolve and the Great Power Reset
- Geopolitics.Λsia
- Jan 4
- 8 min read
Operation Absolute Resolve is best read, in the first instance, as a geopolitical event; however, it is more accurately understood as a military-technical act whose significance is lodged in its operational design. The United States did not wage a conventional war against Venezuela in the classical sense of seizing territory, toppling institutions through occupation, and rebuilding governance under a prolonged footprint. Rather, it executed a decapitation–extraction raid: an assault calibrated to remove the leadership node, transfer custody offshore, and withdraw before the gravitational pull of stabilisation could take hold. In effect, the mission amounted to the seizure of a control switch, whereas the capture of the country was neither sought nor required. The question of Monroe 3.0, accordingly, turns less on whether Washington still claims a privileged security role in the hemisphere, a claim that has never vanished, and more on whether that role has matured into a repeatable enforcement mechanism with a revised doctrinal grammar. Absolute Resolve suggests that it has.
The situation is straightforward in its verified spine. Months of surveillance and preparation culminated in an execute order at 22:46 EST on 2 January. A joint package of more than 150 aircraft and drones launched from roughly twenty bases and warships across the Western Hemisphere. Helicopters carrying the extraction force flew low over water towards Venezuela. As the force closed on the target, the United States layered effects from space, cyber, and other interagency mechanisms to create a survivable pathway into contested airspace. Air defences were dismantled or disabled through strikes on military facilities. Caracas experienced a large-scale blackout. Mission command judged that tactical surprise held until the last high-terrain masking. The helicopters touched down at the palace compound at 02:01 local time, 01:01 EST. The force came under fire; one aircraft was hit, though it remained flyable. The apprehension element entered the compound, isolated the area, and took the indicted persons into custody under Department of Justice control, with military assistance. Withdrawal began under multiple self-defence engagements, supported by overhead tactical aviation. The force was confirmed over water at 03:29 EST with the HVT onboard, and the custody node was stabilised aboard USS Iwo Jima. No United States troops were killed and no aircraft were lost. These particulars matter because they define what was achieved and, equally, what was deliberately left unattempted.
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With that established, the geopolitical terrain becomes legible. Blue’s win condition was satisfied in the most literal operational sense: the leadership was removed and offshore custody achieved without incurring the friction of holding terrain. Red, however, does not collapse automatically with the seizure of a single figure. The regime is decapitated, yet it is not thereby dissolved. It enters a continuity crisis in which command succession, elite cohesion, and the integrity of the coercive apparatus become decisive. A regime may lose its head and still retain its hands. The immediate battlespace therefore shifts from kinetic engagement to continuity management: who can establish command authority, who controls the streets, who retains the loyalty of armed units and militia proxies, and who shapes the narrative frame through which the next political reality is accepted or resisted. This is why the operation produces a micro-delta vacuum: the margin of stability narrows, and entropy becomes the battlefield. The raid ends at embarkation; the conflict begins after extraction.
A useful way to interpret this, without lapsing into grand rhetoric, is to situate Absolute Resolve within the lineage of earlier United States regime-change instruments. Compared with Iran 1953, Panama 1989, and Iraq 2003, the operation most closely resembles Panama’s Just Cause capture logic, while drawing upon the post-9/11 manhunt apparatus refined in Afghanistan, Iraq, and wider counterterrorism campaigns. Iran 1953 may be counted an operational success if success is defined as plan executed and objective achieved; nonetheless, it is not a military OPLAN in the relevant sense, being covert action, regime engineering through elite switching and political warfare. Iraq 2003 contains a relevant sub-operation, the capture of Saddam, whose tactical success is unambiguous, yet it sits within an occupation campaign that became the defining strategic gravity. Panama 1989 remains the nearest analogue because it involved rapid action to remove a leader and impose a new political order; however, it also required a broader footprint, larger force numbers, and an overt invasion structure that made stabilisation unavoidable. Absolute Resolve differs by selecting a narrower objective and attempting, from the outset, to avoid that gravity. It therefore shares neither the plausible deniability associated with Iran, nor the occupation-heavy structure of Iraq, nor the overt invasion footprint of Panama. It points, instead, to an emergent doctrinal class: decapitation–extraction without an occupation posture, executed through full-spectrum joint integration.
This doctrinal shift sits at the centre of Monroe 3.0. Monroe 1.0 was declaratory hemisphere denial; Monroe 2.0 relied on covert action, proxy alignment, and political engineering under a Cold War template. Monroe 3.0, by contrast, presents itself as an integrated custody strike: the use of joint force as a precision regime-switch instrument, where the victory condition is leadership custody and continuity disruption rather than territorial conquest. The essence of the doctrine lies in converting the American joint machine into a hemispheric enforcement tool, deployable with speed and precision under a hybrid frame of legitimacy. The dual justification stack described in another analytical work, narco-terrorism plus resource leverage, is more than rhetorical ornament. It constitutes a doctrinal innovation that compresses normative resistance by satisfying a legalist audience while signalling strategic intent to planners. It gives the operation a law-enforcement skin while revealing a geopolitical skeleton. For this reason, the operation’s meaning extends beyond Venezuela. It demonstrates a means of conducting regime change without formally naming it as such.
