President Donald Trump delivers remarks at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, following Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela leading to the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro (Picture: Molly Riley/The White House)
Donald Trump has said the quiet part out loud. There was no window dressing about “democracy” or “humanitarian intervention” after the United States kidnapped Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro.
He declared the US would “run” Venezuela and that its “very large oil corporations” would “go in” and grab the country’s resources.
“Under the Trump administration, we are reasserting American power in a very powerful way. The future will be determined by the ability to protect commerce and territory and resources that are core to national security.
“These are the iron laws that have always determined global power—and we’re going to keep it that way.”
Now Trump is ramping up threats against Greenland. On Tuesday, the Whitehouse said, “President Trump has made it well known that acquiring Greenland is a national security priority of the United States, and it’s vital to deter our adversaries in the Arctic region.”
The liberal media used to claim that “imperialism” belonged to a by-gone age of European colonialism that ended in the 20th century.
Sure, Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was imperialist and so too are China’s ambitions to take over Taiwan. But they say the West’s warmongering in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria or Iran, had nothing to do with imperialism.
They admitted that there may have been a lack of planning for the “day after” that led to “collateral damage”. But the motive was always upholding “liberal values” against “rogue states” that wanted to undermine the “rules-based international order”.
The liberals aren’t trying to claim that after Trump’s gangster invasion. Even BBC hack Trevor Phillips says Trump’s declaration that he would “run” Venezuela sounds a lot like colonialism.
What’s behind the shift to a more openly predatory imperialism? First, it is part of a wider breakdown of the liberal capitalist order.
After 1945, US imperialism established the “rules-based” international system. It was based on free trade and institutions created during and after the war—the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and Nato.
These international organisations underpinned US dominance, while the US used its military advantage to discipline states that got out of line.
However, imperialism isn’t just about the West preying on weaker states. It is a global system of competing capitalist states, where new powers can emerge and challenge once-dominant ones.
The US was the one global superpower after the end of the Cold War in 1991. But its defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan signalled to China and other rising powers that it wasn’t all-powerful. These combined with economic shifts under globalisation, which saw the rise of China as a manufacturing powerhouse.
Today, imperialist competition is intensifying at all levels of the system. China is the main rival of the US on a global scale. It has built close economic ties with Latin American states, including Venezuela.
And the decline of US dominance has also opened up a space for the rise of regional imperialist powers in the Middle East, where Israel is going on the offensive.
The invasion of Venezuela is of a piece with Trump’s National Security Strategy (NSS) published in December. The document says that the US “rejects the ill-fated concept of global domination for itself”.
But it doesn’t mark some end to US imperialism—far from it. It is a shift to more openly aggressive imperialism and a renewed focus on dominating what’s known as the Western Hemisphere—the Americas and Greenland.
The National Security Strategy speaks about a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. First declared in 1823, it said that Latin America was part of the US sphere of influence and warned European imperialist powers to stay out.
Today, the US warned, “We want a Hemisphere that is free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets.” That partly builds on previous US administrations. General Laura Richardson, who headed US Southern Command between 2021 and 2024, said, “Our competitors and adversaries know that this region is so rich in resources it’s off the charts rich.
“There are adversaries that are taking advantage of this region every single day right in our neighbourhood.”
The US hopes that regime change in Venezuela would stamp its control across the continent and send a chill through all those who want to challenge it.
Maduro’s rule was a faint echo of the Bolivarian Revolution of the 2000s and he built a corrupt regime (see below).
However, there can be no equivocation and hand-wringing on the left and labour movement.
The overthrow of Maduro at the hands of the US will only hurl back the fight for liberation in Venezuela and across Latin America. The kidnapping of Maduro and his wife is a war crime and a prelude to vicious attacks on people in Venezuela.
In the West, our task is to build a movement against imperialism and the class enemy in Downing Street and the Whitehouse.
Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro with Hillary Clinton as the Summit of the Americas in 2009 (Picture: VenezuelaAnalysis)
Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution was a beacon for all those who wanted an alternative to neoliberalism and United States imperialism.
Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999 amid popular resistance to neoliberalism. In 1989, for example, the Caracazo Uprising saw a wave of resistance among workers and the poor to a “structural adjustment package” demanded by the IMF loan shark.
The Venezuelan ruling class never accepted the legitimacy of Chavez or workers and the poor having a say in politics.
And the US hated that a Latin American leader could stand up at the United Nations and denounce president George W Bush as the “devil” to applause.
The height of the “Bolivarian Revolution” in the 2000s was life-changing for millions of working class Venezuelans.
Poverty rates nearly halved between 2003 and 2011. By 2011, Venezuela was the most equal country in Latin America.
But redistribution was underpinned by the commodity price boom of the 2000s. The price of oil rose from around £7.40 a barrel in 1999 to a peak of nearly £100 in 2008—and, with oil making up 95 percent of Venezuela’s exports, cash flooded in.
Revenues weren’t spent on diversification of the economy, leaving Venezuela at the mercy of global oil prices.
While the Chavez government had redistributed wealth, it had never led an assault on the capitalist class and its state.
The majority of the economy remained in private hands. State-owned industries were still run according to the logic of profit. That commodity price boom was ending just as Nicolas Maduro was taking over.
Chavez, just before he died in 2013, said that for “new forms of planning and production for the benefit of the people to emerge requires pulverising the bourgeois form of the state”.
Maduro did the very opposite. He doubled down on the same policies, turned to printing money to mask problems and became increasingly authoritarian. Social crisis ravaged Venezuela and saw millions of people leave.
Key battles during the 2000s pointed to another way forward. The US-backed coup in 2002 was defeated by street mobilisations in the “barrios”—poor areas—of Caracas.
The following year oil bosses and corrupt union officials tried to shut down the industry to crash the economy. But working class people defeated their attempts at sabotage.
There was grassroots organisation—communal councils in poor areas, independent workers’ organisation in the UNT union federation and debates about workers’ control of the Sidor steel plant.
However, these forms of popular organisation didn’t develop into working class bodies that could begin to run society from below. Instead, they became increasingly incorporated into the state bureaucracy.
The United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which Chavez set up in 2006, brought together the left, unions and social movements. But it was modelled on the Communist Party of Cuba, which is a transmission belt for orders from the top.
Many called the new breed of state officials, and those who profited from state contracts, the “Bolivarian bourgeoisie”.
The new “bourgeoisie” included large sections of the armed forces, which control key sectors of the economy.
Today the acting president Delcy Rodriguez hopes to work with the Trump administration to protect the position of the bureaucrats. She represents some of the worst of what the Bolivarian Revolution degenerated into.
On Tuesday Trump announced her administration would hand over 30 to 50 million barrels of oil to the US.
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