The US chases China and Russia out of its backyard

The US military raid on Venezuela on Saturday 3 January raised several questions about the scale of the attack, about the motives of the US government and which position to defend as revolutionaries.

We received contributions from two different contacts, which we welcome because of their clear defence of the internationalist position in reaction to the US military strike. Both recognise the motive of the US for this attack, i.e. compelling any recalcitrant nation on the American continent to comply with the needs of the US. Both are convinced that this expression of force is also directed against China and intended to chase this country out of the Western Hemisphere.

One of the contributions also mentions another motive: “the American bourgeoisie requires an expansion of markets”. It was Trump who boasted all the time about tens of millions of barrels of oil that Venezuela was going to supply to the United States. But the American bourgeoisie, and in particular the oil companies, knew very well that Venezuela will not provide an opportunity for sustainable profitable investments. At the same time, the population of Venezuela is too poor to buy the expensive American products en masse.

In fact, generally speaking, wars in the current period do not lead to an economic boost for capitalism and not even to an economic advantage for the victorious nation. This is one of the reasons why we speak about the irrationality of wars in the present period. The only “victory” for the US, in line with the recent US National Security Strategy, is having chased China and Russia (the closer ally of Venezuela) more or less out the continent. But it must pay the price of an increased instability in this part of the continent, “forcing the United States into a headlong rush of military interventions and adventures”[1]. This is another characteristic of the present period of decomposition: the US, violating international law and inviting others to do the same, as the main factor for the increase of the chaos in the world.

 

The first contribution

For some time now, Trump and the assortment of nationalist ghouls who accommodate him in the leadership of the MAGA movement (be they politicians, propagandists, or activists) have openly expressed their intentions to assert more stringent control over the region in which the U.S. lies, by force if necessary, with calls for: making Canada the 51st state, invading Mexico, and even annexing Greenland. A new development has now occurred in this regard. After months of bombing Venezuela and threats of regime change against its “socialist” president, Nicolas Maduro, he has been captured by American military forces and the Trump administration has asserted U.S. leadership in determining the government of Venezuela going forward, threatening the new president and former vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, to soften Venezuela to American imperial interests, lest it be attacked again, and this time worse. Following this development, Trump has made threats against Gustavo Petro, the leftist president in Colombia who’s made a point of condemning the coup of Maduro, and also reiterated his desire to annex Greenland.

There are two main reasons for this hawkishness across the region. The first is that the American bourgeoisie requires an expansion of markets, all the better in the case of U.S. political occupation where it would have an enormous edge on the world market. Protectionist policies would likely be utilized as well to ensure the industries obtained from these expansionist projects were sufficiently monopolized by the American bourgeoisie. The second reason is that the American state, with Trump at the helm, is preparing itself for war, particularly against China, and finds it necessary to absorb countries within its region into its political umbrella, or at least to make them effectively subordinate, even if their official sovereignty is maintained. Speaking of China, the capture of Maduro and insistence that Rodriguez align herself with the U.S. is not only a Venezuelan or a Latin-American affair, but is also a development in the rivalry between the two largest powers in the arena of world imperialism, the U.S. and China. Seeing as Maduro’s Venezuela was aligned with Chinese imperialism, the prospect of a realignment towards the U.S. means for China the threat of losing a significant ally in the region of its imperial rival.

MAGA propagandists often portray the Venezuelan situation as the freeing of the Venezuelan people from a brutal dictator. Even much of the democratic opposition doesn’t disagree with the coup of Maduro, it simply criticizes the method which was used to do it. It too has always called for the Venezuelan people to be freed from Maduro’s regime in some way. All this, however, is simply veiled language for what is actually intended. Both the MAGA and the democratic bourgeoisie mean by freedom the freedom for Venezuelan markets to be penetrated by American capital. Whether this occurs in an environment of liberal democracy or “dictatorship” is of little consequence to them, despite what their propaganda might suggest. Ultimately, whether one is in a liberal democracy or a “dictatorship,” they are inevitably in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, of capital.

On the other hand, leftist propagandists often portray the Venezuelan situation as yet another attack by the U.S. on a socialist country. Far from being socialist, however, Maduro’s Venezuela, and Chavez’s before him, was simply a state-capitalist regime, that is to say, it nationalized significant portions of its economy, which were in turn directed by the state bureaucracy. But nationalization is not socialism, as it retains capitalist social relations. The fact that the state, rather than private firms, becomes a more prominent employer of wage labor doesn’t negate this fact. Nor was Maduro’s government a government of the working class, or dictatorship of the proletariat, as was seen, for example, in the Paris Commune of the late 19th Century or the council republics of the early 20th Century. The working class never took power in Venezuela via a revolution. Rather, Maduro was the successor of Chavez, who himself took power via election within the framework of a bourgeois state with broad petty-bourgeois appeals to the “masses” and social reforms.

