In the past few weeks, the United States has moved decisively to escalate its confrontation with Venezuela. Under the veneer of ‘counter-narcotics operations’, Washington has deployed the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, to Caribbean waters, accompanied by destroyers, assault ships, and thousands of troops. The official explanation of disrupting drug trafficking, collapses under basic scrutiny. Venezuela is neither a meaningful producer nor exporter of Washington’s ‘targets’. The facts instead reveal the revival of an old imperial Monroe Doctrine: the US asserting its dominance in Latin America through military force, sanctions, and the manufacture of convenient enemies.
In the mainstream American press, the narrative has been made deliberately simple, as is often done. The Venezuelan government, according to the US, is led by ‘narco-terrorists’. Trump has gone as far as publicly ‘authorising’ CIA operations in Venezuela, which in itself is a blatant violation of international law, something the agency has been doing covertly for decades. This ‘authorisation’ serves no operational purpose, but a political one: constructing a threat and manufacturing consent.
The drug narrative itself is untenable. Fentanyl, which Trump insists is flowing from Venezuela, is not produced there. Cocaine, the drug of the American rich, which Trump does not want to target, is manufactured mainly in Colombia, not Venezuela. Moreover, the victims of the US air-strikes in the Caribbean have been Venezuelan, Colombian, and Trinidadian working-class fisherfolk, who had nothing to do with any drug operation, as their families testified. The US has gone so far as to invent a fictional ‘Cártel de los Soles’, meaning the ‘Cartel of the Suns’. The logic resembles the 1989 invasion of Panama, when the US turned its own longtime asset Manuel Noriega into a “drug lord” overnight to justify invasion, or in the case of Iraq where fictional ‘weapons of mass destruction’ were used as a pretext for invasion and the subsequent looting of resources.
Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves. For the US, this alone makes Venezuela too ‘strategically significant’ to remain outside its control. The democratically elected Venezuelan government’s insistence on sovereign control over its national resources is incompatible with Washington’s vision for Latin America: a sphere of influence governed by compradors and open to foreign extraction, in essence, a colony. This is why US administrations, past and present, have treated Venezuela as an ideological and strategic enemy.
Obama intensified sanctions. These sanctions, comparable in severity to those on Cuba and the DPRK, have contributed to food shortages, medicine scarcity, and deepened poverty. They are designed to break societies until they accept political outcomes favourable to Washington. Long before open military escalation, these sanctions devastated Venezuela’s economy. During Trump’s first term, he recognised a self-appointed ‘interim president’, Juan Guaidó, whose brief international recognition collapsed just as quickly as it had arisen. Recently, the US even backed an attempted invasion, Operation Gideon, in which former US special forces trained Colombian mercenaries to overthrow Nicolás Maduro, the President. That effort ended when Venezuelan fishermen captured the invaders. Meanwhile, US-backed figures such as María Corina Machado, a far-right neoliberal ideologue, are celebrated as champions of democracy and even win the Nobel Peace Prize. That she openly advocates mass privatisation and deepened dependence on US capital is precisely why Washington supports her.
The recent military escalation cannot be separated from the domestic crisis in the USA. As Washington commits $18 million per day to sustain its naval force near Venezuela, 42 million Americans are currently facing food shortages due to the prolonged government shutdown. The Gerald R. Ford strike group alone consumes $6–8 million per day, while destroyers and ships add millions more. Since late August, operations have cost US taxpayers over $600 million. For the capitalist elite in the US, austerity at home and militarism abroad are two expressions of the same political logic. Social welfare is portrayed as unaffordable, while imperial warfare is never questioned. The working poor are denied basic necessities but funds will always be available for gunboat diplomacy to enforce global domination. This in itself lays bare the class content of American imperialism.
Latin American left movements have not remained silent. Colombian President Gustavo Petro has committed to forming international brigades to defend Venezuela in case of a US invasion. The entire region carries living memories of US-backed dictatorships, coups, and disappearances. What Washington calls ‘restoring democracy’ is a familiar euphemism for repression.
The US is escalating its attack on Venezuela as the latter strives for independence. The narco-terror narrative is a careful ideological construct, reviving the logic of both the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘war on drugs’ to justify an impending invasion driven by capitalist priorities: energy interests, geopolitical insecurity, and an imperial reflex. It is expressed through sanctions, naval deployments, CIA operations, and the criminalisation of entire governments even as millions of Americans face deprivation. This is not merely a foreign policy dispute. It is a struggle for sovereignty, resources, and the right of a nation to determine its future outside the shadow of an empire.
