The Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective’s Red Paper series takes on the pressing issues of our time with urgency and principled clarity. We are at the frontlines of the Battle of Ideas and we use anti-imperialist methodology to clarify the stakes, intensify the contradictions, challenge the propaganda, and defend the Resistance.
We, the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective (AISC), condemn in the strongest terms possible the US imperialist attack against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The US kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and First Combatant Cilia Flores in a blatantly criminal breach of international law on January 3, 2026, while violently assaulting the sovereignty of Nuestra América. We stand firmly with the Venezuelan people and their revolutionary Bolivarian State as they defend their sovereign right to self-determination. We unequivocally recognize Nicolás Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela and demand the United States government immediately release him and First Combatant Flores. As an organization committed to challenging US-led imperialism and supporting the sovereignty and national liberation of the Global Majority, AISC calls on anti-imperialist forces in the US and across the world to unite in defense of President Maduro and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
In Red Paper #1, AISC provides a critical analysis of the current US attack on Venezuela, demonstrating that it must be understood as an existential conflict between US imperialism and the sovereignty of the peoples of the Americas.
Introduction: The Two Fronts of Imperialist War
The US is waging war against Venezuela on two inter-related levels. First, this war constitutes a renewed escalation of a decades-long “counter-revolutionary” attack on revolutionary forces and states in the region that have overturned imperialist property structures.[1] Second, this war represents an escalation of US imperialism’s attempt to weaken and subjugate the architects and backers of an emergent polycentric world order in which the US will no longer be the sole, hegemonic superpower.[2] The two “fronts” of the US imperialist war are inter-related. The fracturing of the alliances driving forward the polycentric world order provides a necessary condition for isolating, and destroying, the sovereign development projects of the revolutionary states of the Americas. These projects are marked for destruction as they pose an existential challenge to US imperialism. They disrupt the ability of capital in the imperialist core to superexploit labor and dominate resources while also contesting the definitive basis of imperialist power: the control over the flow of resources and capital between territories.
The attack against Venezuela and the Trump regime’s escalated war footing have generated a broad spectrum of criticism and opposition. However, the terms of the opposition have often risked delegitimizing the Venezuelan state—and thus supporting the objectives of US imperialism. In particular, there is a return to a register of anti-war opposition that posits a fundamental distinction between the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and a generic category of the Venezuelan “people.” This is a self-defeating move at best, a complicit one at worst. It is not possible to defend the “Venezuelan people” while aligning with the imperialists in delegitimizing the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela as a “dictatorship.” It is not a generic category of the “Venezuelan people” that is under attack, but a specific state formation structured upon reorienting the nation’s resources in the service of national development rather than imperialist wealth appropriation. To delegitimize this state structure is to lay the groundwork for legitimizing US imperialist interventions. The questioning of an anti-imperialist state’s legitimacy, particularly by imperialist forces, should never serve as a basis for violating its state sovereignty.
As imperialist forces sow confusion, it is thus imperative that we respond with clarity as to why Venezuela has been attacked and move with a principled commitment to the defence of its sovereignty. This is a war on a revolutionary state that has challenged imperialism by reclaiming both its “internal” and “external” bases of sovereign power: it has constructed a sovereign national development project and forged sovereign international relations with other anti-imperialist states.
Socialism with Bolivarian Characteristics: Resource Sovereignty, Communal Power and Popular Defense
In the late twentieth century, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela emerged as a revolutionary challenge to the foundational bases of US imperialism. The Bolivarian Republic has deepened and sustained Venezuelan sovereign-popular ownership over its own resources, reclaiming control over its oil wealth from US corporations such as ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips.[3] It subsequently directed its oil wealth into sovereign national development projects[4] as well as into regional and international “South-South” frameworks[5] that fundamentally challenge the dependent relations that have kept Global South states at the mercy of the US-led imperialist order.
