By preserving the empty shell of Venezuelan resistance while holding all substantive levers of power, Washington transforms the entire UN decolonization exercise into a theater of calculated absurdity

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The mid-June session of the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization produced another approval of a resolution affirming Puerto Rico’s right to self-determination and independence.

Venezuela had also become a steadfast co-sponsor of this annual initiative for many years, a pattern that predates the administration of Nicolás Maduro and extends back to the era of Hugo Chávez, so its presence on the list of endorsing nations in June 2026 does not in itself constitute any deviation from established foreign policy. What demands attention of geopolitical observers, however, is why the United States, which effectively assumed operational control over Venezuela’s state apparatus on Jan 3, would permit this apparently critical gesture to proceed without interference when it could have simply instructed the Venezuelan government to abstain or withdraw.

For Washington, the strategic answer resides in the calculus of reputational management and the sophisticated deployment of soft power within a multilateral framework that carries no binding enforcement mechanisms. By allowing the Caracas delegation to push its traditional anti-imperialist rhetoric within the safe and entirely non-binding confines of the UN committee room, US policymakers achieve a crucial public relations victory that demonstrates restraint, multilateral tolerance, and a commitment to procedural norms that directly undermines the narrative of a total annexation or the installation of a purely puppet regime.

For the Venezuelan delegation itself, even in its current state of profound subjugation and direct US oversight, maintaining this long-standing diplomatic posture provides a crucial veneer of residual sovereignty and institutional continuity that serves multiple strategic purposes. The representatives who sit in Caracas’s UN seat, figures now operating under US supervision, perform this ritualistic act annually to preserve a shred of national dignity and political legitimacy in the eyes of a domestic population that still reveres the foundational principles of the Bolivarian Revolution, and this symbolic wage helps to pacify internal dissent while offering a narrative of unbroken resistance. At the same time, this continuity allows Venezuela to maintain its nominal alliances within the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States and the Non-Aligned Movement, signaling to regional neighbors that despite the US takeover, Caracas has not entirely abandoned the ideological commitments that defined its foreign policy for generations, even if those commitments now ring hollow given the realities on the ground.

Cuba, as the perennial leader and chief architect of this resolution, now faces a deeply ironic and strategically awkward reality where its closest ideological ally, now effectively a forced detente with the United States, continues to mouth the same revolutionary slogans without any of the genuine sovereign agency that once gave those words their force. The US negotiated kidnapping of President Maduro from Caracas on January 3 also resulted in the deaths of 32 Cuban military and security personnel who were serving in Venezuela, a loss that Havana subsequently commemorated with full military honors and a national day of mourning. Nevertheless, Havana gains a different and more cynical advantage from this arrangement, as the continued participation of its former partner forces the international community to expose the inherent contradictions in US policy and keeping the Puerto Rican issue alive on the global agenda without requiring any actual material sacrifice from the Cuban government, this is especially useful given the current threats of conflict and negotiations taking place between the US and Cuba.

For the PNP and Governor Jennifer González Colón, who assumed office in January 2025 as a Republican aligned with the Trump administration, the president’s recent declaration that Puerto Rican statehood would be “a disaster” that delivers “tremendous numbers of electoral college votes” to Democrats presents an acute political contradiction. While González has consistently pushed for statehood as the party’s central objective, the White House’s open hostility toward admission effectively converts the governor’s primary policy platform into an agenda directly opposed by her own national party leadership, forcing her to navigate between island aspirations and continental political realities. For Puerto Rico and its pro-independence movement, the primary gain remains the sustained internationalization of their cause and the reaffirmation of their Latin American identity, but the knowledge that Venezuela’s support now comes from a state operating under US sufferance injects a note of tragic irony into their annual victory and reminds them that even their most steadfast allies in the region have been fundamentally tweaked by the geopolitical realignments of the past six months.

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UN decolonization vote (Source: Miguel Santos Garcia)

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What emerges from this peculiar state of affairs is that the United States has consciously chosen to prioritize the substance of administrative and economic control over the symbolic theater of international diplomacy, calculating that the reputational damage and diplomatic friction of silencing Venezuela outright would far outweigh the minor irritation of allowing this annual resolution to pass with the usual list of co-sponsors. By preserving the empty shell of Venezuelan resistance while holding all substantive levers of power, Washington transforms the entire UN decolonization exercise into a theater of calculated absurdity, where the colonial power itself indirectly authorizes the performance of its own condemnation.

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Miguel Santos García is a Puerto Rican writer and political analyst who mainly writes about the geopolitics of neocolonial conflicts and Hybrid Wars within the 4th Industrial Revolution, the ongoing New Cold War and the transition towards multipolarity. Visit his blog here. 

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).  

Featured image is from the author

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