Venezuela and the Panic of Empire

When Venezuela’s socialists declare their determination to resist U.S. aggression, they are not issuing a symbolic slogan. They are highlighting a fundamental structural conflict: imperial capitalism versus popular sovereignty. What Donald Trump and the U.S. ruling class treat as an “easy target” is, in reality, a frontline society where the deepest contradictions of global capitalism are most exposed — and therefore most feared.

Trump’s hostility toward Venezuela is not simply personal, nor merely ideological in a superficial sense. It is a form of class warfare conducted at the level of states. Venezuela’s real “offense” in the eyes of Washington is not mismanagement or authoritarianism, but defiance: the refusal to fully subordinate its labour, resources, and political economy to the requirements of U.S. capital.

This explains why U.S. measures — sanctions, sabotage, and regime-change fantasies — persist even after years of demonstrable failure. These are not accidental policy errors; they are instruments of imperial coercion.

A genuinely Marxist analysis begins where liberal moralism ends. The United States does not intervene in Venezuela because Trump is irrational or personally cruel — though he may be both. It intervenes because capitalism in its imperial phase requires expansion, extraction, and domination.

Venezuela sits atop vast oil reserves, strategic minerals, and significant geopolitical space. An independent, redistributive political project in such a location is intolerable to an imperial system built on accumulation by dispossession. As Lenin warned, imperialism is not about isolated bad leaders; it is about monopoly capital seeking outlets for surplus, profit, and power.

Trump, in this sense, merely strips away diplomatic euphemisms. Where previous administrations cloaked interventions in human rights rhetoric, this administration speaks more plainly — exposing coercion, punishment, and domination as the real logic of U.S. foreign relations.

Economic sanctions are not neutral diplomatic tools. They are weapons of class war. Sanctions do not primarily target governments; they target populations. They destroy purchasing power, collapse public services, and fracture social reproduction. They are designed to force the working class into desperation, hoping that hunger will succeed where coups have failed. This is why sanctions regimes - from Cuba to Iran, Iraq to Venezuela — resemble one another: the goal is not democracy, but submission.

Yet sanctions repeatedly backfire. Rather than producing compliant societies, they reveal the violent core of liberal capitalism. They radicalise consciousness, deepen collective identity, and delegitimize elites aligned with external pressure. In Venezuela, survival itself becomes a political act.

For much of the twentieth century, U.S. imperialism in Latin America relied on terror: coups, death squads, IMF shock therapy, and military occupation. Local oligarchies acted as junior partners of the empire. But that mechanism is breaking down.

Latin America today carries an accumulated memory of imperial violence — from Pinochet’s Chile to Argentina’s disappeared, from Guatemala’s genocide to Nicaragua’s dirty war. This historical consciousness matters. It is why Trump’s threats no longer intimidate as they once did: fear has been replaced by recognition.

Even governments that are not socialist understand the danger of legitimising intervention. Across the continent, civil society movements, indigenous organisations, unions, and left formations see Venezuela not as an isolated case, but as a test of whether sovereignty itself is still possible.

Trump is not a symbol of American strength. He is a symptom of imperial exhaustion. The U.S. ruling class faces crises on multiple fronts: a declining industrial base, deep internal polarisation, loss of ideological credibility, and the erosion of global hegemony. Trump responds not with renewal but with aggression - mistaking domination for leadership.

But imperial power without consent is brittle. The United States still has the capacity to destroy, sanction, and destabilise. What it can no longer do is command belief. Its claims to democracy sound hollow after Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Gaza. Its moral authority has collapsed under the weight of its own violence. Trump’s belligerence accelerates this collapse, because he speaks openly what empire prefers to hide.

The U.S. has confronted defiant societies before — and lost. Cuba survived blockade not through economic success but through political will and social solidarity. Iraq’s destruction produced a permanent crisis, not stability. Afghanistan ended in a humiliating retreat. Vietnam shattered the myth of invincibility. These were not just tactical failures; they were systemic limits.

Venezuela belongs to this lineage of resistance — not because it is flawless, but because it insists on the right to choose its own contradictions. That insistence is intolerable to an imperial order that demands obedience, not perfection.

Ranjan Solomon is a commentator on Palestine, civil rights and foreign affairs. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.