In recent months, the US has moved decisively from coercion exercised through indirect means to coercion exercised openly and without mediation. The escalation of economic warfare against Venezuela – sanctions, seizures, financial strangulation, has culminated in direct military action, including the bombing of Caracas and the forcible removal of President Nicolás Maduro.
Whatever moral vocabulary is mobilised to justify this escalation, the significance of the event lies elsewhere. It marks a transformation in how US power now operates under conditions in which the older mechanisms of hegemonic governance have begun to fail.
US on top
Unipolarity did not consist merely in the numerical dominance of US military capacity. It described a historically specific arrangement in which US interests could be presented as universal norms, enforced less through open violence than through institutional and financial architectures that made compliance appear as participation in an objective international order.
The centrality of the US dollar, the embedding of rival states within Western legal regimes, and the role of multilateral organisations functioned together as a system capable of disciplining deviation without rupturing the appearance of stability.
The coercive apparatus of the US represents this fusion of financial warfare with direct kinetic force into a single system of hegemony. Yet, this world is decaying.
US in decline
Trump, albeit unwittingly, has placed the US on the path of decline, one in which imperial power is no longer mediated through neat institutional consensus or economic integration, but increasingly asserted through militarisation and coercion.
The explicit rationale of the aptly-named ‘Donroe Doctrine,’ a corollary to the Monroe doctrine’s claim to hemispheric sovereignty under conditions of global retrenchment, reflects the recognition that the instruments which once guaranteed US dominance have lost their efficacy, and that deviation can no longer be disciplined within the parameters of an intact system.
Under this doctrine, Venezuela is reclassified not as a sovereign state, but as a malfunctioning subsystem within a self-declared sphere of US influence. The accusations deployed to justify this intervention, narco-terrorism, humanitarian catastrophe, democratic illegitimacy, are less causal explanations than modular pretexts assembled to render aggression legible after the fact.
Each charge is selectively applied, internally inconsistent and transparently hypocritical, emanating from a state whose own record of cartelised finance, proxy violence, mass incarceration, electoral interference abroad and routine violation of international is unrivalled.
The return of the principle ‘might makes right’ foreshadows the instinctive gesture of a wounded empire toward self-preservation through confrontation. It is at this juncture that the assault on Venezuela acquires its true significance – not as an isolated act of aggression, but the embryonic expression of a new historical configuration.
Why Venezuela? Because it’s there
The decision to escalate from sanctions to direct military intervention was not driven by the idiosyncrasies or personal volition of Donald Trump alone. Rather, it reflects the constraints imposed upon historical actors by conditions not of their own choosing, compelling them to enact measures that correspond to the deeper, inexorable logic of a system in crisis.
As G. W. F. Hegel observed in The Philosophy of History:
Such individuals had no consciousness of the general Idea they were unfolding, while prosecuting those aims of theirs; on the contrary, they were practical, political men… For that Spirit which had taken this fresh step in history is the inmost soul of all individuals; but in a state of unconsciousness which the great men in question aroused.
For Hegel, the cunning of reason names precisely this process: historical transformation does not proceed through the intentional realisation of a universal plan, but through the seemingly contingent, self-interested actions of political actors who, unbeknownst to themselves, serve the
unfolding of a broader historical logic.
In this sense, Venezuela is not the product of a singular decision or aberrant policy choice, but a moment in which the underlying contradictions of the unipolar order are forced into the open. The intervention marks not a deviation from history’s course, but the means through which it advances – revealing, in violent form, the exhaustion of the old order and the emergence of a new one.
Trump’s turn toward militarisation and territorial assertion acknowledges the indeterminacy of a world in which the present Weltgeist is blowing eastward, not retreating the empire, but purifying it, stripping it of its moral pretensions and reducing it to its bare essence: territorial expansion, resource capture and geoeconomic supremacy.
Expand or die
The system cannot not expand; if it remains stable, it stagnates and dies. It must continue to absorb everything in its path, to interiorise everything that was hitherto exterior to it. Economic instruments may have once redirected the flows of capital, but they no longer suffice to arrest the system’s relentless expansion nor the conflicts it inevitably generates.