The military logic of the operation is itself a kind of game, and its game type illuminates both its success and its fragility. It is a paralysis game rather than an annihilation game. The decisive act lies in interrupting the regime’s command spine long enough to remove the leadership node and escape, rather than in destroying an opposing force. The success criteria are therefore narrow and measurable: custody, exfiltration, and the survival of the force package. The mission is judged by whether the helicopters touch down, the HVT is seized, the corridor holds, and the force returns over water to an afloat base without catastrophic loss. Within this frame, the operation was a tactical and operational success. Even so, it was structurally high-risk precisely because it depended upon a stacked chain of dependencies. It demanded synchronisation across dozens of moving components: aircraft launches, refuelling, overhead cover, electronic warfare, suppression of air defences, pathway creation through cyber and space effects, intelligence fusion, low-level rotary navigation, urban landing under fire, rapid breach, custody control, and withdrawal under contested conditions. Any single failure, early detection, a downed helicopter, a delayed breach, an intact air-defence node, a MANPADS shot during exfiltration, could have cascaded into mission collapse. The fact that one aircraft was hit and remained flyable is therefore more than a minor detail; it shows that the mission operated within an envelope where small events might have shifted the outcome dramatically. The absence of United States fatalities does not imply ease. It indicates that integration succeeded in compressing risk into a brief window and saturating that window with overmatch.
Here the sensitivity analysis matters, less as a technical aside than as a bridge to geopolitical consequence. The operation’s success generates a paradoxical strategic risk: it increases pressure to complete the political transition precisely because the removal of a leader produces instability. If continuity fails and violence escalates, external actors, whether the United States or regional coalitions, confront the temptation to stabilise, and stabilisation draws them towards the very footprint escalation the operation was designed to avoid. This pull seldom begins with a declaration; it begins with an accumulation of obligations: protection of civilians, prevention of militia fragmentation, securing infrastructure, managing refugee flows, and containing insurgent identities. Offshore control doctrine seeks to avert such entanglement, yet the environment can pull doctrine into its opposite. That is the primary trap attractor embedded in the operation. For RealZ game design, this supplies the logic of phase evolution: after the clean extraction, the game shifts into a stability contest in which Blue must resist gravity and Red must restore continuity.
The next twenty-four to seventy-two hours therefore determine whether Monroe 3.0 remains a clean custody doctrine or slides into something older. The key variables to watch are continuity signals rather than dramatic speeches. On the Red side, the most important indicators are succession clarity, elite fracture or cohesion, security-sector unity, and militia behaviour. If coercion groups begin acting independently, rather than as extensions of the state, the regime becomes a fragmented system in which non-state coercion hardens into political identity. That is an entropy spiral that rhetoric alone cannot reverse. On the Blue side, the decisive variable is footprint creep. If Blue maintains an offshore posture and limits itself to ISR and signalling, it preserves the no-occupation claim and reduces the intensity of sovereignty backlash. If it moves into territory-holding operations, even briefly, it invites the symbolic framing it seeks to avoid: imperial occupation. At the system level, what matters is the speed and intensity of sovereignty narrative alignment. Latin America will not respond as a single bloc; it will polarise into condemn, align, or paralyse clusters. States such as Brazil and Mexico face a legitimacy squeeze: condemnation risks reprisal and strains relations, support triggers internal ideological backlash, and neutrality can appear as weakness or complicity. Beyond the region, the key question is whether rival powers respond materially or asymmetrically. A direct military response is unlikely; a grey-zone response in unrelated theatres, cyber intrusions, symbolic alliance acceleration, pressure points in Taiwan, Syria, or the Sahel, becomes the more probable vector. The more this is framed as a precedent weapon, the more a precedent response becomes rational.
This is why the operation carries implications beyond Venezuela and beyond the hemisphere. It possesses precedent value in treating a head of state as a capturable individual rather than as an untouchable sovereign symbol. In doing so, it places direct pressure on the international norm that force should not be used against the territorial integrity or political independence of a state. Whether one celebrates or condemns the act, the structural consequence is much the same: the norm weakens when an enforcement system demonstrates both capacity and willingness. This is therefore more than a moral question; it is a systemic one. A precedent, once demonstrated, becomes available. The doctrine will be studied, mimicked, and weaponised by other actors, great and regional alike. The world has lived through similar mutation moments: the debut of drone strikes, the normalisation of cyber operations, the spread of targeted killing. Absolute Resolve suggests the emergence of a new doctrinal class: decapitation without occupation, custody without conquest, regime change pursued through paralysis rather than annihilation. Once that grammar enters the system, it cannot be unlearned, and its very availability invites imitation as well as counter-doctrine.
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