This political report for the week of February 8–14, 2026, is compiled based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org).
Demonstrators hemmed in by NSW Riot Squad Police at Sydney Town Hall, February 9, 2026
1. Imperialism and War
Preparations for War Against Iran
The United States has repositioned substantial military assets—including the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group, additional aircraft and logistics infrastructure—to prepare for what officials describe as a “sustained, weeks-long” military campaign against Iran. This build-up accompanies tightened sanctions and continued diplomatic manoeuvring, with high-level Trump–Netanyahu conclaves coordinating strategy and escalatory rhetoric toward Tehran. The repositioning signals an expectation of reciprocal strikes and prolonged regional confrontation, occurring alongside sharp transatlantic diplomatic tensions at the Munich Security Conference.
This military mobilisation represents imperialist decision-making divorced from democratic accountability, driven by competition for regional dominance and resource control. War preparations will deepen social misery both in Iran and across the region while accelerating global polarisation. The working class internationally must mount independent anti-war mobilisations: strikes, mass actions and political organisation to block military adventurism and the domestic austerity that invariably accompanies rearmament spending.
Complicity in Israeli Genocide
Israeli policies in the West Bank have escalated dramatically, with expanded settlement construction, tightened movement restrictions and explicit annexationist measures designed to “bury the idea of a Palestinian state.” German officials, including Parliament President Klöckner, visited Israel in what amounts to tacit endorsement of genocidal policies, signalling Berlin’s political alignment with Israeli security doctrine. Meanwhile, Australian police violently suppressed mass protests opposing Israeli President Herzog’s state visit to Sydney, deploying riot squads, horse charges and kettling tactics that left demonstrators—including filmmaker James Ricketson—bloodied and arrested. Labor governments imposed protest bans and extended police-state powers to protect visiting war criminals.
These actions confirm that European and allied governments are active accomplices in imperialist aggression. The suppression of dissent through state violence exposes the class character of bourgeois democracy: when challenged on fundamental questions of war and genocide, ruling elites deploy repression regardless of party labels. Workers must oppose their own governments’ participation in imperialist crimes through international solidarity and industrial action, not appeals to the very state institutions orchestrating repression.
Militarisation and Inter-Imperialist Rivalry
Germany is transforming a regional airport into a military fortress as part of NATO’s eastern-flank expansion, deepening preparations for imperialist confrontation. The Munich Security Conference revealed sharp US–EU tensions over strategy, burden-sharing and confrontations with Russia and China, exposing fissures within NATO alliances. Social-democratic parties across Europe are converting wholesale to pro-war positions: Germany’s SPD is drafting a programme stressing military readiness and “national strengthening,” while conscription plans advance despite youth opposition organised by socialist student groups.
Inter-imperialist rivalry intensifies the danger of global conflict as capitalist powers compete for markets, resources and geopolitical advantage. Workers must oppose their own governments’ militarism and build international solidarity to prevent war profiteering and the conversion of Europe into a staging ground for imperialist confrontation.
2. Authoritarian Consolidation and State Repression
Criminalisation of Dissent
Türkiye imprisoned 77 members of the Socialist Party of the Oppressed (ESP) and placed six Left Party members under house arrest, with charges relying on informant testimony that conflated legal party activism with terrorism. Evidence presented in court included routine political literature such as copies of The Communist Manifesto. In Australia, new “prohibited hate group” laws echo 1951 Cold War-era attempts to ban communism, while Queensland’s LNP government matched Labor by banning “prescribed phrases” at protests. Princeton University abruptly cancelled a scheduled discussion by Norman Finkelstein on Gaza, implementing new policies to limit campus dissent and free speech.
These measures demonstrate how bourgeois states weaponise counter-terror and hate-speech legislation to criminalise legal socialist organising and suppress opposition to imperialist policy. The expansion of police-state powers is bipartisan: Labor and conservative governments alike deploy repression to defend capitalist interests. The defence of democratic rights requires mass working-class mobilisation and political independence, not reliance on bourgeois courts or appeals to the same state apparatus orchestrating repression.