The formation of communes has been at the heart of the sovereign national development projects advanced by the Bolivarian Republic. Emerging out of the historic social missions launched by President Hugo Chávez in 2004—which virtually eliminated illiteracy via Misión Robinson and built a nationwide, free community healthcare system via Misión Barrio Adentroand significantly reduced poverty—the commune project advanced the revolutionary process towards what Chávez termed “communal socialism.”[6] In these grassroots structures, communities legislate, administer resources, and manage their own means of production. Forged under the pressure of the US economic blockade and imperialist hybrid warfare, the communes now collectively control productive resources in close coordination with the state. They have played a central role in mitigating the deleterious impact of sanctions by meeting urgent community needs and advancing food sovereignty.[7] Even under escalating US attack, President Nicolás Maduro’s government deepened the state’s commitment to the communes by launching a new strategic plan in November 2025 based on over 36,000 proposals from a national popular consultation intended to fortify national unity and resilience.[8]
This same communal infrastructure that sustains daily life under siege also forms the material and organizational basis for Venezuela’s national defense. In December, building on the grassroots power of the communes, the Bolivarian National Militia activated Nicolás Maduro’s doctrine of “Guerra de Todo el Pueblo,” distributing rifles and other weapons to millions of civilians.[9] The intent of the militia is to involve the whole of the Venezuelan people in the national defense against imperialist aggression. Maduro warned that any large-scale US invasion will face a “new Viet Nam,” a prolonged campaign of guerrilla war characterized by cascading hit-and-run attacks springing from compact urban areas, foreboding mountains, and immense jungles. While the US military retains immensely destructive technological capacities, it is increasingly evident that it is not capable of engaging in such a land war. By its own admission, it has not trained in tropical environments in decades, having just revived its “jungle warfare” training program in Panama for the first time in over 20 years.
It is the popular basis of the Bolivarian Revolution, renewed and reforged through the communes and the National Militia, that grounds the legitimacy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The “qualitative basis” of the sovereignty of the Bolivarian Republic is to be found in the empowerment of Indigenous, Afro-Venezuelan, and working class peoples, and the reorientation of the nation’s land and resources in service of a popular form of national development that meets the needs of all its peoples. This qualitative force provides the Bolivarian Republic with its greatest source of legitimacy and deepest power in resisting US imperialism.
Venezuela v. US Imperialism
It is precisely this combination of sovereign development, popular power, and territorial defense that the US led capitalist imperialist world order could never accept. Capitalist imperialism requires a consistent drain of cheap resources and goods from the periphery into the imperialist core as a means of both stabilizing class relations in the core and appropriating surplus value from the periphery.[10] Imperialism has historically established the conditions for such appropriation through military force and imposing economic dependency on the peripheries. Time and again, when the peoples of the imperially subjugated Global Majority have sought to reclaim their sovereign right over both their territories and the flow of economic capital into and out of their territories, they have been subjected to imperialist war and economic sanctions.[11] This is the fundamental rule of the capitalist imperialist system, as seen in the economic warfare and blockades imposed on Haiti in the 19th century, Cuba in the 20th century, and now Venezuela in the 21st century.
The emergence of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has been all the more threatening to the US imperialist order because it is a key insurgent challenge to the “end of history” Washington consensus that the US sought to impose on the entire planet at the close of the twentieth century. The structural adjustment programs that the United States enforced across the Global South destroyed national economies, undermined social reproduction capacities, and in so doing produced massive pools of cheap labor and resources for exploitation and appropriation by the imperialist core.[12] But what US imperialism did not foresee at the time was the strength of the anti-imperialist challenge that would be launched against the IMF-World Bank neocolonial program. Key among these challenges included the anti-IMF Caracazo movement in Venezuela that led to the Bolivarian socialist revolution and the rise of the communes;[13] Venezuela’s PetroCaribe Energy Agreement program that leveraged the country’s oil wealth for the socio-economic development and the integration of Caribbean countries;[14] the resilience of the Cuban socialist revolution in the face of the collapse of the Soviet Union;[15] the Lavalas program in Haiti demanding reparations and higher wages;[16] the struggle in Zimbabwe that led to the reclamation of stolen land by dispossessed Zimbabweans;[17] the anti-privatization water wars in Bolivia that led to the rise of MAS;[18] and the Palestinian second intifada that brought the Washington consensus Oslo framework to crisis.[19] The US has systematically sought to destroy each and every one of these challenges to the foundations of imperialist-core accumulation.
