Venezuela, Greenland... Behind the show of strength, the United States is exacerbating capitalist chaos!

With the spectacular operation on 3 January, kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores from their sleep in a highly secure residence, the world's leading power sent a warning to the entire world: the United States can use its overwhelming military force at any time to impose and defend its national interests everywhere. Blackmail, open pressure and now kidnapping, typical of mafia systems, are now commonplace within the former international community. And it is using these same open gangster methods that the American power has issued threats against other bandits around the world who, by contrast, appear more civilised, blowing hot and cold on Greenland or Canada, on the Europeans, NATO or the UN at the Davos Forum[1].

The completely fallacious official justification of a fight against Maduro’s narco-terrorism was a mere pretext that fooled no one. Similarly, Trump's great flourishes on Venezuelan oil, widely echoed by all the international bourgeoisies and in particular their leftist factions, to reduce the event to a simple war for resources, is no longer really convincing: the high cost of extraction, dilapidated facilities and instability do not really interest the big oil companies, nor the investors who are not exactly rushing to the gate. The meaning of the event and the scope of the American offensive are indeed elsewhere, much more global, much more brutal and destructive!

An earthquake of historic proportions

In reality, the intentions of the Trump administration and the United States were to strike and intimidate their rivals, particularly China and Russia, in an attempt to deter them from aggressively encroaching on Washington's traditional sphere of influence in Latin America. Commercial incursions on the continent and the construction of port infrastructure are increasingly unwelcome to Uncle Sam, as evidenced, for example, by Trump's reaction in Panama regarding the flow of Chinese goods and control of the canal. Behind the rhetoric of ‘consolidation by hemisphere’ lies a strategic priority that remains absolutely intact: to contain China, the United States' main challenger on the world stage, and prevent its expansion. This is the main motive behind the military adventure in Venezuela.

This brutal policy, which merely reinforces the new National Security Strategy (NSS) announced and published barely a month earlier, is far-reaching. It further opens Pandora's box, accelerating global chaos and disorder to an unprecedented degree. And its method of trampling on international law amounts to nothing less than shattering the entire international order and the institutions put in place to guarantee it, which had been established since 1945 by the United States itself. In this sense, the American offensive marks a considerable deepening of the process of disintegration of capitalist society, a new quality in the evolution of imperialist rivalries and ‘every man for himself’.

Trump's policy, mundanely uninhibited and unpredictable in its contours, is already having profound consequences. In just a few days, Washington has gone from escalating its intervention in Venezuela to making new and very direct threats against Denmark over Greenland, then to seizing a Russian ship in international waters, before announcing massive new arms programmes! Now it is Canada that is directly targeted by the American desire to destabilise the province of Alberta. This policy, which heralds a new escalation of militarism and tensions, is already being implemented in a context of growing instability and totally destructive wars, particularly in Europe between Ukraine and Russia, further accelerating the frantic arms race.[2] While the European Union's reactions to Trump's threats and his desire to make Greenland the 51st state of the United States were initially more firm than usual, the discord within NATO is only growing. Unlike Venezuela, Greenland is part of Denmark, whose integrity is being threatened for the first time by the United States, even though it has been a member of the European Union since 1973 and a founding member of NATO. Similarly, Canada, also threatened by the Trump clan, is a member of the British Commonwealth, NATO and a traditional ally of the United States.

Such an acceleration of the situation and the nature of the threats only serve to inflame tensions, heighten nervousness and reinforce the already existing inability of the major powers to maintain long-term strategic coherence. Events are unfolding at breakneck speed, forcing immediate responses, an upheaval that states cannot take the time to assimilate, leading to tensions where already fragile alliances of the past are quickly called into question, also prompting ephemeral, circumstantial, changing reactions, now without any real compass. Trump's unpredictable threats, following the transatlantic divorce, such as his desire to withdraw support for Ukraine and unilaterally end the conflict, not to mention his threats of exorbitant tariffs on European countries, led to timid condemnation from the latter. Today, even if they are not entirely united, most European countries and the European Union have judged the threats to be ‘unacceptable’ and have taken a united stand. That is why this time they have stood their ground and sent symbolic military contingents to Greenland as a matter of urgency, pushing NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, to perform a complex balancing act, with great exertions, in an attempt to ease the pressure, and apparently sway Trump's intentions and momentarily reassure the ever-worried European bourgeoisie. Such a situation fully confirms the ICC's analysis of the divorce between Uncle Sam and the European Union, highlighting the acceleration of war chaos in a free-for-all, while other groups in the proletarian political milieu continue to talk about a “bloc strengthening itself in preparation for the Third World War”.

More and more voices are now being raised in Europe to assert that the United States is no longer a reliable ally! This conviction has been further reinforced for some members of the European Union, particularly in the face of Trump's latest surprise move to bypass and completely withdraw from the UN framework by inaugurating, at the very moment of the Davos Forum, his own alternative structure, a so-called ‘Board of Peace’ entirely under his control. Ultimately, the European powers find themselves trapped in a situation of strong military and energy dependence on Washington, and their initial firmness appears fragile. This situation can only exacerbate the growing tensions between European states, and within them between pro- and anti-American factions, thus leading to increased political fragility and instability.

But none of this indicates a resurgence of American power and control over the world. On the contrary, the abandonment of multilateralism, the rules of the international order and the democratic mystifications put in place by the United States itself after the Second World War is the clearest expression of its historic decline. While the National Security Strategy (NSS) in no way marks a break with the hegemonic ambitions of American imperialism, it aims to defend its own interests in a context where it is no longer able to impose a “new world order” in the face of the “every man for himself” that dominates the world. So, while some people are concerned about Trump's mental health and wonder why we have reached such a level of chaos and danger in the world, where the United States seems to be shooting itself in the foot in the long term, the answer cannot be found in Trump's personality or profile, however irrational his behaviour may seem. The reasons for his political behaviour and all this chaos are to be found in the historical evolution of the capitalist system. Trump is nothing more than the true face of a capitalism in full putrefaction.