Immigration Enforcement as State Terror
ICE operations have intensified across the United States, with mass workplace raids targeting Amazon Flex drivers in Michigan, meatpacking workers in Colorado facing deportation threats to break strike authorisations, and routine abductions dwarfing media-sensationalised individual kidnapping cases. The Department of Justice moved to gut asylum rights through regulatory changes designed to accelerate deportations. At the Dilley detention centre, a toddler’s near-fatal medical neglect case exposed life-threatening conditions and systematic denial of care. Palestinian detainee Leqaa Kordia suffered a delayed medical emergency after one year of detention at a Texas ICE facility.
Immigration detention operates as a racist, punitive apparatus designed to discipline precarious labour and fragment working-class solidarity. Deportation threats function as employers’ weapons to intimidate workers and prevent collective action. The defence of immigrant workers requires workplace solidarity committees, mass mobilisation against detention regimes and political organisation that links immigrant rights to broader working-class struggles against state repression.
Police Violence and Authoritarian Measures
Minnesota police rioted against protesters outside the Whipple Federal building, deploying indiscriminate baton charges and mass arrests. NSW riot police violently attacked demonstrators opposing Herzog’s visit, with eyewitness accounts documenting kettling, horse charges and denial of medical attention to injured protesters in custody. Massive security operations in Milan deployed snipers and heavy policing against protests opposing Trump administration presence at the Winter Olympics, though dockworker strikes delayed arms shipments and athletes publicly criticised ICE.
State violence is escalating to protect imperialist policy and criminalise dissent. The international coordination of repression—from Australia to the United States to Europe—reveals the class function of bourgeois states under crisis. Defensive mobilisation requires united working-class action and democratic organising, not appeals to the institutions wielding violence.
3. Austerity and Economic Warfare
Corporate Restructuring and Worker Attacks
Stellantis recorded a $26 billion charge tied to its electric-vehicle strategy reversal and simultaneously delayed plant reopenings, cut dividends and pushed buyout schemes affecting American workers. UPS is preparing a second driver buyout program while planning 30,000 layoffs in 2026, shifting labour costs despite sustained profitability. BYD’s Xi’an high-voltage electrical equipment factory imposed steep cuts to piece-rate bonuses that reduced many workers’ take-home pay below 2,000 yuan monthly, provoking wildcat strikes met with police repression.
Corporate crisis is weaponised to intensify exploitation: immense private wealth accrues to billionaire owners while workers face precarious pay, forced exits and degraded conditions. Buyout programmes and “voluntary” redundancies are designed to weaken collective strength and force exits that erode bargaining power. The strategic response requires coordinated rank-and-file mobilisation, rejection of unilateral management schemes and international solidarity to resist the global race to the bottom.
Public Service Destruction
The UK lost WHO measles elimination status due to falling vaccination rates and deliberate public-health neglect—a direct outcome of neoliberal austerity that prioritises profit over population health. New Zealand’s capital faces environmental disaster from a massive sewage leak, exposing capitalist underinvestment in essential infrastructure. Los Angeles authorities moved to dismantle federal oversight of homelessness as the crisis deepens, shifting responsibility to avoid redistributive demands. A UN report warned of global “water bankruptcy” affecting billions, with scarcity and contamination exacerbated by private control of resources and climate breakdown.
The rollback of public health, infrastructure and essential services is rooted in the capitalist drive to divert social resources toward private accumulation and war preparation. Restoring public goods requires mass working-class pressure to force socialised control, democratic planning and international cooperation—issues only resolvable through political struggle against capitalist property relations.
Trade War and Economic Coercion
Trump threatened to block the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge as part of escalating economic warfare against Canada, weaponising infrastructure to extract concessions. New Zealand’s coalition government fractured over the India Free Trade Agreement, with populist objections masking the reality that such deals serve corporate profit and intensify wage competition, privatisation and precarious labour.
Economic warfare is an extension of imperialist diplomacy. Free-trade agreements deepen exploitation and cross-border wage competition while populist nationalism channels working-class anger into reactionary scapegoating. Workers on both sides of borders must unite internationally to resist bourgeois brinkmanship and oppose both neoliberal trade regimes and chauvinist diversion.
4. Class Struggle and Bureaucratic Betrayal
Healthcare Workers’ Resistance
Nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian overwhelmingly rejected a tentative agreement that the New York State Nurses Association attempted to force through via an illegitimate snap vote, continuing their strike under rank-and-file defiance. The Kaiser healthcare workers’ strike expanded as 3,000 pharmacy and laboratory workers joined 31,000 already on strike, significantly widening disruption. San Francisco’s 6,400 educators struck for the first time since 1979, drawing mass rallies and broad community support before union bureaucrats and Democratic Party figures brokered a tentative agreement that concedes austerity and fails special-education demands.
