“A World Governed by Force” The Attack on Venezuela and the Conflicts to Come

“We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Stephen Miller told CNN host Jake Tapper, on January 5, 2026, spelling out the fascist program as he justified seizing Greenland by force. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Early in the morning of January 3, the Trump administration carried out a made-for-TV raid on Venezuela, bombing at least seven targets in Caracas and kidnapping president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores. This was the culmination of a year-long pressure campaign during which the administration designated Venezuelan immigrants in the US as “narco-terrorists,” attempted to employ the Alien Enemies Act, bombed alleged “drug boats,” seized oil tankers, and deployed the US navy to blockade Venezuela.

The Trump regime initially accused Maduro of heading “Cartel de los Soles,” a construct as concocted as “antifa.” Though they revised this accusation yesterday in order to formulate a less tenuous legal case, it is typical of their method that they begin with a false narrative and seek the means to impose it on reality. One of Donald Trump’s chief objectives was to post a photograph of Nicolás Maduro in chains, echoing the photographs that federal agencies have circulated of people abducted by ICE. Rather than offering improvements in anyone’s economic conditions, Trump offers his supporters the vicarious thrill of identifying with jailers and torturers. His goal is to dehumanize his adversaries and desensitize everyone to the kind of violence that will be required to sustain his reign and capitalism itself in an era of declining profits.

Corporate media is performing its classic role of loyal opposition, raising questions about the legality of the action while demonizing Maduro and lionizing his right-wing opponent, María Corina Machado. For anarchists and others who aim to oppose imperialism, it’s necessary to situate the attack on Venezuela in a larger context, reflect on what effective opposition could look like, and identify how we can take action in response.

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Fire at Fuerte Tiuna military complex in Venezuela, January 3, 2026.

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The Playbook

The United States government has a long history of imperialist interventions in Latin America, including over a century of operations against Cuba, the bloody military coup in Chile in 1973, and George Bush’s invasion of Panama in 1989. The attack on Venezuela picks up where a series of more recent endeavors left off, from George W. Bush’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002 and 2003 to Joe Biden’s dismantling of the international “rules-based order” to enable Benjamin Netanyahu to carry out genocide in Palestine starting in 2023.

At the same time, the program of the Trump administration represents a departure from previous norms. In seeking to carry out resource extraction by brute force without the slightest pretense of any other agenda, Trump joins Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu in inaugurating an era of naked rapacity for its own sake.

While Trump’s underlings have cited the rigged elections that took place in Venezuela in 2024 to justify the attack, Trump is not pretending to bring elections or “democracy” to Venezuela. Some sources claim that the opposition led by María Corina Machado is supported by nearly 80% of the Venezuelan population, but Trump maintains that they do not have enough support to rule; presumably, he means that they lack the support of the military. Trump himself would prefer to work with an autocratic regime that is beholden directly to him. He, too, would rather not answer to elections, whether in Venezuela or the United States.

Trump is using war to stave off domestic crisis. While Trump and a contingent of anti-communist republicans have long pressed for regime change and the naval buildup in the Caribbean has been growing since August, this coup is timed to seize the media cycle in order to distract from worsening polls and a series of court losses regarding Trump’s efforts to deploy the National Guard. At the same time, evidence of Trump’s complicity in Jeffrey Epstein’s racket of child predation and rape is finally fracturing Trump’s base.

As autocrats lose their hold on power, they become more dangerous and unpredictable. Netanyahu’s maneuvers to stay ahead of his corruption scandal—including his readiness to sacrifice hostages in order to continue perpetrating genocide—are instructive here. When crisis threatens them, such rulers create additional crises to distract those they rule. Any effective opposition should remember to keep the spotlight on what Trump is trying to conceal. That is what he fears most.

Understood as a media operation, the attack on Venezuela is an attack on all of us: an effort to intimidate everyone who might resist the Trump regime, to make us accept that state violence will continue escalating whatever we do, to convince us that we are not the protagonists of our time.

