On January 3rd, the United States launched airstrikes across Venezuela, captured President Nicolás Maduro, and declared it would “run” the country. In the hours that followed, Trump spoke openly of U.S. oil companies going in to “fix the badly broken infrastructure” and “start making money.” The mask didn’t slip; it was simply never really on.
This is imperialism in its plainest form: the violent seizure of a nation for its resources. And it is entirely consistent with the history of U.S. intervention across the Global South.
The United States has been trying to crush Venezuela for over twenty-five years. When Hugo Chávez was elected in 1999 and launched the Bolivarian Revolution, Washington saw the threat immediately: a resource-rich nation asserting sovereignty over its own oil and using that wealth to improve the lives of its people instead of increasing the wealth of Wall Street. We see the same response unfolding today. They backed a coup in 2002 that removed Chávez. When that failed, they turned to sanctions. Obama declared Venezuela an “extraordinary threat” to national security.” Trump imposed an oil embargo that collapsed production and strangled imports of food and medicine.
The United States will not allow a liberated South America, a liberated Middle East, or a liberated world, as it would impose serious constraints on their ability to appropriate resources and labor from these respective regions. As W.E.B. Du Bois once said, “What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamond and cocoa?” So they bomb and invade these countries, forcing them to end spending on national development, and instead direct those funds toward defense.
The United States cannot stomach a liberated Venezuela, or any other nation who develops for people and not profit, because it opens the door to liberation movements across South America, and across the globe. This is completely antithetical to capitalism’s goal to endlessly accumulate money and resources, and it’s clear that they’re willing to go to extraordinary lengths to prevent that from occurring. To the point
where they will even debase their own claims about human rights, international rules-based orders, etc. etc. to completely flatten entire nations over oil.
We must work together to create a world where we no longer focus on the endless pursuit of growth; a world that no longer requires the exploitation of other countries for profit, but instead uses our collective labor for the collective good of humanity.
This means rejecting the logic that treats oil fields as prizes to be seized, that measures a nation’s worth by its extractable resources, that treats sovereignty as an obstacle to accumulation. The attack on Venezuela is not an aberration—it is the system working exactly as designed. When Trump speaks openly of running Venezuela, of U.S. oil companies going in to “start making money,” he is simply saying the quiet part out loud. This is what imperialism has always been: the violent reorganization of the world for capital.
A degrowth future is an anti-imperialist future. There is no path to ecological sanity that does not also dismantle the war machine, because that machine exists precisely to secure the flows of resources that fuel the growth imperative. Every barrel of oil extracted at gunpoint, every coup staged to protect corporate interests, every nation strangled by sanctions—these are not separate from the climate crisis. They are its engine. And that must end.
Solidarity with the people of Venezuela is solidarity with a livable planet. We cannot build sustainable societies at home while our governments bomb and blockade those who attempt the same abroad. The struggle is one struggle.
As Giorgos Kallis reminds us: “A world where enough is plenty can be a world of freedom, equality, and joy.”
That is the world we are fighting for.
Caracol DSA 