The bombing raid and illegal abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Moros and his wife Cilia Flores has engendered for many on the Left a familiar sense of dread which has come to define the atmosphere of the second Trump administration. The countless horrors in Gaza, the ‘12-day war’ with Iran, a series of extrajudicial murders in the Caribbean, military strikes on Nigeria – just to name a few – are the unpredictable and vindictive actions of an Empire devoid of strategy to stall the multitude of structural factors behind its relative decline. 

Analysis of the conjuncture must situate this most recent (shocking, if not surprising) aggression in the long-tail of imperialist hostility to any projects in the Global South based in national self-determination and sovereign control of political and economic affairs. The 1823 ‘Monroe Doctrine’ infamously articulated Washington’s warning off European intervention in the Americas. This was to be the rising power’s imperial playground. Since then, the populations of Central and South America have faced repeated aggressions from their belligerent northern neighbour, but no more so than Venezuela in the twenty-first century.

The US’ obsession with regime change stems back to the ascendancy of Hugo Chávez to the Presidency in 1999 as the figurehead of the Bolivarian Revolution. The state-socialist project centres on utilising Venezuela’s abundant natural resources (primarily oil) to fund the goals of domestic economic development, social gains and regional solidarity. This has long been viewed as an intolerable threat to US capital’s ability to exploit the resources of a Southern nation and especially as an affront to the US oil majors which have long coveted Venezuela’s vast oil deposits. 

Recent years have seen escalating attempts to undermine the sovereignty of Chávismo as a decolonial project. For example, in 2015, President Obama denounced Venezuela as an “extraordinary and unusual threat to US national security”. While barely credible on any reasonable assessment, this declaration was nevertheless utilised to justify the imposition of devastating sanctions. These have contributed significantly towards the widely-reported decimation of the Venezuelan economy and the subsequent denial of basic necessities and forced displacement of millions.

The first Trump administration enthusiastically embraced the policy of curtailing the Venezuelan government’s room for manoeuvre by applying a policy of “maximum pressure”. This included entertaining the more clownish elements of the Opposition represented by Juan Guaidó and culminating in the farcical ‘Operation Gideon’. During his second administration, Trump has decisively turned the dial directing Washington’s supervision of the region away from subtler acts of coercing submission and towards brute force.

The abduction of Maduro was prefigured by the deployment of US naval assets to the Caribbean Sea, ostensibly to curb ‘drug trafficking’, and a series of lethal attacks on small fishing boats based simply on spurious allegations and without due process. In keeping with the broader demise of liberal internationalism – expressed in the atrocities in West Asia and the militarized policing of Global North border regimes – ‘MAGA’ foreign policy eschews past fairytales of ‘human rights’ and ‘nation-building’. Instead, we have the flimsy chimera of ‘narco-terrorism’ to deploy violence against populations it deems surplus.

Materialist analyses have focused on the recurrent throughline from the neo-conservative moment, ranking this aggression alongside Iraq in the history of US military power supporting the expropriation of oil from a nation concurrently constructed as ideological nuisance. However, by economic logic alone, the fix presented by value extraction in the form of Venezuelan oil reserves is deficient. It does not address fall in demand (due to a stuttering American economy propped up on the promise of AI) or the US ceding the battle of the future of energy to China (with its rapid program of electrification build-out). The contradictions presented by the state of the industry in Venezuela would require an extended overhaul of property rights, debt hierarchies and regulation, nevermind the associated massive capital expenditure costs.

While the fine details of Venezuelan fossil fuel reserves undercut the crude economist narrative, the ecological damages wrought by the system of imperialist plunder remains. Western leaders need not share Trump’s reactionary fetish for fossil fuels to accede to his demand for growing militarism, which ultimately protects the overarching structure of unequal exchange. For all the displays of spectacular cruelty, we nevertheless should remain attentive of Maduro’s extradition as a symptom of imperialism’s political weakness. 

In the context of climate breakdown and geo-economic rivalry, the US-led imperial system is playing the only card it has left: military force. The more desperate it becomes, the more damage it is likely to inflict via frenzied spasms of brutality. Our tasks in the imperial core are to escalate the work of organising around anti-imperialist struggles; develop political education to further public consciousness; and struggle to shift the balance of forces in aid of resistance efforts in the Global South facing down imperialist aggression.