US imperialism has, over the past twenty five years, attempted coups d’etats and imposed punitive economic sanctions as a means to try to overthrow the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Among the longstanding aims of the US are to deny Venezuela sovereign control over its oil wealth and to hand it over instead to US oil majors, including through persistent demands that Venezuela pay “compensation” for the nationalization of its oil industry. Rather than cooperate with an increasingly sovereign Venezuelan oil sector, US oil majors escalated legal warfare, aggressively suing Venezuela for so-called “lost assets” and demanding compensation payments for the 2007 oil nationalization.[20] This demand for compensation to the expropriator—to the colonizer, to the imperialist—coupled with sanctions against national liberation projects, is a structural feature of imperialism. The roots of colonial-imperialist “compensation” lie in the blockades imposed against Haiti and Cuba, which demanded that colonial property owners be compensated for the “losses” incurred when the Haitian and Cuban peoples reclaimed sovereign power over their territories and lives.[21] Similar demands were imposed against Zimbabwe earlier this decade.[22] What is at stake today, however, is not only resource domination and colonial-imperialist compensation, but also control over the country’s financial flows as finance capital aims to dominate future revenues, debt, and collateral streams.
However, the US has failed time and again in its attempts to destroy the sovereignty of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The first Trump administration rolled out a “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign, which led to a severe economic crisis in Venezuela.[23] Its GDP contracted by close to 90 percent between 2013 to 2020, resulting in 40,000 deaths due to the devastating impact of the sanctions regime on Venezuela’s public health system.[24] The economic crisis also triggered massive economically motivated emigration from the country. The Venezuelan state not only withstood the sanctions campaign, but has achieved a small degree of economic recovery in recent years. In fact, Venezuela is forecasted to lead GDP growth in Latin America for both 2024 and 2025.[25] It is in light of the failure of the US economic sanctions regime to achieve its objectives of regime change and complete subordination that we must view the turn to military force against Venezuela. This latest wave of US imperialist intervention seeks to extract concessions from the Venezuelan state—particularly access to its oil and mineral wealth—and to curtail its independent, South-South solidaristic international relations. The attack on Venezuela is informed by the same strategic objectives that drove the US attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran this past summer. In both cases, the US has sought to destroy a sovereign state that has provisioned regional economic or military strategic depth to anti-imperialist forces.
The Revival of the Monroe Doctrine and the Recolonization of Nuestra América
The US imperialist attack on Venezuela has been identified as an enactment of the “Trump corollary to the Monroe doctrine” that animates the 2025 US National Security Strategy.[26] At its core, the revival of the Monroe doctrine is centered upon expelling what it identifies as “non-hemispheric rivals”—China, Russia, and Iran—from the Americas and re-consolidating the region under full spectrum US domination.[27] The Trump corollary is premised upon a claim that the “non-hemispheric rivals” threaten both regional prosperity and US power, and their removal and replacement with full spectrum US “leadership” will benefit the region’s economic development and security. What the attack on Venezuela reveals, however, is that the Trump corollary is primarily concerned with these “non-hemispheric rivals” for the role they have played affording Venezuela and other states in the region greater space for constructing and sustaining projects of sovereign development. Sovereign development advances the utilization of national resources for national development, and thus threatens the reproduction of cheap labor and resource pools for appropriation by capitalist imperialist modes of accumulation.
