Every week is bringing more evidence that US imperialism is on the march under Donald Trump, determined to reorder world relations in its favor.
On January 3, US forces kidnapped Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and brought him to New York to face charges of “narco terrorism.” This was after months of military buildup by the US in the Caribbean, blowing up small boats allegedly carrying drugs, killing over 100 people in cold blood, and then seizing “sanctioned” oil tankers.
It was clear very quickly that this had a lot more to do with oil than with drugs. Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves of oil as well as significant sources of rare earth minerals, key to everything from smartphones and laptops to electric vehicles. Trump has made clear that control of resources is part of reasserting the Monroe Doctrine and the domination of “our” hemisphere, within the broader conflict with Chinese imperialism. We say, Latin America is nobody’s “backyard.” US and all imperialist powers out!
Since the attack on Venezuela, Trump has made further threats against Cuba, Mexico, Greenland, and Iran.
The End Of The Rules-Based Order
Invading other countries and “regime change” operations by the United States, especially in Latin America, are nothing new. What’s changed is the ripping up of the international “rules-based order” created after World War II. No longer is there any pretense of abiding by international law or working through “international institutions” like the United Nations or NATO.
To be very clear, the UN throughout its history has been dominated by US imperialism. But such institutions are now seen as an obstacle to US assertion of power so they are simply being ignored. As Trump’s odious, white supremacist adviser, Stephen Miller, declared, “we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power…These are the iron laws of the world.”
This is naked imperialism, more comparable to the “gunboat diplomacy” of the 19th and early 20th century when the world’s imperial powers raced to colonize every part of Africa and Asia. Miller, who agrees with colonialism’s racist premise, unsurprisingly, has also said that decolonization after World War II was a mistake.
The Wider Context
The drive to control natural resources is directly linked to the struggle for global domination between the US and China. Controlling Venezuelan oil is about denying it to China. Meanwhile, Greenland occupies a strategic position next to the Arctic Ocean which is soon to be ice free and is increasingly a zone of competition between the US and other Western countries on the one side and Russia and China on the other.
Venezuela has been a key ally of Chinese imperialism in Latin America. Likewise, the US bombed China’s ally Iran last year while Israel waged a savage campaign against Iran’s “axis of resistance,” in the process changing the balance of forces in the Middle East. Russia was unable to stop the overthrow of its ally Assad in Syria. China and Russia seem helpless to assist their allies in the Middle East and Latin America as the US attacks them.
The War At Home & Abroad
Trump’s imperialist offensive also cannot be separated from what is happening here at home. The authoritarian power grab and the ICE terror campaign are the other side of the assertion of raw power in Latin America and beyond. In both cases it is about reasserting the power and control of the US ruling class: against rivals and over resources, markets, and the working class.
They are out to settle scores with revolutionary movements in Latin America, including the Cuban revolution which the US has sought to overthrow for 67 years and the remnants of the Bolivarian revolution led by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela at the end of the 1990s.
Here at home, the most reactionary and counterrevolutionary government in a century seeks to overturn all the gains made by Black people, women, and queer people through the mass movements of the 60s and 70s. The labor movement is also in its crosshairs. Trump has declared in the notorious National Security Presidential Memorandum that everything from “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” to “extremism on migration, race, and gender” can be precursor to “domestic terrorism.” This is the same allegation used to justify the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
The Limits Of US Imperialism
The massive assertion of power by Trump, including the imposition of tariffs and the bombing of targets in a whole series of countries from Nigeria to Yemen, certainly has given US imperialism a temporary global advantage. But it also masks long-term decline including an economy dangerously reliant on the AI speculative bubble and the erosion of an industrial base that shows no signs of being reversed. And racist fantasies about colonial empires are just that, fantasies.
The US can carry out precision raids, but it is unable at this point to deploy significant forces to occupy countries as it has done in the past. These are the results of the historic defeats in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It was only four and a half years ago that US forces had to abandon Kabul to the Taliban in the biggest humiliation for the US since the exit from Saigon in 1975. In Venezuela, for now, the US has left the Maduro regime in place (minus Maduro) and seeks to rule the country through Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez.
More than long-term US strength, what has been revealed is the weaknesses of other imperialist powers including Russia, China, and the EU. At the same time, US-made weaponry is being chewed up by Russia’s relentless, bloody, if very slow, offensive in Ukraine. The powers that today seek deals or kowtow to Washington, as has the EU, are frantically looking to develop alternatives to economic and military dependence on the US.
But even more important to understanding Trump’s “triumphs” are the weaknesses of the leadership of the left, labor, and revolutionary movements internationally. The dictatorial Maduro regime has sought to rule in collaboration with a section of the domestic ruling class and has sought compromise with Trump. Cuba faces the worst economic and social crisis since the revolution in 1959.
In the West and Latin America, the failures of the left have meant an emboldened right and far right which has come to power in a series of countries and threatens to do so in a number of others.
Our Internationalist Revolutionary Socialist Answer
Ultimately, revolutionary movements which remain isolated, as in Cuba, or do not expropriate the ruling class, as in the case of Venezuela, will succumb to the pressure of imperialism. To win decisive and lasting change, a working-class-centered revolution, wherever it starts, must spread internationally and pose a challenge to the rule of capital inside the imperialist powers themselves.
The most important thing that can be done right now in the US is to develop a challenge to Trump centered on the social power of the working class. This is where the working class in Minneapolis is showing the way. No reliance can be placed on the Democrats who serve the imperialist ruling class that brought us Trump in the first place.
We also need to build an international, anti-imperialist antiwar movement. This means opposition to all imperialism, be it US, Russian, or Chinese imperialism. But we in Socialist Alternative are also clear that, as the German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht said over a century ago, “the main enemy is at home.” We oppose the reactionary regime in Iran and stand with the masses. We oppose the Maduro regime while calling for returning to the road of anti-capitalist revolution. But most of all we oppose all of US imperialism’s attacks and bully-boy tactics and stand for the international unity of working people and the oppressed everywhere.
Photo: The White House