Whether Venezuela be China-aligned or U.S.-aligned, “dictatorial” or liberal-democratic, state-capitalist or private-capitalist, the Venezuelan proletariat will remain exploited and oppressed. Only through the creation of its own independent political organs in opposition to the existing, bourgeois state, and the subsequent crushing of that bourgeois state, can the Venezuelan proletariat begin to transform its conditions. And only through the Venezuelan proletariat’s fraternization, and eventual fusion, with the proletariat in the other countries of the world, given they’ve also succeeded in conquering political power, can social revolution be carried through to such an extent that capitalism is transcended and a new mode of production arises, that of communism, in which states and classes will have dissolved.

Synthesiz

 

The second contribution

On the Venezuelan shakedown

The second quarter of the 21st century began as the last one had ended: with wars, occupations and military adventures. Only 3 days into the New Year, the spectacular kidnap of Venezuelan President Maduro and his wife by the USA – backed by air and naval forces including the world’s largest aircraft carrier, a nuclear-powered submarine, spy planes and 15,000 troops – is the most obvious example. But the continuation of the war in Ukraine, the on-going genocidal strangulation of Gaza and the widening Israeli occupation of the West Bank, plus the carnage in Sudan, speak of a social system gripped by a deepening spiral of self-destruction on a global scale.

Why the ‘Hollywood-style’ capture of Maduro?

It certainly wasn’t, as Trump has insisted, because of Maduro or his state’s involvement in the drug trade, something in which the US itself is well versed. Indeed, President Trump has pardoned over 100 convicted narcotics offenders since coming to office for the second time – the most recent being the freeing of ex-Honduras President Hernández who had been sentenced to 45 years jail by a US court in March 2025.

Nor was it primarily to gain access to Venezuela’s oil reserves, said to be the largest on the planet. While the mafia-like US state has confirmed it will ‘run’ the country and ‘wet its beak’ in the oil profits it hopes to extract, global demand for oil (and prices) are falling and even China, which had invested billions to secure supply, had largely written this off as ‘bad business’.

No: the main driving force of this ‘mission impossible’ - orchestrated in the face of all previously established rules of international conduct - was to again demonstrate the US’s overwhelming military might in front of its ‘allies’ and its rivals. In a world of ‘every man for himself’ America once more acted out the role of Top Gun.

It was a warning to the US’s allies that, as Trump boasted, it was uncontested in the western hemisphere. It was clearly a signal to the ruling religious clique in Iran that regime change is the order of the day; it sent a message that Putin, who had met with Maduro in Moscow a few months previously and voiced his unwavering support, was in fact powerless to defend those in Russia’s orbit, as the fall of Assad (in Syria) had indicated the previous year. And while some bourgeois commentators felt that the lawlessness endorsed by the Trump clique would only encourage China to mimic such antics vis-à-vis Taiwan, the mighty US war machine assembled in the Caribbean has a global as well as regional reach.

Why such a demonstration of force by the US?

Following the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the US used the first Gulf war as a means not just to threaten its enemies but, above all, to keep its allies under the godfather’s thumb. For the disappearance of the ‘Soviet Union’ and its sphere of influence implied a corresponding crumbling of the western alliance – a process recognised and completed early in Trump’s second term with the “Atlantic divorce.”

But just as the Gulf wars failed to prevent the growing chaos in international affairs, the tendency of ‘every man for himself’ was actually stimulated by the US’s intervention which brought a veritable feeding frenzy in the wake of it actions in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya and today in Syria.

Decomposition, the final phase of capitalism’s decadence, itself has a history. Today, the bloating of military budgets in almost every nation as war or war preparations become generalised and in particular, the growth of China as a serious economic if not yet equally powerful military rival, threaten USA hegemony. Washington bailed out the Trump-friendly Milei regime in Argentina with a package of 20 billion dollars to provide a counter-weight against the influence of China in Argentina and Venezuela was another South American country reliant on Beijing’s largesse. Thus, the US show of boastful bravado in fact stems from a global and historic weakening of its dominance, even in its own ‘backyard.’ Its actions create yet further regional and global instability, demonstrating the utter irrationality of imperialist wars in this epoch.

The US intervention in Venezuela is more than mere spectacle. It is a stepping up of the stakes, a further departure from international ‘norms’, a further lurch into chaos. It will for a while reassert the US’s will. But it can’t prevent the increasing decomposition of capitalist relations with murderous implications for the planet’s populations. It will in fact only accelerate this process.

KT 4.1.2026

 

[1] “US show of force in Venezuela: All states are imperialist! Capitalism means war!”, ICConline