A clearer understanding of the relationship between sovereign development and the region’s engagement with an emergent polycentric world order can be grasped if we recall the key role played by these so-called “non-hemispheric rivals” in the consolidation of the gains of the Bolivarian Revolution. After the Bolivarian Revolution, the Venezuelan state identified deepening relations with non-Western powers as central to reducing dependency on US investment and export markets.[28] This strategy became particularly urgent and pronounced after Venezuela deepened the nationalization of its oil sector in 2007. Western capital, as mentioned above, refused to accept nationalization and instead sought to contest it by suing for “compensation” and effectively conducting a “capital strike” by withdrawing investments from the country.[29] While such measures have historically been used by imperialist powers to force concessions from peripheral states after they achieve independence – i.e. the capital strike will only be ended after the targeted state relents on its nationalization program – Venezuela was able to withstand this financial imperialism by drawing on support from China, Russia, and Iran. China and Venezuela created the “China-Venezuela Joint Fund” in 2007 that received significant injections of capital from Chinese state development banks that proved essential for maintaining state oil revenues in the service of infrastructure development and social spending.[30] Russia’s state-owned oil company, Rosneft, similarly injected significant levels of investment that sustained the Venezuelan state oil sector and provisioned funds for social spending.[31] Iran and Venezuela have deepened relations across multiple sectors such as healthcare and food production, and have forged cooperative economic relations through which they support each other in withstanding US sanctions. Iran, in particular, has transferred vital technical expertise, refinery parts, and catalysts to help sustain Venezuela’s blockaded oil industry.[32]
We see here the outlines of a world premised upon sovereign cooperation and solidarity. Venezuela’s ability to sustain its nationalization program provisioned the means for strengthening the cooperative relations with regional anti-imperialist states, most notably Cuba. Venezuela’s provisioning of discounted oil flows to Cuba has been essential to the latter’s own ability to withstand the nearly 70 year US blockade.[33] Venezuela has further taken leadership in regional integration efforts such as the Bolivaria Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). Venezuela and Cuban solidarity would, in turn, serve as an anchor for a growing Latin American anti-zionist bloc which raised its voice loudly, and took concrete material action, in opposition to the escalating US-zionist genocidal war against Palestinians. Both states have severed ties with the zionist entity. The US-zionist imperialist alliance has, in turn, made the defeat of the anti-zionist bloc in the Americas a key component of its larger strategy to overcome the zionist entity’s increasing international isolation.[34] We note here the commitment of the US backed Venezuelan regime change leader, Maria Corina Machado, to restore full Venezuelan diplomatic support for the zionist entity.[35] In addition, US secretary of state Marco Rubio has demanded that Venezuela sever its relations with anti-zionist forces in West Asia, namely the Islamic Republic of Iran and Hezbollah, as a condition for the ending of the US blockade on Venezuelan oil exports.[36]
These two inter-related levels of anti-imperialist sovereign expression—“internal” sovereign national development and “external” cooperation and solidarity with other anti-imperialist states—pose existential challenges to the US led imperialist world order. Sovereign national development reduces the capitalist core’s access to cheap labor and resources in the Global South, while deepening anti-imperialist inter-state cooperation counteracts the threat of “isolation” that imperialism seeks to impose on anti-imperialist states.
It is for this reason, above all, that the “Trump corollary to the Monroe doctrine” seeks to remove “non-hemispheric rivals” and why it has targeted Venezuela as its first act. It seeks to remove from Venezuela the strategic economic depth through which it has been able to withstand decades of hybrid warfare—capital strikes, international lawfare, sanctions, attempted coups—and sustain its sovereign development project. The attack on Venezuela explicitly takes as its aim the re-routing of oil flows away from China and Russia and towards the US.[37] This will open the door to windfall profits for Western finance and mining capital, severely curtail the sovereign development capacity of the Venezuelan state, and provision the US with a stronger control over international oil and capital flows. Controlling Venezuelan oil would, in turn, provide US imperialism with a powerful instrument with which to intensify its squeeze on the Cuban economy and advance its longstanding aim of rolling back the Cuban revolution. It could further be deployed to exercise leverage against China, the major source of strategic economic depth for anti-imperialist forces in the world today.
