In my previous blog covering two events on either side of the Pacific, I had made the following contention: “developments in Venezuela and Taiwan will drive nuclear proliferation.” But this will unfold in the long-term.
What does Venezuela represent in the short-term, say, in the year 2026?
The answer is in what Marco Rubio said during his brief remarks in the first press conference that followed the Operation Absolute Resolve. Rubio emphatically stated that the world needed to take Trump seriously. Those who play “games” with Trump, like Venezuela’s Maduro, are going to face consequences. Marco emphasised that Trump is not a president who just talks, but someone who means it.
Following the press conference, Trump’s White House put out a post on X that said “FAFO” along with Trump’s image.
My contention is that FAFO, which stands for “F**k Around and Find Out”, is a response to another acronym, TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out), that defined much of 2025. This shift to FAFO is going to make 2026 far more destabilising than Trump’s first year in office.
Employing his oft-used tactic of escalating to deescalate, Trump made major tariff threats in 2025 (including the “Liberation Day” tariffs announced on 2 April 2025), often to backtrack multiple times. This led TACO — first popularised in a May 2025 Financial Times piece — to stick around.
If escalate to deescalate as a strategy is deployed too many times, it is only expected that stakeholders end up not taking the initial threat and hype cycle seriously.
Even as the TACO narrative was spreading, the year did not end well for Trump. When he flew to South Korea’s Busan to meet China’s Xi, Trump ended up conceding more to China in a comprehensive deal spanning trade, tariffs and critical minerals. A headline in Time went as far as to say “How Trump Put China First.”
After backtracking on tariff threats and conceding to China in 2025, Trump needed a win. A win that could flip the TACO narrative on its head.
The surgical operation in Venezuela that led to the capture and exfiltration of Maduro handed Trump just that — a win that his administration could spin to bolster the FAFO narrative.
Venezuela has only emboldened Trump. The shrill rhetoric that the administration has directed towards Cuba, Greenhand and Iran is part of the FAFO approach that seems well-poised to define 2026.