These struggles expose the gulf between rank-and-file militancy and union apparatus. Bureaucratic sellouts are imposed to protect political ties with the Democratic Party and stabilise capitalist rule. The NYSNA’s snap-vote manoeuvre, the attempt to isolate Kaiser strikers and the intervention of Nancy Pelosi to contain San Francisco educators all demonstrate that union leaderships function as barriers to sustained class struggle. Winning safe staffing, liveable wages and healthcare as a social right requires democratically elected strike committees, strike pay drawn from union assets, expansion of strikes across facilities and sectors, and political independence from both union bureaucrats and bourgeois parties.
Industrial Militancy and Betrayal
Refinery workers denounced the United Steelworkers’ national pattern deal as a sellout prioritising corporate interests, with BP Whiting workers facing isolation if concessions are accepted. The UAW hailed a Volkswagen Tennessee contract as “historic” amid rank-and-file criticism that gains are modest and concessions linger. Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks rank-and-file activist, launched a campaign for UAW president demanding abolition of the Solidarity House bureaucracy and creation of workplace committees. In Norway, a union organised a sham strike that imposed financial burdens on members while failing to press management, forcing workers to pay for bureaucratic theatre.
National pattern agreements and bureaucratic compromises fragment struggle and normalise concessions. Union apparatuses routinely betray workers by containing mobilisation, isolating militants and deferring to management. The necessary alternative is democratic coordination across plants, refusal of bureaucratic imposition and preparation for escalated, coordinated strike action under workers’ control.
International Worker Struggles
Tens of millions of Indian workers joined a one-day national strike against the Modi government’s labour “reforms” and removal of employment guarantees, though participation remained politically confined by Stalinist-linked federations channelling dissent toward bourgeois opposition parties. Peru saw mass protests uniting transport workers, students and families of state-repression victims against austerity and violence. Colorado meatpacking workers authorised strike action over dangerous conditions despite ICE deportation threats. High school students in Carson, Royal Oak and Detroit suburbs staged walkouts protesting ICE raids, authoritarianism and war, joining broader youth mobilisations.
These struggles demonstrate the international scope of working-class resistance and the potential for cross-generational, cross-border solidarity. However, episodic protests and one-day token strikes cannot substitute for sustained, politically independent organisation. Without rank-and-file leadership breaking from nationalist and reformist containment, such mobilisations risk canalisation into bourgeois electoral channels or bureaucratic dead-ends.
5. Elite Criminality and Political Decay
Revelations tying Lord Peter Mandelson to Jeffrey Epstein networks have engulfed Keir Starmer’s Labour government, producing resignations and police inquiries. Jeremy Corbyn called for a Chilcot-style inquiry while insisting much remain shielded on “national security” grounds, demonstrating the political bankruptcy of Corbynism: seeking establishment solutions that protect state secrets and preserve bourgeois stability rather than mobilising independent working-class opposition. Leaked Epstein files implicate Trump and other political figures, with testimony at the Bondi hearing exposing cover-ups and secret “domestic terrorist” lists targeting dissidents. The FBI identified billionaire Leslie Wexner as a co-conspirator in 2019 but took no action.
The Mandelson-Epstein scandal exposes intimate links between political elites and the financial oligarchy, revealing how the ruling class operates with systemic impunity. Parliamentary inquiries and legalistic remedies cannot break oligarchic power because state institutions exist to shield ruling-class crimes. Only mass working-class mobilisation and independent political organisation can hold elites accountable and overturn the structures protecting them.
6. Political Bankruptcy of Reformism
Corbynism and Pseudo-Left Opportunism
Internal battles within Your Party saw factional purges and contrasting programmes, with Zarah Sultana’s Grassroots Left emphasising parliamentary reform and alliances with NGOs, unions and identity-based coalitions. Corbyn’s historical record of accommodation to Labour’s Blairite right and Sultana’s reformist trajectory both reproduce illusions that have repeatedly failed the working class. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance at the Munich Security Conference signals her full integration into establishment foreign-policy circles, providing pseudo-left cover for imperialist strategy.
