At first sight, this extraordinary act of international gangsterism, the invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Maduro, is further confirmation of U.S. imperialism’s global supremacy.
This is reflected not only in the US’s ability to commit this crime smoothly and swiftly, a testament to its military and technological strengths (said Trump: “I watched it literally like I was watching a TV show”). It is also reflected in U.S. ability to obtain support for its crime from a large number of countries and tame submission from many others. After a long silence, the Indian authorities finally mumbled “deep concern”, without mentioning either the U.S. or Maduro, and said they were “monitoring the evolving situation”. Indeed worldwide “monitoring” has reached unprecedented levels.
U.S. imperialism’s global power is reflected too in its ability to shape the reporting of this event worldwide. It was expected that the embedded New York Times would report the kidnapping (“Operation Absolute Resolve”) in glowing terms, but even India’s relatively sober Hindu newspaper merely reproduced a U.S. press agency’s report on its front page. The headline, “U.S. forces capture Maduro after strikes on Venezuela”, steered clear of unpleasant words like “kidnap” and “invasion”.
U.S. power was already reflected in its ability to wage a brutal political and economic war against Venezuela over a quarter century, ever since the latter, under the leadership of Hugo Chavez, broke from U.S. domination. Under the first Trump administration itself, sanctions claimed tens of thousands of Venezuelan lives due to lack of food and medicine, and due to a sharp decline in production of oil, the country’s largest export. Sanctions have been standard treatment for countries the U.S. wishes to invade at some point: Iraq was the classic case, Syria a more recent one. In recent weeks, the U.S. has bombed Venezuelan civilian boats on flimsy pretexts and seized Venezuelan oil tankers without a fig-leaf of legality. Which other power could declare that it would temporarily “run” Venezuela and select a successor to Maduro, or that its oil companies would enter Venezuela and take over the country’s oil industry?
Thus U.S. imperialism is evidently still, in certain respects, supreme.
Waning economic supremacy
However, its power is far from what it was. In a much earlier phase of its supremacy, the U.S. was able to corner the lion’s share of Venezuela’s oil wealth without having to resort to such naked aggression. Gabriel Zucman shows that shareholders of U.S. oil firms in 1957 raked off 12 per cent of Venezuela’s national income, equivalent to the income of the entire poorer half of Venezuela’s population. But, as anti-imperialist mass sentiment grew around the world, oil producing countries began nationalising their oil resources, and Venezuela did so too in 1976.
A turning point was reached with the great mass upsurge of Caracas against the IMF programme in 1989. This upsurge and its bloody suppression set in motion a process that culminated in Hugo Chavez’s election in 1998. Venezuela began gaining a larger share of the earnings from its own oil, and spending it on public needs. More basically, it began asserting its sovereignty against imperialism. Despite the US’s strenuous efforts to dislodge Chavez and his successor Maduro, including by sponsoring coups, imposing brutal economic sanctions, waging a propaganda war, and backing internal political opponents of the Venezuelan government, it failed. Contrary to the propaganda of the western media, the reason that the Maduro government has not fallen in the last 12 years (as also the Chavez government for 15 years before this) is the continuing allegiance of the Venezuelan people, particularly the mass of working people, even amid enormous immiserisation due to sanctions. It is in these conditions that the U.S. has turned to military intervention.
More generally, U.S. imperialism’s hyper-aggression worldwide is paired with its declining hold on the world economy. Its National Security Strategy 2025 (NSS 2025) defined U.S. strategic aims to include:
We want the world’s strongest, most dynamic, most innovative, and most advanced economy….
We want the world’s most robust industrial base….
We want to remain the world’s most scientifically and technologically advanced and innovative country….
We want to ensure that U.S. technology and U.S. standards—particularly in AI, biotech, and quantum computing—drive the world forward.
Two points are noteworthy about the above. In an earlier period, the U.S. would have taken for granted its possession of these attributes, not made them items in a wish list. Secondly, these are items one might expect to see in an economic strategy, not in a national security strategy. They are listed here because they are to be obtained through the attribute the U.S. does possess—military supremacy.
The use of U.S. military might in an attempt to reverse its declining economic supremacy began some time ago—indeed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 marked the initiation of this drive. Now, however, the decline in the relative economic strength of the U.S. is more advanced, its challengers more ascendant, the size of the financial bets made on U.S. technology even more fantastic and bloated.