US imperialism’s strategic renewal of the Monroe doctrine is thus propelled, in significant part, by an awareness that the US has rapidly lost economic leadership in the world economy. China has demonstrated it is pulling away from the US in economic and technological sectors shaping the future of the world economy.[38] The superior efficiency and performance of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) sector has threatened the valuation of US AI sectors and firms that have received hundreds of billions of dollars in capital investment.[39] In contrast to the US doubling down on oil and gas as a means to power its AI sectors,[40] China is demonstrating a future that ties AI to the accelerated development of its renewable energy sector.[41] This represents a decisive shifting of the world away from dependence on oil and gas, which will not only challenge the basis of US imperialist power—resource dominance and dollar hegemony—but open greater space for more sustainable futures. China has further consolidated its command over the global supply chain for the transition to AI and renewable energy, securing control of both the access to, and the advanced technology required to process, the essential rare earth minerals renewable energy economies demand.[42] It bears emphasizing that China’s strategic control over energy and rare earth supply chains has been anchored primarily in long-term domestic industrial and processing capacity, while its access to upstream resources in the Global South has been sustained through negotiated South–South cooperation frameworks, as seen above in its relations with Venezuela.[43] This contrasts with the coercive sanctions, regime-change operations, and expropriatory demands characteristic of Western imperialism. Recognizing it is incapable of competing with China on economic terms, the US is increasingly using lawfare and military power to seize access to rare earth minerals, deepen control over energy flows, reshape global supply chains and shift capital investment towards US controlled global production lines.
While China has helped sustain Venezuela’s oil nationalization program, US oil majors have for decades sought to undermine and reverse it. In the fall of 2025, when U.S. courts ruled in favor of domestic energy and mining capital by ordering the Venezuelan state to sell its U.S. assets to satisfy colonial-imperialist “compensation” claims from Exxon and ConocoPhillips, the zionist-led “vulture capitalist” firm Elliot Management—owned by the notorious Paul Singer – stepped in and acquired Venezuela’s US assets—largely consisting of CITGO refineries.[44] The rush by the Trump regime to re-route Venezuelan oil to the US will then provision windfall profits to Elliot Management and other US firms involved in refining Venezuelan crude oil in the CITGO refineries.
A similar dynamic exists if the US is able to gain access to Venezuela’s substantial rare earth mineral supply. This will strengthen the “Pax Silica” alliance recently forged by the US. The “Pax Silica” is an explicit framework in which the US has brought together eleven allied states in an attempt to build a supply chain for semiconductor chips and AI technology independent of China.[45] Venezuela’s critical minerals (including coltan) would constitute an important foundation to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative.[46]
We can thus see how the US imperialist state’s “strategic” move to re-consolidate control over global energy and mineral flows has implications for the profitability and valuation of US capital and firms. It is necessary to be attentive to the motives of US imperialism at both the firm level and the structural level of the world economy in order to grasp the dynamics of the “Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.”
The Contradictions of the Trump Corollary: Tactical Gains versus Strategic Losses
In light of the US attack on Venezuela, it may appear that US imperialism has re-established its primacy in the world-system. However, it remains the case that its crises not only persist, but deepen. Absent a fundamental re-organization of its economic structure, the US will continue to prove incapable of keeping up with China’s productive leaps across a range of sectors, including renewable energy and AI. As the US doubles down on wars for oil, China has decisively opened a post-fossil fuel trajectory wherein its own dependency on oil will enter into secular decline.
The ongoing US-led wars in Ukraine and Palestine have become a resource drain for NATO.[47] Its member nations are suffering cash flow problems and declining economies compounded by exhausted weapons and defense systems that are expensive and slow-to-manufacture.[48] Social unrest across the US and Europe is high and political fragmentation threatens the stability of both.[49] In this context, the desperation of US imperialism betrays itself, manifesting in racist, colonial language, fascist repression, savage violence and abductions of both migrants and heads of state, as well as the accelerating use of concentration camps like the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador. Having lost the ability to conduct long wars as those waged against Viet Nam and Iraq, the US turns to short, sequential wars sprinkled with discrete and barbaric acts of aggression, like the abduction of President Maduro and First Combatant Flores.