Corbynism’s “broad church” historically subordinated the left to Blairite interests; Sultana-style reformism proposes parliamentary solutions that will capitulate under capitalist crisis. Figures like AOC function to contain working-class anger within bourgeois institutions. Objective economic developments—globalisation, financial oligarchy, declining profitability—have rendered social-democratic reformism impotent. Only revolutionary organisation rooted in workplaces, independent of bourgeois parties and grounded in international socialist strategy, can defend social rights.
Stalinist Betrayal
The Communist Party Marxist–Kenya published a diatribe openly defending Stalin and endorsing Stalinist historical falsifications while aligning with reactionary bourgeois regimes. The Turkish Communist Party held a mass Ankara rally glorifying Stalinist figures and promoting revisionist Soviet narratives. In Venezuela, Morenoite currents formed alliances with Stalinist parties supporting bourgeois nationalist regimes through electoral manoeuvres.
Praising Stalin today is not abstract historiography but a political programme that betrays working-class independence by subordinating socialist aims to bourgeois nationalism and petty-bourgeois interests. Stalinist tendencies function as props for capitalist regimes, providing pseudo-left legitimacy for reactionary policies and undermining international solidarity. Trotskyism remains the necessary continuity of revolutionary Marxism against both Stalinist bureaucratic liquidation and nationalist illusions.
Electoralism and Municipal Dead-Ends
DSA-aligned councilmember Nithya Raman entered the Los Angeles mayoral race presenting symbolic progressive rhetoric while actual policy remains confined within bourgeois constraints. New York City Mayor Mamdani announced symbolic tax-the-rich rhetoric while cutting homelessness support, prioritising market interests. The military-aligned Bhumjaithai Party won Thailand’s election through defections and right-wing consolidation, reflecting the bankruptcy of nominally “democratic” bourgeois parties.
Electoral manoeuvres cannot substitute for independent workplace organisation. Symbolic reforms and progressive branding deflect from fundamental class conflict while subordinating working-class demands to capitalist institutional limits. Parliamentary routes have been exhausted; only mass organisation and direct working-class action can secure social rights.
7. The Revolutionary Alternative
The week’s events confirm a central reality: global capitalist crisis produces simultaneous assaults on living standards, democratic rights and international peace. Imperialism drives toward war in the Middle East while intensifying repression domestically. Austerity destroys public services and infrastructure. Corporate restructuring weaponises crisis to deepen exploitation. Elite criminality operates with systemic impunity.
Against these attacks, working-class resistance is mounting: nurses rejecting bureaucratic sellouts, educators striking, refinery and meatpacking workers authorising action, youth walking out against ICE terror, millions in India protesting labour destruction. Yet episodic militancy remains fragmented and politically contained by union bureaucracies, reformist parties and pseudo-left opportunism.
The strategic answer is the independent, international organisation of the working class around a Trotskyist programme: democratically elected rank-and-file committees in every workplace and school; coordination across industries, borders and continents; political independence from all bourgeois and reformist parties; and the construction of a mass revolutionary party to expropriate the oligarchy, end imperialist war and place social power in workers’ hands. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the Socialist Equality Parties organise this political work. Workers seeking to connect their struggles to organised resistance can join at https://www.wsws.org/en/special/pages/sep/us/join.html.
[1] “Oppose Trump’s criminal invasion of Venezuela! Release Maduro!” WSWS, 4 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/04/avdu-j04.html>
[2] “US imperialist bandits parade kidnapped Maduro in show trial,” WSWS, 6 January 2026
[3] “Trump and Miller’s ‘iron law’ of imperialist barbarism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/07/erjx-j07.html>
[4] “After Venezuela attack: White House threatens Venezuelan acting president, Cuba and Greenland,” WSWS, 5 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/05/crzb-j05.html>
[5] “Trump and Miller’s ‘iron law’ of imperialist barbarism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] “US imperialist bandits parade kidnapped Maduro in show trial,” WSWS, 6 January 2026 , <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/06/zyve-j06.html>
[9] “Latin America’s bourgeois governments bow to US attack on Venezuela,” WSWS, 6 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/06/slwp-j06.html>
[10] “Oppose Trump’s criminal invasion of Venezuela!” WSWS, 4 January 2026
[11] “After Trump’s attack on Venezuela: Germany’s Left Party supports European imperialism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/07/sfqt-j07.html>
[12] Ibid.