The U.S. must now not only resort to force but announce loudly that it intends to continue doing so; thus the change of name of its Department of Defense to the Department of War. It is the very downward slide of U.S. supremacy that causes Trump to declare: “We can do it [invade a country] again, too. Nobody can stop us. There’s nobody that has the capability that we have.” The U.S. bombed Nigeria a week ago, and Trump declares that U.S. forces are “locked and loaded” to assault Iran as well.
Western Hemisphere as launching pad for the revival of U.S. hegemony
Trump has declared the “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine (the 19 th century declaration by the U.S. that it would exclude European powers from the Western Hemisphere, which it alone would dominate):
We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere. (National Security Strategy, 2025 [NSS 2025])
Some commentators interpreted the NSS 2025’s focus on monopolising the Western Hemisphere to mean that the U.S. was forswearing hegemonic aims in the rest of the world, but the bombing of Nigeria and the threats to Iran indicate that it has not done so as yet. Rather, the NSS 2025’s focus on the Western Hemisphere is as a launching pad for the revival of U.S. imperialist global hegemony.
The NSS 2025 notes that “Non-Hemispheric competitors have made major inroads into our Hemisphere”. This refers largely to the economic sphere: China is now South America’s top trading partner, a major investor, and a growing supplier of credit.1 However, its military ties are yet weak. And so the U.S. government must leverage its own military dominance to capture a larger share of the economic surplus of South America for U.S. corporations: “The U.S. Government will identify strategic acquisition and investment opportunities for American companies in the region…. we should make every effort to push out foreign companies that build infrastructure in the region.” The NSS goes so far as to say that countries over which the U.S. has most leverage must sign “sole-source contracts for our companies.” What U.S. corporations are not able to obtain through competition, NSS 2025 intends to obtain for them through force.
Thus just hours after abducting Maduro and his partner, Trump declared: “We’re going to have our very large U.S. oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.” The U.S. would also decide who would run the country—“We can’t take a chance on letting somebody else run it.”
From colonialism to neocolonialism and beyond
It is necessary to place the present phase in historical context.
What Trump is doing is not entirely new. Just as Trump refers to Venezuelan oil as “our oil”, colonial rule allowed the colonisers to treat the colonies’ surpluses and wealth as their own, and directly usurp them. But even colonialism required an ideological apparatus, a justification, with which to motivate its own cohorts and intellectually dominate those it had conquered. This largely took the form of the ‘civilizing mission’ of colonialism and the racial inferiority of the subjugated peoples. The pernicious effects of this ideology linger even today, in the minds of people both in the imperialist countries as well as in the once-colonised.
While colonial rule always faced resistance, it was the twentieth century that witnessed the great awakening of the colonial peoples, particularly after the October Revolution of 1917. Great waves of revolt arose in colony after colony, forging in the process an anti-imperialist national consciousness among the people. The people paid a heavy price for this consciousness, in millions of lives lost in the anti-colonial struggle. But by the middle of the twentieth century it became increasingly untenable for pure colonial rule to continue, and the colonial rulers began handing over the reins to native propertied classes.
Very few countries won comprehensive political and economic liberation under the leadership of revolutionary forces. In most former colonies, colonialism was succeeded by neocolonialism, in which the propertied classes reached an understanding with the imperialists and left the earlier economic and social structures of exploitation in place to one extent or the other. Neocolonialism also came with its own ideological apparatus: notions of Independence, Development, and Modernisation shorn of the social and institutional changes needed to bring them about in material terms. Nevertheless, in response to the by then elevated national aspirations and restiveness of the masses, the local rulers did carry out some developmental activities and promote domestic economic activity to an extent.
World capitalism experienced a crisis in the 1970s, and was remoulded into the new regime of neoliberalism. In the neoliberal era, i.e., after 1980, imperialism was no longer content with such extractions as the neocolonial set-up in its ‘developmentalist’ mode allowed. It began applying the screws, in the form of ‘structural adjustment’ programmes in Latin America in the wake of the post-1981 debt crisis there. Now international negotiations supposedly about trade were broadened to include all manner of internal economic policy, in which Third World countries had hitherto enjoyed greater autonomy. This acquired further momentum after 1990-91, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening-up of countries such as India.
