The global meaning of the US attack on Venezuela
First published at NACLA.
Historians will likely look back at the January 3, 2026 attack on Venezuela, the kidnapping of its president, and the takeover of the country as marking the definitive crack up of the post-WWII international order as the world descends into transnational conflagration. The U.S.-Caribbean venture is inscribed within the broader logic of the epochal crisis of global capitalism that also encompasses the United States’ threat to take over Greenland, ICE assassinations in U.S. cities, the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the wars in Ukraine and Sudan, the bombing of Nigeria, mass displacement and the seizure of mineral deposits in the Congo, and other headlines that are reverberating around the world.
In times of epochal crisis, we can only make sense of events by framing them within their world-historic context. The United States’ position as the hegemonic anchor of world capitalism has been in decline for some time as the world fragments into competing political and geoeconomic centers. Yet all countries are integrated into a single globalized system of production, finance, and services—and no one state, however powerful, can control the process of global accumulation. In earlier epochs, the breakdown of hegemonic order during periods of capitalist crisis was marked by political instability, intense class and social struggles, wars, and ruptures in the established international system.
We have entered anew a period of worldwide upheaval. Key turning points include Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the West’s radical political, military, and economic response to it, as well as Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza beginning in 2023 and the West’s complicity in it. Major crises of world capitalism have historically involved the breakdown of state legitimacy, widespread social conflict, political upheaval, and war. But the current crisis is like no other, given the social and biospheric limits to further expansion and the destructive power of the global arsenal. An epochal crisis signals the irreversible decline of capitalism’s capacity to reproduce itself through time and space. The different dimensions of this crisis — economic, social, political, and ecological — are coming together in an explosive mix that is generating conflict in every direction.
Structurally, global capitalism faces a crisis of overaccumulation, chronic stagnation, and a secular decline in the rate of profit that generates intense pressure for expansion. The capitalist system is by its nature expansionary, and cycles of crisis have always involved waves of violent expansion. The transnational capitalist class has accumulated more wealth than it can spend, much less reinvest. In its desperate search for outlets for these surpluses and new spaces for transnational accumulation, it has launched a new round of predatory expansion around the world involving the seizure of markets and resources — especially energy and mineral resources — through war, displacement, and repression. The U.S. state in its Trumpist form and beyond it, what I will call Global Trumpism, has become the out-of-control instrument of this expansionary wave.
Transnational capital is penetrating ever deeper into the Latin American countryside, where land and resources must be tapped to fuel this expansion. Autonomous peasant and Indigenous communities stand as barriers and must be dispossessed. The so-called “War on Drugs” has nothing to do with combatting drugs, yet provides a pretext for the application of state and paramilitary violence to access this wealth and contain resistance to the plunder. The Gaza genocide has set a precedent for the impunity with which ruling classes can unleash death and destruction in complete disregard for any legal order.
This is the larger context for the U.S. takeover of Venezuela, intended as much as a disciplinary projection of power in Latin America as it is as a seizure of the country’s oil and mineral resources, as well as a show of force on the world stage. As part of its playbook, the emerging U.S. fascist state seeks to normalize the use of violence beyond borders with absolute arrogance and impunity. Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy evoked a “Trump Corollary” to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, prioritizing tech and financial sector dominance by redirecting U.S. military power to the Western Hemisphere, expanding access to critical resources, and propping up regimes aligned with the Trump agenda.
Thirdworldization and the global oil market
While Venezuela is the first casualty of this “Donroe Doctrine,” we must note that the Bolivarian Revolution has been neither democratic nor socialist. The Venezuelan state has served as a machine for plunder and corruption by political, military, and economic elites. As it has shifted state policies to favor employers, it has increasingly repressed workers and opened the floodgates to corporate predation by both Chinese and Western transnational capital. As the state has increasingly taken on mafioso dimensions, different Chavista factions have engaged in fierce internal struggles over power, fiefdoms, and plundering rights. Newly appointed interim President Delcy Rodríguez and her brother, National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez, appear to have won out over Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello and army chief Vladamir Padrino López, as charges of “betrayal” flew around Caracas in the aftermath of the incursion — including from Maduro’s son “Nicolasito,” who promised, according to the Associated Press, that “history will reveal who the traitors were.”
Venezuela will likely face a period of prolonged instability and conflict. Transnational investors will need a strong and compliant state to extract hydrocarbons and minerals. In the lead up to January 3, the CIA reportedly determined that Chavismo needed to be preserved and that Rodríguez was best positioned during a transition period to hold together the Venezuelan state and military apparatus, necessary to provide investment guarantees for transnational capital and to exercise social control in the face of mass discontent and popular protest. Reportedly engaged in secret negotiations with the White House since April 2025, Rodríguez announced, the day after being sworn in as the country’s interim president on January 5, that she would work with Washington on an “agenda of cooperation.”
If Latin American immigrants in the United States are as much a target of the fascist state as Latin America itself, another crucial link emerges between the U.S. takeover of Venezuela and domestic policy. As the global crisis deepens, working classes in the rich countries that had enjoyed some protection from the worst ravages of exploitation are now undergoing a process of “thirdworldization,” whereby their living standards are plummeting as they begin to experience the unemployment, precariousness, and impoverishment of their counterparts in the Global South. In the larger picture, this thirdworldization is essential to understanding the U.S. seizure of Venezuela’s oil.