[13] “Trump and Miller’s ‘iron law’ of imperialist barbarism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026
[14] Ibid.
[15] “Oppose Trump’s criminal invasion of Venezuela!” WSWS, 4 January 2026
This article was originally published on the World Socialist Web Site on 27 January 2026.
The Trump administration released its 2026 National Defense Strategy on Friday, a 34-page document that openly proclaims American military domination of North and South America as a platform for global war. The strategy, issued by the newly renamed “Department of War,” is a blueprint for imperialist conquest.
President Donald Trump walks onto the field with Lt. Gen. Steven Gilland, superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, left, and Lt. Gen. Michael Borgschulte, superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy, right, before the start of the 126th Army-Navy NCAA college football game at M&T Bank Stadium, Saturday, Dec. 13, 2025, in Baltimore. [AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson]
The National Defense Strategy introduces the concept of “Homeland and Hemisphere,” effectively expanding the definition of the American “homeland” to include all of North and South America.
Building on the National Security Strategy released in December, which declared a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” the document asserts that defending American territory requires military control of the entire Western Hemisphere. It declares: “We will actively and fearlessly defend America’s interests throughout the Western Hemisphere. We will guarantee U.S. military and commercial access to key terrain, especially the Panama Canal, Gulf of America, and Greenland.”
The document explicitly invokes 19th-century imperialism, noting that “our predecessors recognized that the United States must take a more powerful, leading role in hemispheric affairs” and that “it was this insight that gave rise to the Monroe Doctrine and subsequent Roosevelt Corollary.” Under the Roosevelt Corollary (named after Theodore Roosevelt, president from 1901 to 1909), US Marines invaded Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. The Trump administration declares these crimes the model for 21st-century foreign policy: “This is the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine—a commonsense and potent restoration of American power and prerogatives in this hemisphere.”
The Pentagon is committed to “provide the President with credible options to guarantee U.S. military and commercial access to key terrain from the Arctic to South America.”
“Homeland and Hemisphere” recalls the Nazi slogan “Heim ins Reich”—”Home into the Reich”—used to justify Germany’s annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938. Just as Hitler declared that German-speaking territories belonged to Greater Germany, the Trump administration asserts that Greenland, Panama, and the Gulf of Mexico are American possessions to be secured by force.
While proclaiming hemispheric domination, the National Defense Strategy claims the military will “no longer be distracted by interventionism, endless wars, regime change, and nation building.” The document’s claim to oppose “regime change” is rendered absurd by the fact that it was released days after the administration carried out one of the most flagrant acts of regime change in American history—the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
The claim was published as US warships steam toward Iran. On Monday, the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group approached the Middle East. On Friday, Trump told reporters: “We have a big flotilla going in that direction, and we’ll see what happens. We have a big force going toward Iran.” This follows his bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities last year.
The National Defense Strategy makes clear that US domination of the hemisphere is not a retreat from global domination, but what the Trump administration sees as a prerequisite. It insists that “ours is not a strategy of isolation” but rather “one of focused engagement abroad.”
While claiming that “President Trump seeks a stable peace, fair trade, and respectful relations with China,” the National Defense Strategy frames hemispheric domination as preparation for great-power war. It acknowledges that China is “already the second most powerful country in the world—behind only the United States—and the most powerful state relative to us since the 19th century,” adding that despite internal challenges, “the fact is that its power is growing.”
To prepare for this conflict, Trump has called for a 50 percent increase in military spending, demanding a $1.5 trillion military budget for 2027. The National Defense Strategy demands that all US allies follow suit: “President Trump has set a new global standard for defense spending at NATO’s Hague Summit—3.5% of GDP on core military spending and an additional 1.5% on security-related spending, for a total of 5% of GDP.”
Five percent of GDP would represent the largest peacetime military buildup in modern history—exceeding $1.3 trillion annually for the United States alone, and tripling German military expenditure. The resources demanded for this military expansion will be extracted from the working class through austerity, the gutting of social programs, and the further impoverishment of billions of people worldwide.