As we argued in 2025, Trump has copied much of his playbook from authoritarians like Vladimir Putin. When Putin became prime minister in August 1999, his approval ratings were even lower than Trump’s are now. He solved that problem by means of the second Chechen war, which turned the polls around dramatically in his favor. Afterwards, every time his support slumped, he repeated this trick—invading Georgia in 2008, Crimea and Donbas in 2014, and Ukraine in 2022—slowly consolidating control of Russian society until he could afford to feed Russians into the meatgrinder of war a hundred thousand at a time.

Putin has used the war in Ukraine as a means of domestic control—and in Russia, this goes far beyond suppressing protests. As economic conditions worsen, Putin has to project strength and brutality continuously, but he also has to figure out what to do with an increasingly restless and desperate population. Shoveling young men from poor families in the hinterlands into the maw of war enables Putin to keep them busy; if a couple hundred thousand of them never return home, all the better—they will not show up in unemployment statistics and the police will not have to suppress their protests. Likewise, conscription has driven those who would likely lead a revolution to flee the country by the thousands. This is a strategy we shall see repeated elsewhere as the global crisis of capitalism intensifies.

The chief difference between the two contexts is that, while the United States is much more powerful than Russia, Trump’s hold on power is not nearly as secure as Putin’s. At the same time, coming out of the disastrous occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, US voters have considerably less stomach for operations that put the lives of US soldiers at risk.

Trump is not an especially disciplined tactician, nor is he a focused strategist. He always relies on threats and intimidation to achieve his goals, taking advantage of the cowardice and weakness of his contemporaries. Presumably, he is gambling that intimidation will serve to bend the governments of Latin America to his whims without the need for further military action. If that does not work, he likely intends to rely on military technology, private mercenaries, and other means of exerting force without having to send US troops to occupy Venezuela or other countries. But war, once summoned, imposes its own logic. If the Trump administration continues down this path, US forces may yet become embroiled in open conflict.

In the wake of the attack on Venezuela, Trump and his henchmen have threatened to take similar actions targeting Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Denmark, and other nations. They will certainly undertake these if they feel that they are acting from a position of strength, but even if things go badly for him, Trump may attempt to use such stunts to distract from his weakness.

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Cars stand in lines for fuel in Venezuela after the attacks.

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The Return of Plunder

Capitalism began in the midst of colonial plunder, and as profit margins decline throughout the global economy, governments are returning to this old-fashioned strategy of accumulation. This explains Putin’s land grab in Ukraine, Netanyahu’s ongoing attempt to use genocide as a form of gentrification, and Trump’s latest adventure in Venezuela.

In a November 2025 “National Security Strategy” paper, the Trump administration explicitly committed to a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, aiming to “restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere” as a means to “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”

Trump has embraced the self-aggrandizing renaming of this geopolitical strategy as the “Donroe Doctrine,” stating that “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.” This is about oil, as Trump has emphasized—Venezuela contains 17% of the world’s oil reserves—but it is also a means of jockeying for power with China, which is a major investor in and importer of the Venezuelan oil industry, purchasing 80% of Venezuela’s oil exports and propping up the Venezuelan oil industry with over $60 billion dollars of loans since 2007. This strategy precedes Trump: a renewal of the Monroe Doctrine with a focus on competing with China and Russia in the Global South was a key part of the 2024 Commission on the National Security Strategy created under the administration of Joe Biden. The 2024 Commission explicitly called for competing with China and Russia for leverage in Latin America with regard to the “development and harvesting of natural resources, and facilities and capabilities for projecting power.” While Trump represents the turn towards autocracy, the geopolitical and economic rationale was already in place.

In other words, Trump’s heavy-handed brutality offers the ruling class a solution to a problem that capitalists of all stripes are confronting—the problem of evaporating opportunities.

Trump’s plan to have US oil companies take over resource extraction in Venezuela is part of a new phase of colonial plunder, a return to directly seizing assets from other countries. We have to understand this within the larger context of stagnation and financialization. Historically, this mirrors earlier periods of “systemic chaos,” ¹ when declining profits compelled capitalists to pivot towards financial speculation and the machinery of the capitalist world system struggled until it was reconstituted into a new order through mass violence. The most relevant recent example is the period from 1914 to 1945, which saw both of the 20th century’s world wars.