The underlying contradiction persists for US imperialism: its immediate tactical victories undermine its longer term strategic objectives. It is notable that the US prepared for six months, then deployed 150 aircraft and dozens of military personnel to capture two people.[50] In the aftermath of this spectacular display of force, however, the Bolivarian Republic remains intact. Interim President Delcy Rodriguez has been sworn in, the Venezuelan armed forces, together with the mass-based Bolivarian militia, have ensured national security and stability, opposition parties have united with President Maduro’s party—Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV)—in defense of the nation; and each day has brought growing global and national outcry against the US as a “rogue superpower.”
US-led Western imperialism has once again reaffirmed its refusal to make any space for the sovereign development of the peoples of the Global South. The defeat of US imperialism therefore remains the fundamental task confronting all those who are fighting for a world founded on sovereignty, justice, and peace. In the face of the criminal terrorist attack conducted by US imperialism, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela remains standing and its popular forces remain prepared to defend it. It is imperative that anti-imperialist forces across the world unite in demanding the release of President Maduro and First Combatant Flores, the unconditional lifting of U.S. sanctions and the blockade against Venezuela and Cuba, the full defense of the sovereignty of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and the recognition of the Venezuelan people’s right to resist imperialist aggression.
Notes
[1] Our use of the concepts of “revolutionary” and “counter-revolutionary” is precise. Our understanding of revolution begins with Malcolm X’s definition that “revolutions overturn systems”, which we then combine with Karl Marx’s insight that the overturning of a system (or mode of production) occurs when its organizing property relations are “burst asunder” by class struggle. The system of capitalist imperialism has historically organized itself in its colonies and imperially subjugated peripheries through property regimes—plantations, haciendas, zamindari, etc.—that are structured by a “denial of sovereignty” and which function to transfer cheap labor, resources, and surplus value to the imperialist core. Revolution from the periphery is thus premised upon an overturning of the plantation, its underlying power relations being burst asunder by the violent class struggle of peasants and workers. In the Latin American region, the revolutionary struggle has been waged on a continental scale and has secured important victories in overturning imperialist property structures in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. The “counter-revolutionary” war seeks to return to the past, to undo the revolution and restore imperialist property. We can grasp here the convergence of US oil majors and Venezuelan class collaborators eager to re-enter Venezuela through the renewed militarized Monroe doctrine.
[2] In this case, the target is the “framework” being constructed by relations between Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, China, and Russia.
[3] James Petras, “Venezuela: Democracy, Socialism, and Imperialism” in The Marxist (24,2), 2008.
[4] George Ciccariello-Maher, We Created Chavez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution(Duke University Press, 2013).
[5] Cira Pascual Marquina and Chris Gilbert, Venezuela, the Present as Struggle: Voices from the Bolivarian Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, October 29, 2020).
[6] Chris Gilbert, Commune or Nothing! Venezuela’s Communal Movement and its Socialist Project (New York: Monthly Review Press, October 1, 2023); Rebecca Trotzky Sirr, “Misión Barrio Adentro: Experiencing Health Care as a Human Right in Venezuela,” Venezuelanalysis, May 27, 2007, https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2406/.
[7] “Preliminary Statement and Findings of the Venezuela Fact-Finding Mission of the International People’s Tribunal on U.S. Imperialism,” National Lawyers Guild International Committee, August 3, 2023, https://nlginternational.org/2023/08/preliminary-statement-and-findings-of-the-venezuela-fact-finding-mission-of-the-international-peoples-tribunal-on-u-s-imperialism/.
[8] President Maduro Celebrates Success of 4th Nationwide Popular Consultation,” Orinoco Tribune, November 25, 2025, https://orinocotribune.com/president-maduro-celebrates-success-of-4th-nationwide-popular-consultation/.
[9] Instituto Tricontinental de Investigación Social, Venezuela y las guerras híbridas en Nuestra América, Dossier no. 17, June 2019, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/190604_Dossier-17_ES-Web-Final-2.pdf.
[10] Samir Amin, The Law of Worldwide Value (Monthly Review Press, 2009); Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and Present (Monthly Review Press, 2021); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972).
[11] Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Columbia, 2004).
[[12]](https://www.anti-imperialists.com/red-papers/9c87cae1-c7ba-4b1b-b5dc-299fd04b746a/