On nuclear weapons, the document demands the modernization of US nuclear forces “with focused attention on deterrence and escalation management amidst the changing global nuclear landscape.” It declares that “the United States should never—will never—be left vulnerable to nuclear blackmail.” The reference to “escalation management” is military jargon for preparing to fight and “win” a nuclear war.
The document concludes: “We will restore the warrior ethos. We will refocus the American military on its core, irreplaceable goal of winning the nation’s wars decisively.”
The Democratic Party supports this military buildup. On Thursday, the House passed combined defense and consolidated spending bills by a vote of 341-88, with 149 Democrats voting yes and only 64 voting no. The $839 billion military budget—$8.4 billion above what Trump requested—funds the weapons systems, carrier strike groups and military infrastructure required for the wars outlined in the National Defense Strategy. Both parties represent the same ruling class, and there is bipartisan consensus for militarism and global domination.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Image courtesy of www.aa.com.trn
The January 3, 2026 U.S. military assault on Venezuela and the forcible seizure of President Nicolás Maduro constitute a watershed in the degeneration of American imperialism and the collapse of the post-1945 juridical order. This was not a rogue “raid” or law-enforcement operation but a war of aggression conducted to impose control over strategic resources and geopolitical space. As the World Socialist Web Site emphasized, the operation represents “a total repudiation by the Trump regime of any semblance of legality… an unprovoked war of aggression launched in flagrant violation of international law.”[1] The deployment of over 150 aircrafts launched from 20 bases across the Western Hemisphere, heavy bombardment across Caracas and surrounding states, a naval blockade, and at least 100 deaths—including 32 Cuban military personnel—underscore the operation’s character as large-scale military conquest rather than counter-narcotics action.
Material Foundations: Oil, Finance Capital and Geopolitical Rivalry
The assault must be understood through the material interests driving contemporary imperialism. Venezuela possesses the world’s largest proven oil reserves alongside substantial deposits of gold, bauxite, diamonds, copper, nickel, manganese, coltan and uranium. Control of these resources is central to U.S. finance capital and the oil majors’ strategic aims. Trump made the predatory motive explicit, declaring that “we’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars.”[2] Reportedly,Trump briefed oil executives about the assault before it occurred while deliberately withholding information from Congress and the American people.
The operation simultaneously aims to reverse China’s and Russia’s deepening economic penetration of Latin America. U.S. demands to interim President Delcy Rodríguez revealed the geopolitical objectives: Venezuela must “kick out China, Russia, Iran and Cuba and sever economic ties,” then “agree to partner exclusively with the US on oil production and favor America when selling heavy crude.”[3] Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed this explicitly: “Why does China need their oil? Why does Russia need their oil? They’re not even in this continent. This is the Western Hemisphere.”[4] The raid therefore expresses both the search for surplus value through direct plunder and the sharpening geo-political rivalry born of US imperialism’s systemic crisis.
This crisis has deep historical roots. As Lenin analyzed in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, monopoly capital’s need to secure sources of raw materials, investment outlets and markets drives the violent redivision of the world among rival powers. The contemporary period witnesses this process in acute form: decades of financialization, debt expansion and speculative excess have failed to resolve capitalism’s fundamental contradiction—the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The globalization of production from the late 1970s represented a temporary response based on accessing cheap labor and strategic territories, but that framework is now disintegrating as American imperialism confronts eroding economic dominance and intensifying competition from rival powers.
From Juridical Pretense to the “Iron Law” of Force
The assault signifies American imperialism’s abandonment of postwar legal constraints—UN Charter norms, sovereignty protections, diplomatic process—which had served as inter-imperialist settlement for the ‘peaceful’ neocolonial plunder of former colonies, their resources and cheap labor. Historically, US imperialism never wanted to be restrained by these international limitations. Today US administration officials dismiss such constraints with unprecedented candor. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller declared: “We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” dismissing international law as mere “international niceties.”[5] Miller made explicit that “the United States of America is running Venezuela… we are in charge, because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions.”[6]
This represents government doctrine enacted through military operations, not rhetorical excess. The WSWS correctly characterized Miller’s formulations as “the language of the Nazis, drawn from Hitler’s Mein Kampf and its talk of ‘iron laws of Nature’ in relation to races and racial-state conflict.”[7] The Manhattan spectacle of parading Maduro in chains before federal courts—a sitting head of state declared a “prisoner of war” and denied even the opportunity to complete his statement of identity—aims to legitimize seizure through pseudo-legal theater while humiliating a sovereign nation.[8]
The postwar institutions that once helped regulate inter-imperialist rivalry and provided a veneer of legitimacy for neocolonial extraction have become, under conditions of acute capitalist crisis, obstacles to plunder. That order has collapsed. Trump’s invocation of what he terms the “Donroe Doctrine”—superseding the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine—and his declaration that “this is OUR hemisphere” make explicit that Washington treats Latin America as colonial property. The willingness to threaten even NATO ally Denmark over Greenland, combined with explicit orders to expel foreign economic partners from Venezuela, demonstrates that the U.S. oligarchy now regards legal constraints as impediments to be swept aside. The long-standing fiction that American policy is shaped by principles other than naked imperialist interests is now being openly set aside.
