Trump’s hostility toward Venezuela is neither episodic nor merely ideological in the narrow sense. It is a form of class war conducted at the level of states. Venezuela’s real transgression is not mismanagement or authoritarianism, as Washington endlessly repeats, but defiance — the refusal to fully subordinate its labour, resources, and political economy to U.S. capital. This is an unforgivable crime in an imperial order that equates obedience with legitimacy.
This explains why U.S. pressure persists even after years of demonstrable failure. Sanctions, sabotage, diplomatic isolation, and regime-change fantasies are not policy mistakes; they are instruments of imperial coercion. Their purpose is not reform but capitulation.
Imperialism as systemic necessity
A progressive analysis begins where liberal moralism ends. The United States does not target Venezuela because Trump is uniquely irrational, though he may be. It intervenes because capitalism in its imperial phase requires expansion, extraction, and domination. Monopoly capital seeks new outlets for surplus and profit, and any state that resists this logic becomes a threat.
Venezuela sits atop immense oil reserves and strategic minerals. An independent, redistributive political project in such a location is intolerable to a system built on accumulation by dispossession. Trump merely strips away the language of diplomacy. Where previous administrations cloaked intervention in the rhetoric of democracy and human rights, this one speaks more openly — exposing punishment, coercion, and domination as the true grammar of U.S. foreign policy.