So this is not just about oil; it is a means of shoring up the conditions for capitalist profiteering in general, and a glimpse of larger-scale violence to come. We are entering a phase of relations based in pure force, not “rule of law” or diplomacy, and this attack—like Trump’s presidency itself—is a symptom, not a cause.

But this represents a departure from the nationalist and populist imperialism of the past, in which regimes stole resources from the global periphery in order to improve the quality of life in the imperial core. Trump’s assault on Venezuela is calculated to benefit an increasingly small cadre of capitalists. The middle class and white working class are no longer “junior partners” to colonial ventures, and have increasingly less cause to identify with them.

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People in Caracas clean up after the United States bombings.

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The Question of Leadership

At first, Venezuelan vice president Delcy Rodríguez struck a defiant tone, but she immediately backpedaled to more conciliatory rhetoric. This has prompted speculation that Rodríguez might be prepared to cooperate with the Trump regime, or already cooperating.

A variety of scenarios are possible, and it is difficult to determine the truth. Perhaps the United States has put Delcy Rodríguez in a terrifying situation, but she is bearing up bravely; perhaps the Trump regime has already negotiated secretly with Delcy Rodríguez, and she intends to talk tough while facilitating the US agenda of resource extraction; perhaps something else is going on. Regardless, the vulnerability of Chavismo² to the kidnapping of its leader—and the possibility that Rodríguez or other elements of the Venezuelan government are complicit, or will become complicit, in Trump’s plan to take control of Venezuelan resources—both underscore the fact that all hierarchies represent a point of failure for liberation struggles.

We have already seen how the leadership of previous revolutionary left movements, such as the government of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, has been forcibly integrated into the functioning of neoliberalism and compelled to impose capitalist austerity measures and state control on the populations under their rule. Confronted with these defeats, some people draw the conclusion that the only way to possess sovereignty is to control a powerful nation state that possesses nuclear weapons. This is the logic underpinning “campism,” the support for imperial powers like Russia and China that rival the United States.

Yet Russia and China operate according to the same authoritarian, capitalist logic that the United States government does today—and those who choose to support them will have no more leverage over the actions of their leaders than Venezuelans do over the United States government. Those who seek to align themselves with one geopolitical state actor or another will inevitably end up defending genocidal autocrats from a position of total powerlessness. The real alternative is not campism, but an international grassroots resistance that extends across borders.

But for that to become a persuasive alternative, people in the United States will have to develop the capacity to prevent the US government from overseas bombing and looting.

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It’s double or nothing for everyone now.

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What to Expect, How to Prepare

The attack on Venezuela marks the escalation of a proxy war with China. Shifting the industrial base, including the tech industry, into wartime industry is one way to deal with the stagnating economy, but this will only be possible if the Trump administration can whip up more “national spirit” and patriotism. Arguably, the rush to consolidate the funding and proliferation of artificial intelligence is intended to create a more credulous and controllable population towards that eventual purpose.

In the nearer term, we can expect to see the Trump administration attempt once more to use the Alien Enemies Act against Venezuelans and other targets. Trump’s and Miller’s previous attempt was defeated in court because the US was not, in fact, at war. Now that they have created a war, they will use this to declare a range of additional emergencies and justify additional clampdowns. We can also expect more racist violence against Latin American and Chinese people, as well as retaliation against US foreign policy from non-state actors or proxy actors, which the Trump administration will seek to take advantage of to advance its agenda.

The midterm elections are scheduled for November 2026. Donald Trump and the Republicans are not favored; but Trump has crossed so many red lines already that he cannot tolerate any threat to his power. Whether by election interference, fraud, or, more likely, engineered crises that legitimize a state of exception, we can expect the midterms to be the least “democratic” elections in recent memory. Elections alone will not get us out of this mess.

As Trump is beset by various crises, scandals, and obstacles, he will become more violent, unpredictable, and dangerous. This is a sign of weakness, but it is a weakness that is backed up by the full strength of the US military. We should expect military entanglements on a larger scale by October of this year, including further National Guard deployments and perhaps even martial law.