An Escalation Built on Prolonged Aggression
The assault on Venezuela followed shortly after the release of the December 2025 National Defense Strategy, which explicitly designated the Western Hemisphere as an “American sphere of influence” where Washington would reject any involvement by “extra-hemispheric powers.” This strategic document identified China as the primary adversary and demanded U.S. military control over “energy dominance” by securing strategic resources across Latin America and the Middle East. The Venezuelan intervention represents the doctrine’s inaugural execution.
The Maduro abduction completed a sustained campaign of military pressure and economic strangulation. Throughout 2025, the U.S. assembled a massive naval armada in the Caribbean, conducted repeated deadly strikes on Venezuelan vessels, seized oil tankers, and imposed an effective naval quarantine—measures constituting acts of war and a de facto blockade. In late December 2025, the CIA conducted the first strike on Venezuelan territory, targeting a port facility. By early January, the military buildup had reached culmination point, with special forces rehearsing the raid using models of Maduro’s compound while Trump approved the final operation before Christmas.
This trajectory followed a deliberate escalation ladder: designation of the “Cartel of the Suns”—which the state department alleged was helped manage and ultimately led by Maduro—as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, expansion of sanctions targeting Maduro’s family and oil shipments, demands for the return of nationalized assets seized from U.S. corporations in 2007, and finally direct military assault. The pattern reveals systematic preparation for regime change and resource seizure, with direct military intervention undertaken only after attempts to orchestrate a political coup failed due to lack of popular support for the opposition.
The Bankruptcy of Bourgeois Nationalism and the Pink Tide
The raid exposed with surgical precision the class character and political bankruptcy of Latin America’s national bourgeoisies. Brazil’s Lula da Silva, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and other “Pink Tide” leaders offered tepid condemnations that carefully avoided breaking with imperialism or mobilizing popular opposition. As the WSWS documented, “the rotten and reactionary response of all sections of the Latin American bourgeoisie to the US invasion of Venezuela must be taken by the working class as a testament to the inadequacy of all nationalist perspectives in the epoch of imperialism.”[9]
The same pattern of cowardice and betrayal emerged across South Asia. In Sri Lanka, while the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) issued a statement on January 4 condemning the U.S. assault and declaring that “powerful countries do not have the right to violate this principle” of sovereignty, the NPP government adopted a markedly different position. Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath, a politburo member of JVP, explicitly distinguished between the party and NPP government, stating that while “political parties can have their own opinions,” the government “represents all sides” and must work through UN mechanisms. The official Foreign Ministry statement expressed mere “deep concern” while urging “dialogue” and “peaceful resolution”—the language of diplomatic evasion that refuses to name the aggressor or mobilize popular opposition. This split exposes the fundamental contradiction at the heart of bourgeois nationalist governance: the party that once postured as anti-imperialist now defends defense cooperation agreements with Washington and New Delhi, fearful of jeopardizing its integration into imperialist economic and military frameworks.
India’s Modi government demonstrated even more abject servility. The Ministry of External Affairs issued a statement over 24 hours after the assault expressing “deep concern” but conspicuously avoiding naming the United States or condemning the military strikes. India’s response on 04 January carefully avoided naming Washington, instead calling vaguely for “all concerned to address issues peacefully through dialogue.” The Modi government’s calculation is transparent: trade negotiations with Trump, potential access to Venezuelan oil payments owed to ONGC, and strategic partnership with Washington take precedence over any principled opposition to imperialist aggression.