In 1974, three years after Washington abandoned the gold standard, the United States and Saudi Arabia worked out the Petrodollar Agreement, which established a dollar denominated global oil market. For half a century, pricing oil exclusively in U.S. dollars forced the rest of the world to sell and buy oil in U.S. currency, making the dollar the reserve currency for global trade and investment. This gave Washington enormous political and economic clout, allowing the U.S. Treasury to finance deficits by printing dollars and emitting trillions of dollars in bonds snatched up by global investors. The petrodollars arrangement thus helped to keep the U.S. domestic economy afloat, buoyed national living standards, and stabilized the domestic social order.
But the U.S.-Saudi agreement expired in 2024, and the Saudis did not renew it. To the contrary, the BRICS bloc and other countries have increasingly traded in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, while the global oil market has moved slowly but steadily away from exclusive dollar denomination. The end of dollar hegemony in global financial markets threatens to destabilize the entire U.S. political economy, spark hyperinflation, and plunge living standards in the United States — conditions likely to spark widespread political and social unrest.
The January 3 attack on Venezuela and the takeover of its oil is nothing less than a barefaced bid to maintain the petrodollar through international violence, piracy, and fraud.
The global police state
If the global oil market is one part of the Caribbean saga, another is the centrality of the the new digital technologies, led by artificial intelligence (AI), to the global economy and society. These technologies and the billionaires who control them are driving a radical new round of worldwide restructuring and transformation. Big Tech controls the entire ecosystem of global digitalized capitalism, which gives tech capital enormous structural power that is now being converted into direct political power through the fascist state. The new digital technologies require a massive expansion of data centers in the United States and around the world to fuel the AI revolution, demanding enormous increases in the supply of electricity, and, in turn, the seizure of energy resources and critical minerals such as lithium and cobalt.
As the crisis of global capitalism deepens, political power is hardening and social disintegration is spreading. Global inequality and deprivation have reached obscene levels and are driving conflicts everywhere. Rising inequality, impoverishment, and insecurity undermine state legitimacy, destabilize national political systems, jeopardize elite control, and give impetus to authoritarian, dictatorial, and fascist forms of government. Ruling groups now face a crisis of social control that is leading many countries towards authoritarianism and neofascism. We are moving into an era of civil and interstate wars, permanent political upheaval, and outright chaos.
In this context, the U.S. attack on Venezuela reflects the increasing centrality of warfare and systems of transnational social control and repression to the entire global economy and society. An expanding global police state that goes well beyond state militaries is on full display in the U.S. militarization of the Caribbean. Digitalization has vastly enhanced states’ capacity for surveillance and control; war itself has become digitalized. The global police state serves a triple purpose for the ruling classes. First, it is an instrument of social control and repression at a time when capitalist states face acute crises of legitimacy, mass discontent with the status quo, and widespread spontaneous and organized resistance. Second, the global police state is an instrument to smash open new spaces for accumulation by attacking states and displacing communities standing in the way of the seizure of resources, from the Congo and Burma to Palestine, Ecuador, and now Venezuela. Third, investing in systems of warfare, social control, and repression provides an increasingly important outlet for unloading surplus accumulated capital.
It is therefore unsurprising that defense stocks spiked after Trump announced on January 8 that he would seek an increase in the U.S. military budget to $1.5 trillion, up from $901 billion slated for 2026. Likewise, stocks in CoreCivic and GEO Group, two of the leading corporations that run private, for-profit immigrant concentration camps, shot up as Trump expanded the war on immigrants and raised the anti-immigrant budget to $170 billion. Around the world, military spending is skyrocketing amid a bleak industrial landscape and chronic stagnation in the civilian economy. There has been an explosion in the value of aerospace and defense stocks, which have outperformed the S&P500 over the last few decades, alongside massive new investment in tech firms that are pivoting towards digital technologies for warfare and repression
In Latin America, the Brazilian, Bolivian, Mexican, and Venezuelan militaries doubled in size from the turn of the century to the 2020s. Central American militaries grew by 20 percent, Colombia’s military quadrupled, and the rest of the region’s armed forces expanded by an average of 35 percent. This militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression are integral to the political economy of fascism. They throw fresh firewood on the embers of a global economy sinking into long-term stagnation, even as these means of accumulation escalate tensions within and among states. Venezuela is thus a frightening harbinger of a new era of permanent global warfare.
The “rules based” international order put in place at the close of WWII reflected the global balance of power of the post-war period, with the United States as the hegemonic anchor of an expanding world capitalism that enjoyed several decades of prosperity. But that order increasingly became an anachronism as the global economy shifted economic power to new centers and the system entered a deep structural crisis, especially in the wake of the 2008 global financial collapse. The attack on Venezuela spells the death knell of this order. Not surprisingly, Trump withdrew the United States from more than 60 international organizations on January 8. “I don’t need international law,” he declared in an interview with The New York Times, adding that his “own morality” is “the only thing” restraining him around the world.
That is not true. The only force that is capable of restraining Global Trumpism and the crisis-ridden system it represents is mass resistance from below by the global working and popular classes. Our resistance.
William I. Robinson is a distinguished professor of Sociology, Global Studies, and Latin American Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His latest book is Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism (2025).