EDITORIAL
Trump’s Threats against Venezuela—Extortion or Build-Up to War?

Oct 19, 2025

U.S. is threatening war against Venezuela. Sure, Trump likes to play “tough guy.” But he’s driving down the same road U.S. imperialism has mapped out for decades.

Today, Trump sends helicopters and drones to blow up fishing boats, then brags about killing their occupants. His secretary of war puts a U.S. naval armada in the Caribbean near Venezuela and sends U.S. planes capable of carrying nuclear weapons into Venezuelan air space. Trump’s attorney general issued an arrest warrant for Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, putting a 50-million-dollar bounty on his head.

Intent on keeping his head, Maduro acceded to most U.S. extortion demands. He agreed to transfer control over Venezuela’s oil and gas fields to U.S. oil corporations. He accepted to sever trade relations with Russia, China, Iran and Cuba, cutting off Venezuela’s last semi-independent leg.

But the U.S. wanted more. It wanted its man (or woman) as Venezuela’s president. Maduro, however, wouldn’t step down.

So, Trump upped the ante. He authorized the CIA to invade Venezuela and assassinate Maduro. Venezuela’s president-in-waiting is Maria Corina Machado, who just won the Nobel “Peace” Prize. That little ornament can’t paper over her long reactionary history in Venezuela. The daughter of one of the richest capitalist families in the region, she has been supported ever since 2002 with funds coming from a George Bush foundation. She was involved in planning for a military coup in 2002 aimed at throwing out Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, who had tried to use part of Venezuela’s nationalized oil wealth to pay for education and health care for the population.

Machado called for the U.S. military to invade Venezuela then, and she’s calling for it now. She supported every economic sanction imposed by the U.S.—sanctions strangling Venezuela’s economy and impoverishing its people. She applauds Trump when he incinerates fishermen and their boats, and when he sends Venezuelans to a vicious jail in El Salvador.

She will be the perfect flunky for U.S. imperial interests as Venezuela’s next president.

The U.S. has a long history of organizing coups against regimes in Latin America it could not completely control: Guatemala, 1954; Cuba, 1961 and many subsequent attempts; Brazil, 1964; Dominican Republic, 1965; Chile, 1973; Nicaragua, repeated attempts in the 1980s; Haiti, multiple times throughout the 20th century.

This history does not rest on the evil machinations of any one president, even one as evil as Trump. It was produced by the functioning of imperialism in the world.

There are six or seven major imperialist powers in the world, with the U.S. on the top, and a few more minor ones. All the other countries are, in one way or another, economically subject to these powers. A significant part of their wealth is drained toward the imperial centers.

Their natural resources, like oil, must be traded in the world markets that imperialism controls. Their products produced by human labor must be traded in those same markets. The products and materials they need to buy can be found only in those same markets.

The terribly unequal relations spawned by such a system don’t rest on economic legs alone. They require the threat of force, and behind the threat, actual force. That is why war is an ever-present reality in a world organized by imperialism.

There is no answer to such a system unless the working class organizes itself to get rid of it—unless this perspective, no matter how far off it seems, is advocated inside the working class today.