U.S. President Donald Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife on Jan. 3 expanded both the war he had started in September with murderous attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific and the world’s spiral into war. Its connection to his war to subdue the people in the U.S. was viscerally brought home by an ICE agent’s murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.

For months, Trump’s “team”—“Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth; Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio, whose career has been fanatically anti-Cuba; Stephen Miller, Führer of La Migra, intent on deporting millions of migrants; and General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—have planned, openly and secretly, to attack Venezuela. They moved a complete armada into the Caribbean of ships, planes, soldiers, sailors, Marines, Special Forces, and air force pilots. This action gives a 21st century face to 19th and 20th Century U.S. imperialism, with a mission far beyond Venezuela.

U.S. CAPITALISM’S IMPERIAL FACE

“Against imperialism, unity of our America,” mural in Caracas, Venezuela. Photo: Andreas Lehner, CC BY 2.0

The press conference with Trump and team held the day after the invasion/kidnapping, with Trump crowing about the “perfect” operation, and Caine reciting the “facts” of the imperialist incursion—no “American” deaths (forget about the admitted 75 Venezuelans killed during operation!)—was a vulgar display not alone of Trumpism, but of the reach of U.S. capitalism’s imperialist face. This was not about stopping drugs, nor of some supposed narco-terrorist gangs invading the U.S. The vast majority of the more than 200 Venezuelans sent by Trump and Miller to El Salvador’s infamous torture-prison did not have criminal records. Trump himself said over and over that the conquest of Venezuela is about oil, oil, oil.

The Venezuelan masses under Maduro’s dictatorial rule never benefited from Venezuelan oil. Oil profits went to his generals and other elites. Whatever the vision was of Hugo Chavez’s “21st Century socialism,” it was constructed from above, not from the masses, and its remnants have long since disappeared, under the U.S.’s horrendous economic sanctions and Maduro’s authoritarian rule, together with the 2014 crash in oil prices.

More is at stake for us in the U.S., where Trump is the president of a capitalist country that has for decades been determined to become the hegemonic ruler of the world. Trumpism is a new attempt to reassert U.S. economic-political dominance on a global level beginning with Latin America, with the relative decline of U.S. power reflected in tacit acceptance of other spheres of influence dominated by Russia and China. Old-fashioned “gunboat diplomacy” will certainly be understood by Latin America, whose countries have suffered over and over from U.S. imperialism, and recently Chinese imperialism has also been active in the region.

This is not simply about the idiosyncrasies of Trump. It is the logic of capitalism rearing its hideous head as it attempts to establish spheres of influence and global dominance. The more openly brutal and unilateral form it is taking under Trump, both in Latin America and in U.S. cities—along with Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Russia’s war on Ukraine—and the apparent falling apart of the post-Cold War world order, reflects the deep economic, environmental, and social crisis in which capitalism has been submerged for some time.

We need to fight Trumpism at home and oppose U.S. imperialism’s new adventures while not separating that from opposing the fascistic attack on immigrants and others at home, nor from opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Russia’s war on Ukraine. More deeply, we need to recognize that Trumpism is only the most prominent brutal form of present-day capitalism/imperialism, making our fight not only against Trump but as well against capital and capitalism.