The Atlas Network is a highly influential force that billionaires use behind the scenes to advance their class war against the rest of us. It backs extreme right-wing groups campaigning globally for “property rights, limited government, and free markets.” And a key target for it right now is Venezuela, where it desperately wants regime change. But it’s very much pushing its agenda everywhere it can, including in the UK.

Understanding the Atlas Network’s behaviour, author and economist Julia Steinberger insists, is:

fundamental to any potential of pro-equality, pro-democracy and pro-climate political change.

Know your enemy: the Atlas Network

The US empire loves having control over other countries’ resources. And under Donald Trump 2.0, it’s stepping up its longstanding regime-change efforts in Venezuela. But behind the scenes, the Atlas Network has been trying for years to demonise the country and push its protégés into power there, hoping for a return to the neoliberal dominance of the late 20th century.

But it’s much bigger than just Venezuela. Because the US has a long, brutal record of using any means necessary to ensure its dominance in Latin America in particular. Via the Atlas Network in recent years, it has supported far-right president–turned-coup-plotter Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. And ‘Atlas Network protégé‘ Javier Milei, the flailing neoliberal extremist currently in charge in Argentina, just got a get-out-of-jail-free card via a $20bn bailout from Trump’s regime. Atlas has also been doing its best to strengthen a desperate right wing in Mexico, where the centre-left managed to win elections for the first time in 2018. A massive propaganda campaign from Atlas and its corporate allies in Mexico was reportedly responsible for violent anti-government protests in recent days.

In Britain, meanwhile, the Atlas Network has helped to ensure decades of devastating neoliberalism, from Margaret Thatcher onwards. Its lobbyists have often got a free pass in the media, with reporters failing to explain their connections. And with its Tory lapdogs now tanking, it’s increasingly looking to Reform UK to continue the mission.

It’s not the only global neoliberal network either.

Key facts

Here’s some important information you should know about the Atlas Network:

• HQ: Arlington, Virginia, USA (coincidentally also home to the Pentagon and very close to CIA HQ and Washington DC).
• Funding: Mainly US and UK billionaires and their organisations. Significant support from the fossil-fuel industry.
• Ideology: Neoliberal imperialism. Indirect class war on behalf of the super-rich. Anti-democracy, anti-union, anti-protest (the ones it disagrees with anyway), anti–climate.
• Size: 500+ partner thinktanks in 100+ countries. Particularly successful in North America, Europe, and Latin America.
• Aim: To “litter the world with free-market think tanks”.
• Activities: Training political agitators, shaping media narratives, influencing policy, and coordinating campaigns for deregulation, privatisation, and anti-climate action.
• Targets: Governments or movements that challenge the dominance of Western corporate interests.
• Friends: Donald Trump, Reform UK and Nigel Farage, and anyone else who hates humanity and the planet.
• Inspirations: Neoliberal extremists like Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Margaret Thatcher.
• UK partners have included: Adam Smith Institute, Big Brother Watch, Centre For Market Reform Of Education, Centre For Policy Studies, Centre For Research Into Post-Communist Economies, Civitas: The Institute For The Study Of Civil Society, Cobden Centre, Conservatives For Liberty, Geneva Network, Institute Of Economic Affairs (IEA), Legatum Institute, Network For A Free Society, Open Europe, Policy Exchange, TaxPayers’ Alliance.
• Founded: 1981 by UK citizen Antony Fisher, who also founded the IEA.

The IEA in particular was a forerunner of the organisation, reportedly becoming “the inspiration for all subsequent Atlas Network think tanks”. Thatcher even gave the IEA “credit for her election” in 1979. And its success spurred on the Atlas Network’s creation as a way to globalise the mission. The network’s groups, Steinberger explains, “universally recruit and train neo-liberal young guns” in “media-lobbying”, and “the most promising ones, who look great on TV and show political promise, are further promoted in their media and political careers”.

Why is Venezuela a target?

It’s a long story, but here are some key points to know:

