Venezuela and the Panic of Empire – Trump, Imperial Decline, and the Return of Class War

by Dr Ranjan Solomon

When Venezuela’s socialists vow to resist U.S. aggression, they are not issuing a symbolic declaration. They are naming a structural conflict: imperial capitalism versus popular sovereignty. What Donald Trump and the U.S. ruling class perceive as “easy targets” are in fact frontline societies where the contradictions of global capitalism are most exposed—and therefore most feared.

Trump’s hostility toward Venezuela is not personal, nor is it ideological in the superficial sense. It is class warfare conducted at the level of states. Venezuela’s crime, in the eyes of Washington, is not authoritarianism or mismanagement, but defiance: the refusal to fully subordinate its labour, resources, and political economy to U.S. capital.

This is why sanctions, sabotage, and regime-change fantasies persist even after repeated failure. They are not errors. They are instruments.

Imperialism Is Not a Policy Choice—It Is a Systemic Necessity

Marxist analysis begins where liberal moralism ends. The United States does not intervene because Trump is irrational or cruel, though he may be both. It intervenes because capitalism in its imperial phase requires expansion, extraction, and discipline.

Venezuela sits atop vast oil reserves, strategic minerals, and geopolitical space. An independent, redistributive, or socialist project in such a location is intolerable to an imperial system built on accumulation by dispossession. As Lenin warned, imperialism is not about bad leaders; it is about monopoly capital seeking outlets for surplus, profit, and power.

Trump merely strips the language bare. Where previous administrations cloaked intervention in human rights rhetoric, Trump speaks the language of the real relation: coercion, punishment, domination.

Sanctions as Class Warfare

Economic sanctions are not diplomatic tools. They are weapons of class war. They do not target governments; they target populations. They destroy purchasing power, collapse public services, and fracture social reproduction. They are designed to force the working class into desperation, hoping hunger will succeed where coups have failed. This is why sanctions regimes look similar across contexts—from Cuba to Iraq, from Iran to Venezuela. The goal is not democracy, but submission.

Yet sanctions repeatedly backfire. Rather than producing compliant societies, they expose the violent core of liberal capitalism. They radicalise consciousness, deepen collective identity, and delegitimise domestic elites aligned with imperial pressure. In Venezuela, as in Cuba, survival itself becomes a political act.

Latin America and the End of Imperial Fear

For much of the twentieth century, U.S. imperialism in Latin America relied on terror: coups, death squads, IMF shock therapy, and military occupation. Class struggle was resolved through repression, with local oligarchies acting as junior partners of empire. That mechanism is breaking down.

Latin America today carries the accumulated memory of imperial violence. From Chile’s neoliberal laboratory under Pinochet to Argentina’s disappeared, from Guatemala’s genocide to Nicaragua’s dirty war, the region understands U.S. intervention not as aberration but as structure. This historical consciousness matters. It is why Trump’s threats do not intimidate as they once did. Fear has been replaced by recognition.

Even governments that are not socialist understand the danger of legitimising intervention. Civil society movements, indigenous organisations, unions, and left formations across the continent see Venezuela not as an isolated case but as a test of whether sovereignty itself is still possible.

Trump and the Crisis of Imperial Legitimacy

Trump is not a sign of American strength. He is a symptom of imperial exhaustion. The U.S. ruling class faces a crisis on multiple fronts: declining industrial base, internal polarisation, loss of ideological credibility, and the erosion of global hegemony. Trump responds not with renewal but with aggression – mistaking domination for leadership.

But imperial power without consent is brittle. The United States can still destroy, sanction, and destabilise. What it can no longer do is command belief. Its claims to democracy ring hollow after Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Gaza. Its moral authority has collapsed under the weight of its own violence. Trump’s belligerence accelerates this collapse. He speaks openly what empire prefers to hide, and in doing so, unmasks it.

Historical Defeats the Empire Cannot Erase

The U.S. has confronted defiant societies before – and lost. Cuba survived blockade not through economic success but through political will and social solidarity. Iraq’s destruction did not produce stability but permanent crisis. Afghanistan ended in humiliating retreat. Vietnam shattered the myth of invincibility.

These were not tactical failures. They were systemic limits. Empires can crush states; they struggle to defeat peoples. Venezuela belongs to this lineage of resistance—not because it is flawless, but because it insists on the right to choose its own contradictions. That insistence is intolerable to an imperial order that demands obedience, not perfection.

The Global South Is Re-Learning Solidarity

What most alarms Washington is not Venezuela alone, but contagion. If Venezuela endures – if it resists, adapts, survives – it reinforces the possibility of alternatives. It tells the Global South that submission is not inevitable, that sanctions are not omnipotent, that empire can be endured and outlasted.

This is why the struggle over Venezuela is global. From Palestine to Latin America, from Africa to West Asia, the same mechanisms of domination are at work: siege, delegitimization, economic strangulation. And increasingly, the same response emerges: refusal.

Empire Does Not Fall—It Retreats

Trump may shout. He may threaten. He may attempt to project strength through spectacle. But structural reality is unforgiving.

An empire facing coordinated resistance, declining legitimacy, and internal fracture does not win decisive victories. It withdraws unevenly, denies its defeats, and seeks scapegoats. This is how imperial decline looks—not dramatic collapse, but retreat disguised as resolve. Trump will not conquer Venezuela. The U.S. will not reclaim uncontested dominance in Latin America. The world has moved beyond that moment.

What remains is struggle – uneven, difficult, incomplete – but no longer paralysed by fear. And that, more than any speech or sanction, is what terrifies empire the most.

Ranjan Solomon, writer on justice, imperialism and the global South