A new acceleration in the phase of capitalist decomposition

After the implosion of the Eastern Bloc and the collapse of the ‘Soviet’ Union in 1989, which were both products and indicators of the new period of capitalist decomposition, President George W. Bush Sr. announced the advent of a “new world order” under the leadership of the United States and took advantage of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 to launch the first Gulf War in order to guarantee, in the name of the ‘international community’ and the UN, respect for international law, to align more than thirty countries behind them and to close ranks with their former European allies.

But soon, the global imperialist landscape was marked by a systematic and widespread questioning of American leadership, including by its European allies. From then on, the American policeman's reactions to defend its leadership became increasingly brutal. During the war in Yugoslavia shortly afterwards, NATO members openly and directly opposed Uncle Sam, who ultimately had the last word by flexing his muscles, leading to the signing of the Dayton Accords in 1995 and painstakingly bringing an end to the war in Bosnia. More seriously, during the second war and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, NATO “allies”, including France and Germany, went so far as to refuse to support US policy and participate in military operations. It was without the consent of the UN and with reduced support from NATO members that the Bush Jr. administration invaded Iraq.

Originally, these tensions continued to be part of a multilateral legal and institutional framework that emerged after the Second World War, and the United States' goal at the time was to maintain it as best it could. What's more, all these operations bore the ideological stamp of the ‘fight for freedom and democracy’ against autocratic and dictatorial powers. More than a ‘policeman,’ the United States sought to appear as the herald of the victorious humanist values of the West, the champion of democracy. Wars were systematically waged under the hypocritical guise of ‘humanitarian aid.’[3]

With the open crusade against terrorism following the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 and the 2003 Iraq War and its blatant lies about the alleged discovery of weapons of mass destruction, the United States increasingly tended to openly disregard UN decisions, unilaterally waging its own bloody campaigns. Since then, faced with the increasingly obvious failure of a US-sponsored “new world order”, this tendency to increasingly openly disregard international law and intervene militarily, sowing chaos as in Afghanistan, has become more pronounced. The American ‘world policeman’ was in fact increasingly becoming the main gangster causing trouble and chaos.

While Trump is essentially a caricature of this increasingly overt violence, the start of his second term nevertheless represents a real shift in this regard, with the new administration's explicit desire to end the conflict in Ukraine without resorting to multilateralism and traditional diplomatic mechanisms and excluding the main European ‘allies’ from negotiations. The US President's thunderous statements against ‘international law’ and the international institutions supposed to guarantee it are torpedoing the famous democratic values to make way for the pragmatic ‘America First’, confirming a real divorce between the Europeans and Trump's America. The unilateral decision to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities in early summer 2025 confirms that the world order that emerged in 1945 has collapsed, even if the illusion persists of an intervention to “destroy a nuclear threat posed by an anti-democratic power”. With the show of strength in Venezuela, the world's leading bourgeoisie, which had made its democracy a model for the whole world, shows how much interest this class of bandits has in democracy, ‘human rights’ and ‘freedom’: these are nothing but lies intended to mask the true face of capitalism, a fundamentally lawless system where the strongest wins, whatever the cost!

Such vandalism on Trump's part can only encourage chaos and the development of tensions and ideological manipulations of all kinds. Russian imperialism will feel emboldened to impose its domination over its ‘sphere of influence’ in Ukraine, the Baltic states and Eastern Europe. China's ambitions towards Taiwan will be reinforced. Europe will be all the more fragile and threatened as it is already experiencing strong dissonance between member states, a process of fragmentation that is well underway. However, the United States cannot emerge victorious from such a dynamic of irrationality and chaos. They are becoming the agents and accelerators of their own decline, undermined from within by a kind of latent civil war, in which Trump and his clan find themselves increasingly isolated in a society fractured on all sides, including among those who supported his presidential campaign behind the MAGA banner. If Trump was forced to soften his stance on Greenland, it was due to external pressure from the Europeans, who reacted more firmly, but also because of the chaotic domestic political situation and the divisions that exist within the world's leading power. [4] This situation reflects the decay of the political apparatus of the ruling class, linked to the phase of decomposition of capitalism.

And the worst is yet to come! Thus, the growing number of rivals will demand accountability and will only throw a spanner in the works of the United States by attempting to use their own weapons, those of destabilisation and chaos. This will be the case, for example, in Latin America, where, far from ‘putting an end to drug trafficking’, Trump's kick in the anthill will only generate a myriad of other types of trafficking. In short, it will be an endless spiral, a vortex that can only lead Uncle Sam to use his only strength, that of weapons, a logic that is becoming widespread and can only lead to the questioning of the very foundations of all civilisation, leading only to nothingness and death.

Faced with this monstrous dynamic, which could ultimately lead to the destruction of the human race, there is only one alternative: the struggle of the proletariat for a communist society.

WH, 24 January 2025

 

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[1] This is a ‘den of thieves’, an apt description used by Lenin in his time to refer to the League of Nations (the predecessor of the UN).

[2] After recording colossal expenditure, all states continue to announce new budget increases for military spending. This is obviously the case in the United States, which is planning a defence budget of $1.5 trillion, i.e. 50% more than initially proposed. Another example is France, with a promise of an additional €3.5 billion in the 2026 finance bill and an additional €3 billion planned for 2027.

[3] One example is the first Gulf War, with the ‘Provide Comfort’ food drop operation, intended to justify the bombing of Iraq.

[4] Such as California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, who is encouraging Europeans to stand up to Trump's policies and has called on the international community to ‘wake up’.