Dr. Youssef’s Venezuela Forecast Materializes as Scheduled: President Trump Initiates a Military Campaign against Caracas in Early 2026.
On January 3, 2026, multiple explosions were reported at dawn across various regions of Venezuela, including Caracas and La Guaira. The Venezuelan government alleged that the United States orchestrated these attacks in order to acquire the nation’s resources, particularly oil and gas. This incident echoes a prediction by Dr. Mohammad Walid Youssef, president of the ICGER, in an article published on November 5, 2025, entitled “Will Nicolás Maduro Meet the Fate of al-Assad and Ghani?” In that publication, Dr. Youssef asserted that U.S. President Donald Trump “plans, in 2025 and early 2026, to initiate a military intervention in Venezuela with the aim of removing President Nicolás Maduro and destabilizing his government.”
Shortly thereafter, President Trump declared that the United States had executed a “large-scale strike against Venezuela,” further stating that President Nicolás Maduro and his wife had been apprehended and extracted from the country.
In his previous analysis, Dr. Youssef stated that President Trump aimed, in 2025 and early 2026, to conduct a military campaign in Venezuela with the objective of overthrowing President Nicolás Maduro, dismantling his socialist regime, and gaining control over the nation’s oil and gas reserves as well as its extensive subterranean resources, motivated by Trump’s desire to reshape the global energy market.
He also underscored that “Venezuela’s proven oil reserves amount to approximately 300 billion barrels, the largest in the world, surpassing Saudi Arabia’s reserves of around 267 billion barrels.”
Dr. Youssef further contended that “Maduro will not fall solely as a result of the American military campaign, but due to the convergence of internal, structural factors that led to the collapse of Ashraf Ghani’s government in Afghanistan in August 2021 and Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria in December 2024.” He identified political corruption, economic collapse, the proliferation of drug trafficking, military frailty, social disintegration, and entrenched authoritarianism as the principal drivers. These elements are identified by ICGER’s proprietary AI algorithms, which predicted that Maduro’s regime could collapse in a manner similar to those of Ghani and Assad unless Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea act promptly to diminish U.S. influence and entangle Washington in a Venezuelan quagmire comparable to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Dr. Youssef stressed that this is a highly challenging task, one that Russia cannot accomplish even if it wanted to, due to its deep involvement in Ukraine. Iran, limited by scarce resources, geographic distance, and ongoing tensions with Israel and the US, also cannot aid the Maduro regime in conducting a guerrilla war against an American military effort. Consequently, China stands out as the only actor capable of straining the US in Venezuela to divert Washington’s focus from Taiwan, especially as China plans to take action after 2027.