Unpopular wars without a clear mandate—especially wars that result in US casualties or other sacrifices at home—can spell downfall for a regime. It is our task to turn this war—along with Trump’s other errors, and the wars to come—into a millstone around the neck of the entire ruling class. It will require so much popular force to dislodge Trump that we should popularize similarly ambitious proposals—not simply demand a return to an unpopular centrist status quo. Revolutionaries must prepare to outmaneuver centrist attempts to rebalance the ship of state. It may seem hard to imagine now, but uprisings and revolutions unfold quickly. The “Gen Z” revolutions toppled regimes around the world over the course of 2024.

Demonstrations across the US have used familiar slogans like “No Blood for Oil.” Unfortunately, Trump has concluded that his followers want both—oil and blood. Anti-war movements tend to be inherently conservative, as they seek to influence state policy; but like the administrations before it, the Trump regime has made clear that it is not concerned about opposition. Rather than presenting demands through symbolic protests, we need to build horizontal movements capable of addressing needs through direct action. These should focus on the common conditions that ordinary people face from Caracas to Minneapolis: poverty, austerity, the pillaging of essential resources, control by violent mercenaries, rule by unaccountable tycoons. The resistance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity around the United States represents a promising step towards this.

If, indeed, as Stephen Miller implies, governments do not represent the desires or agency of the people they rule over, if—as should now be obvious to all—they do not have our best interests at heart but simply act to seize as much wealth for themselves as they can, then no one is obligated to obey them. The only question is how to build up enough collective strength—enough grassroots force, enough horizontal power—to defeat them.

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The return of fascism on a global scale—and hopefully, the capability to defeat it.

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Appendix: Further Reading

To begin with, readers should consult “We Denounce the Imperial Offensive on Venezuela,” an international statement from Latin American anarchist organizations published in December 2025.

For deeper background on the situation in Venezuela, we encourage Spanish-speaking readers to peruse the archive of the now-defunct Venezuelan anarchist publication El Libertario, where one can find, for example, a critical evaluation of the Bolivarian social organizations from 2006, or a collection of texts about the role of the petroleum industry in subduing grassroots popular movements in Venezuela and integrating them into the global economy:

“Venezuela is part of the process of building new forms of governance in the region, which have demobilized the social movements that responded to the application of structural adjustment measures in the 1990s, re-legitimizing both the state and representative democracy in order to meet export quotas for natural resources to the chief markets of the world.”
-Ley Habilitante: dictadura para el capital energético (“The Enabling Law: Dictatorship for Energy Capital) in El Libertario # 62, March-April 2011

We could understand Trump’s attack on Venezuela as a way of continuing that “process of building new forms of governance in the region” today.

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A list of those who have recently been incarcerated at a single detention center in Brooklyn hints at the increasing array of world-historical contradictions coming to the fore in our time.

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1. In The Long Twentieth Century, Giovanni Arrighi argues that the past 700 years have witnessed a predictable pendulum swing between relatively “peaceful” and stable periods of trade expansion, during which growing markets enable capitalists and states to profit without significant competition, and investments in production or trade generate reliable profits, and increasingly chaotic periods of financial expansion, during which inter-capitalist competition drives down profits and investment capital seeks profit primarily through financial speculation. As the global economy stops growing, capitalists and national elites increasingly turn towards force and plunder to sustain profits, culminating in periods of “systemic chaos.” These periods are remarkably violent, characterized by military expenditures and plunder; historically, they only end when a new hegemonic force imposes a new global order and restores the conditions for capitalist accumulation. 20th-century American hegemony and the international system introduced by the United Nations played that role after the Second World War, but both have been in decline since the shift towards financialization and the rise of “neoliberalism” in the 1970s, and are now displaying their irrelevance as more and more forces attempt to seize profits by pure force instead of capitalist investment. Pundits bemoaning the end of the international rules-based order and expressing nostalgia for the United Nations are missing the forest of economic stagnation for the trees of individual bad actors like Trump and Putin. Any real resolution to the period of barbarism that we are entering will have to be grander in scope and more ambitious than the “Age of Revolution” of 1789-1848. ↩
2. Chavismo is the socialist movement associated with former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.

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Länk: https://crimethinc.com/2026/01/06/a-world-governed-by-force-the-attack-on-venezuela-and-the-conflicts-to-come