• Resources: Oil. Lots of oil. Also water, “natural gas, iron ore, and bauxite—the latter being a key ore for aluminum production”.
• Government: President Nicolás Maduro, successor to Hugo Chávez.
• Ideology: Not neoliberalism. Chávez inspired Chavismo, which is essentially anti-imperialist progressive nationalism with some socialist features. (It’s not black and white.)
• Legitimacy: As much as most Western nations. Sometimes, as in the West, Maduro has won elections partly due to low voter turnout. Both in 2018 and 2024, however, the US and its allies refused to acknowledge the election results mainly because the right failed to win.
• Why the government came to power: Due to the brutal US stranglehold on Latin America during the Cold War, neoliberalism came to dominate at the end of the 20th century. And in Venezuela, that hurt both ordinary people and traditional ruling parties, whose support base vanished. (Neoliberal extremists have argued that Venezuela’s neoliberalism didn’t go far enough!) Charismatic leader Hugo Chávez won the 1998 election on an explicitly anti-neoliberal agenda. It was a massive loss for the US. Massive social programmes began and, within a decade, poverty levels had fallen significantly.
• Main problems: Consistent external interference and backing of opponents. Harsh US sanctions and regime-change efforts, together with over-dependency on oil. Western media propaganda.
• External interference: From the very beginning, the US and its local right-wing allies in Venezuela worked to undermine Chávez, and then Maduro. This intensified significantly after Donald Trump became US president in 2016. Harsh sanctions added to lower prices in the oil industry (the centre of Venezuela’s economy) to devastate the country, causing a severe economic crisis, many tens of thousands of deaths, and large-scale emigration. Western mainstream media, meanwhile, has consistently functioned as propaganda for US interests. The UK joined in by freezing around $2bn of Venezuela’s gold.
• Internal opposition: From coup leader Juan Guaidó to current Western anointee María Corina Machado, there have been plenty of (largely white and wealthy) local right-wingers happy to do the bidding of global corporations and governments. But they have lacked unity and popularity (possibly because their values often seem to be violence, corruption, elitism, white supremacy, and staunch support for Israel). The exception was in 2015, when the right-wing opposition managed to win parliamentary elections mostly due to economic difficulties resulting from low oil prices.

The Atlas Network and Venezuela

Ricardo Vaz from Venezuelanalysis told the Canary that:

If the US and its allies want to ramp up aggression, they can manufacture it quite easily. It’s not really tied to on-the-ground events anyway, and the corporate media always provides the necessary cover.

But he thought Venezuela might be “better prepared this time around”, because it has “gone through this before”.

Juan Guaidó

Under Donald Trump 1.0, the US escalated its rhetoric and actions against Latin American governments that didn’t fall in line, regardless of the consequences. After the right failed to win the 2018 presidential election in Venezuela, regime-change efforts soon followed. Parliamentarian Juan Guaidó led unpopular coup efforts in 2019, proclaiming himself president. And though Western states rushed to recognise and support him, the efforts to install him in power eventually fizzled out because few Venezuelans supported them.

Previously, Guaidó’s party had reportedly been a “politically marginal far-right group” close to “gruesome acts of street violence”. And the coup leader had “spent his career in the most violent faction of Venezuela’s most radical opposition party, positioning himself at the forefront of one destabilization campaign after another”.

The Atlas Network noted in 2020 that “CEDICE, with the support of Atlas Network, has been working toward economic freedom in Venezuela”, and boasted that Juan Guaidó had taken on “One of their projects, “Citizen Oil.” CEDICE, meanwhile, publicly expressed strong support for Guaidó and his team, and lamented their failure to overthrow Maduro. Members of Guaidó’s team had also participated in Atlas Network events.

Jesús Armas

In late December 2024, just as Trump’s billionaire team were preparing to take power in the US, the detention of longtime agitator Jesús Armas became a story regime-change circles sought to push. Armas was clearly a Venezuelan figure the US establishment was fond of, and he was close to the Atlas Network too. The corporatist McCain Institute (which had long backed the devastating sanctions on Venezuela) called Armas a “McCain Global Leader“. And the IEA proudly revealed he had been a “former IEA intern” who had really “wanted to come to the IEA”. Online, Armas had previously praised Trump, underplayed the devastation of the US sanctions regime, and backed the Guaidó coup efforts. And the Atlas Network itself tweeted:

leader of Atlas Network partner organization Ciudadanía Sin Límites, Jesús took part in a workshop held by Atlas Network Academy in Miami just earlier this year and has attended many Atlas Network events in the past.

On 17 November, longstanding pro–Israel propagandist Bret Stephens — whom Atlas-linked Reason Foundation once prized for his promotion of hard-right causes — used loyal imperialist mouthpiece the New York Times to set out The Case for Overthrowing Maduro.

In the 2024 elections, Armas had been “part of the political team of the Maria Corina Machado campaign which later morphed into the Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia campaign”.

Vaz told us that Armas was a “former councilman from these pro-opposition, upper-middle-class Eastern Caracas areas”. And he added that, while there may have been unjustifiable “violations of due process” in relation to Armas’s detention:

Venezuela’s Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said he was leading plans to sow instability, and given past events it’s not an unreasonable assumption that these kinds of figures would have ties to foreign powers and be involved in subversion plots.