Instead, those conflicts now re-emerge in a more acute form – in this case, through open military confrontation and regime change in Venezuela.
As Deleuze and Guattari wrote in Anti-Oedipus:
Social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned
belief in the possibility of capitalism’s natural death by attrition. No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.
Capitalism continually sets and then overcomes its own limits, but it never ceases to set them. The Bolivarian Republic is one such limit, an exterior that must be forcibly interiorised, not because it threatens the system’s existence, but because it exposes its waning capacity to universalise itself peacefully.
Just as in the 1930s Emperor Hirohito turned Japan to Manchuria to break the impasse of economic stagnation and siphon materials necessary for war, so too does the US turn outward, toward Latin America, Venezuela and now Greenland as a mineral and energy lifeline for reindustrialisation and militarisation.
The success of Imperial Japan in consolidating domestic support for war through the economic gains derived from Manchuria reflects the same principle now at work: territorial expansion as a means of alleviating stagnation, restoring national confidence and uniting a fragmented populace through soft mobilisation overseen by the military-industrial complex, preparing millions for the ultimate confrontation with China.
Westward focus
By engaging in a strategic retrenchment in Europe and the Middle East, deferring security issues to the respective regional actors, the US relieves itself of the fiscal burden of subsidising their defence while simultaneously forging ties with stronger junior partners against China in the Pacific.
In doing so, the US preserves its hegemonic position while shedding its superfluous expenditures. The US reasserts itself not as the manager of global affairs nor the enforcer of the rules-based order, but as a political actor in the Schmittian sense: drawing lines, demarcating enemies and preparing for war.
It follows, then, that the era in which states could trade with, align with and hedge between competing centres of power is rapidly closing. Ambiguity is intolerable. The logic now imposed is binary: subservience to the US military-economic bloc or integration into the emergent Sinocentric world-system. Venezuela’s destruction serves precisely this function – to tear apart the ambiguity that once allowed states to manoeuvre between poles.
As Marx observed:
Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. 3
Always war – as Venezuela shows
The US ruling class cannot resolve its contradictions through peace. It requires crisis and war to reproduce itself, and in charting this path, it confirms the inevitability of its own exhaustion. The US is a centrifugal empire. It depends on perpetual outward motion.
It must lash out in every direction because it cannot stand still; its internal equilibrium is contingent upon a condition of external disorder. For this reason, China is cast not merely as a competitor, but as an existential threat. As Trump’s National Security Advisor, Michael Waltz, said:
We are in a Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party [because China is an] existential threat to the US with the most rapid military build-up since the 1930s.
China is the enemy par excellence because it represents an alternative, anti-hegemonic centre of power. Unlike the US, it does not universalise itself through military occupation. It does not dominate through force. It is centripetal: it attracts.
Its “dominance” consists in its capacity to act as a Sinomorphing force, setting civilisational and economic standards through integration into a shared Eurasian industrial space. As Carl Schmitt wrote in Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political:
An enemy is not someone who must be eliminated because he has no value. The enemy is on the same level as I am. For this reason, I must fight him to the same extent and within the same bounds as he fights me.
The Donroe Doctrine
Thus, the assault on Venezuela is axiomatic to the decline of US imperialism: a tacit admission of the deep ontological indeterminacy confronting the US in a world it no longer commands.
The return to a Monroe-style imperial logic is not a proposal but a fait accompli. The Donroe Doctrine does not announce itself as novelty; it reveals what has already occurred. The language of hemispheric protection once used to cloak domination has now been stripped of pretence.
As Fredric Jameson observed in Representing Capital:
Crises and catastrophes are appropriate to this present of time, which like those of the past are both the same as what preceded them, but also different and historically unique.
Trump might be breaking with the form US imperialism has hitherto taken to survive, and in doing so hopes to preserve its fundamental content. In other words, things need to change so they can stay the same. Venezuela marks precisely such a moment.
Featured image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.