As yet this did not mean the dismantling of neocolonialism. For the imperialists, a great advantage of neocolonialism has been that the shocks of mass unrest and wrath are taken by the native ruling classes, even though the underlying cause of the masses’ anger could be traced to the policies of the imperialists. In all the innumerable protests and upsurges against the IMF’s policies over the years, from Latin America to Africa to Asia, the IMF has never had to send in troops to enforce its writ. Each such upsurge has been suppressed by the local ruling classes and their armed forces. And the local ruling classes have also ensured the necessary transitions in personnel to maintain the continuity of policy. Thus the Aragalaya uprising in Sri Lanka did not result in the cancelling of debt to international bond holders; rather, a new government eventually came into office, and it has adhered to the IMF austerity programme.
In the period after 2001, U.S. imperialism embarked on a new venture, in which it began attempting direct occupation of countries, beginning with Afghanistan and Iraq. And so the ideological industry of the West began constructing justifications for a new colonialism. Like the earlier colonialism, the new mission too would civilize the natives, this time by bringing them democracy, human rights and other uniquely western values. However, the mission ran into fierce and prolonged resistance from the natives. U.S. imperialism faced a humiliating rout in Afghanistan, and had to pare down its occupation of Iraq to military bases.
Unbearable pressure
Meanwhile, the increasing demands of the imperialists on the native rulers have put unbearable pressure on the entire neocolonial edifice. So sweeping and intrusive have the imperialist demands become that they are denuding the credibility of the local ruling classes. The most extreme version of this can be seen in Trump’s humiliating treatment of the Modi government, in which the U.S. has left no instrument unused in extracting the maximum possible gains in current trade negotiations. The last two decades of carefully constructed economic, political, and military ties between the U.S. and India are being placed under enormous strain. While Trump’s character may have imparted a special flavour to this, it is only the endpoint of a long sequence in policy long predating Trump.
Note that the method by which U.S. imperialism is seeking to overcome its rivals or challengers is to intensify its plunder of the Third World, the oppressed and exploited nations. Thus its method of competing with China in Latin America is to commit acts of terrorism in Venezuela; its method of overcoming its trade deficits with China is to impose giant tariffs on India; and so on.
It should be noted that the US’s potential or perceived rivals have not yet posed an obstacle to this latest naked aggression, presumably for reasons of distance, stake and capability. The obstacle faced by U.S. imperialism arises instead from other quarters: the people of Venezuela. While Trump boasted that the U.S. was “in charge” of Venezuela, and would “run” it, Secretary of State Marco Rubio retreated quickly from that claim, saying that the U.S. would be “running policy”, exercising leverage over the government of Venezuela. The decision to kidnap Maduro and transport him to New York, rather than send in an army to overthrow the Venezuelan government and install a puppet, betrays U.S. imperialism’s fear of the Venezuelan people.
Similarly, while Trump has anointed himself emperor of Gaza (nominally, chair of the Board of Peace), the U.S. military will not be taking up the enforcement of Trump rule in Gaza. Rather, the U.S. is pressurising various client states such as Pakistan to provide troops for the purpose. The U.S. is keenly aware that Palestinian resistance has held out successfully against the full force of the U.S.-backed Israeli armed forces for two years, to the point where the Israelis had difficulty mobilising their reserves.
Therefore, in the present phase, U.S. imperialism has less need of an ideological industry to produce justifications for its actions.2 It plans to obtain plunder by means of open brigandage and terrorism.
Such a reign of terror may wreak havoc and take a terrible toll, but it cannot extinguish the precious consciousness that people have won through their history and blood. Two years of genocide, after 74 years of occupation, have not made the Palestinians submit; nor have years of imperialist siege, subversion, and attacks brought the Venezuelans to their knees.
Notes:
1. China’s state-owned China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China are among the region’s leading lenders, lending more than $120 billion to Latin American and Caribbean countries and state-owned enterprises, “often in exchange for oil and used to fund energy and infrastructure projects.” https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/china-influence-latin-america-argentina-brazil-venezuela-security-energy-bri
2. That industry goes on pumping out justifications, nevertheless; but it is now downgraded in importance.