María Corina Machado

The highly controversial 2025 pick for the increasingly laughable ‘Nobel Peace Prize’, María Corina Machado, hasn’t just praised illegal executions and called for military intervention in Venezuela. She’s also a proud Zionist who has claimed Hamas is operating in the country. This is of little surprise, considering that Israel has long backed Latin America’s far right, including Guaidó’s coup attempt in Venezuela.

Some have called wealthy privatiser Machado the “Venezuelan Margaret Thatcher”. And for good reason. Because early in November 2025, she told the America Business Forum (in English):

This is amazing – super exciting for me. We will open Venezuela for foreign investment. I am talking about a $1.7tn opportunity… We will open markets. We will have security for foreign investment and a transparent massive privatisation programme that is waiting for you.

Unsurprisingly, Machado “has been a long-time ally of Atlas Network”. As the group pointed out:

For years, she worked closely with local Atlas Network partner organization Cedice Libertad

She formed “Libre Desarrollo, with similar goals”. She has spoken “on several occasions at Atlas Network’s annual Latin America Liberty Forum”. And at the 2024 event, the network showed how head over heels it is for the “Iron Lady of Liberty”, singling her out as “the most courageous freedom fighter in Latin America” (and perhaps, it later suggested, “in the entire world”). Truly vomitworthy.

Atlas CEO Brad Lips has said he’s “thrilled that the world’s attention is now focused” on Machado, and:

All of us at Atlas Network celebrate this

The network added:

Atlas Network has a long professional relationship with Machado… think tanks in Venezuela were among the very first Atlas Network partners in the early 1980s… and Atlas Network will continue to stand by her side… every step of the way.

Machado’s connections to economic extremism in service of the US empire seem endless. And as The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) has explained:

Machado’s rise as the supreme leader of the Venezuelan opposition is part of a worldwide trend in which far-right leaders and movements have achieved major inroads.

The Western mainstream media, meanwhile, has been fully complicit in that by amplifying her voice uncritically.

A coming US coup?

War hawks have pushed Trump hard from the start of his second presidential term for escalation in Latin America. And he has obliged. The US has doubled its bounty on President Nicolás Maduro‘s head to $50m. It has been provocatively carrying out illegal extrajudicial executions off the Venezuelan coast, increasingly militarising the Caribbean, and threatening military action in the country.

Maduro sought to send a fig leaf to Trump early on. And on numerous occasions, he has sought to appeal to Trump’s domestic focus on immigration by offering to support the return of Venezuelan emigrants to the country. But far-right figures like Colombia’s sadistic ex-president Álvaro Uribe pushed for “an international military intervention” in Venezuela, provoking a more combative tone from Maduro (who called Uribe and others ‘public enemies‘ and slammed the US-led “agenda of colonisation”, mentioning US colony Puerto Rico in particular).

Venezuela has a Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) with countries like China, which is the USA’s main challenger for number one global economy. But China’s support for Maduro may not be enough to stop a US-led coup.

Whatever happens, though, it will be Venezuela’s working class who suffer.

Meanwhile in Britain

UK politics is already very much in the pockets of corporations and their lobbyists. And ongoing efforts from the Atlas Network and others seek to further empower the super-rich.

The Atlas Network (and the IEA in particular) has had significant influence in the Conservative Party for a long time, and got firmly behind Boris Johnson in the 2019 election. But following the Tories’ decline around the 2024 election, thinktanks like the IEA, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), and the TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) have increasingly sung the praises of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Tufton Street lobbyists and the Atlas Network either collaborate or overlap in their aims. And Reform’s opposition to regulations on the fossil-fuel industry is of particular interest to them.

The super-rich don’t just get power through violence

The US empire has long created a facade of democracy at home (though the mask has slipped more and more under Trump) while taking wealth from abroad militarily, politically, and/or economically. The arms industry isn’t a key feature of the US economy for no reason. Its participation in neoliberal Israel’s genocide in Gaza is a particularly brutal example of how it uses its power. But such extreme violence isn’t always necessary to undermine chances of social change or ensure the profits or the rich and powerful.

As journalist Matt Kennard previously told the Canary, the world has an:

Anglo-American empire, which is allowed to operate in secret because journalists don’t touch it.

And that doesn’t just exist because of the US army, the CIA, or state-backed groups like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). It also exists thanks to the efforts of the corporate forces at the top of the empire, from the Atlas Network to control of media outlets and social media platforms. And that’s an essential tactic. Because convincing those with little wealth and power that it’s right for those who already have wealth and power to get perpetually richer and more powerful is a masterstroke gaslighting strategy that can cement the dominance of the latter in a truly sustainable way.

Featured image via Atlas Network 

By Ed Sykes

This post was originally published on Canary.