Pakistan’s military-dominated regime and Bangladesh’s U.S.-backed interim government maintained predictable silence, offering no statements of condemnation. Across South Asia, bourgeois nationalist parties and governments—whether presenting themselves as left-progressive, Hindu-chauvinist, or Islamist—demonstrated their organic incapacity to resist imperialism when confronted with its naked assertion of force.
This confirms Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and his analysis of the incapacity of the national bourgeoisie in dependent countries to carry forward anti-imperialist or democratic tasks. In Results and Prospects (1906) and The Permanent Revolution (1928), Trotsky demonstrated that the belated development of capitalism in backward countries produces a bourgeoisie organically tied to imperialism and landed property, terrified of independent working-class mobilization, and therefore incapable of leading struggle against foreign domination. The Pink Tide represents merely the latest chapter in Latin American bourgeois nationalism’s history of accommodation and betrayal.
Right-wing and fascistic governments went further, openly celebrating the assault. The Brazilian far-right, architects of the January 8, 2023 coup attempt in Brasília, seized on the operation to advance their own dictatorial aims under newly favorable international conditions. Trump’s threats against Colombian President Petro—“He has to watch his ass”—and declarations that Cuba and Nicaragua “will not survive” his administration signal that the Venezuela operation establishes precedent for unlimited violence throughout the hemisphere.[10]
The Counter-Revolutionary Role of the Pseudo-Left
Pseudo-left currents, reformist parties and NGOs that locate opposition to imperialism in international law, diplomatic institutions or alliances with rival capitalist powers play an objectively counter-revolutionary role. They funnel popular anger into impotent appeals and national strategies that leave capitalist property relations—and imperialist domination—fundamentally untouched.
Germany’s Left Party exemplified this tendency. While formally condemning Trump’s actions as “state terrorism,” the party directed its criticism not against imperialism but toward demanding that Europe assert its own great-power ambitions more aggressively. As the WSWS analyzed, the Left Party “criticises Chancellor Merz not from the left, but from the right,” calling for sanctions against the United States and “a concrete European plan” to counter American actions—thereby functioning as “aggressive apologists for German and European imperialism.”[11] Similar patterns emerged across pseudo-left organizations internationally, each subordinating working-class opposition to their respective national bourgeoisies’ geopolitical interests.
These tendencies propagate fatal illusions: that imperialism can be restrained through appeals to bourgeois institutions, that “multipolar” capitalist competition offers progressive alternatives, that identity politics or reformist parliamentarism can substitute for independent class struggle. As the WSWS emphasized, “the struggle against war is inseparably linked to the struggle against its cause: the capitalist system. It must be led by the working class, with the aim of building an independent political movement, overcoming capitalism and reorganising society on the basis of social needs rather than private profit.”[12]
The Domestic Dimension: War Abroad, Dictatorship at Home
The turn to militarism overseas proceeds inseparably from authoritarian consolidation domestically. The WSWS identified this essential connection: “the same illegality, the same ruthlessness, the same criminality that is expressed in the kidnapping of Maduro is expressed in the assault on democratic rights at home—the mass deportations, attacks on the press, purging of the civil service, deployment of the military against the population.”[13] Perpetual war finances and is employed to legitimize police-state measures while directing social anger outward rather than against the ruling class itself.
This pattern reflects objective necessity for the oligarchy. As Marx demonstrated, capitalism’s internal contradictions generate both external expansion and internal repression. Trump represents “a criminal oligarchy that has amassed its wealth through fraud, speculation and plunder… the chosen instrument of the American ruling class, a gangster vomited up by the oligarchy to enforce policies that can no longer be pursued through democratic or legal means.”[14] The simultaneous assault on Venezuela and acceleration of authoritarian measures domestically express unified class interests of finance capital confronting deepening crisis.
Revolutionary Tasks and the Road Forward
The assault on Venezuela demonstrates that the fight against imperialist war is inseparable from the fight against capitalism itself. Defensive measures are urgent: mobilize mass anti-war action, build rank-and-file committees in workplaces to oppose military preparations, forge international links of workers’ solidarity—especially between U.S. workers and their Latin American class brothers and sisters.
But defensive measures must connect to revolutionary perspective. The expropriation of the banks and multinationals, formation of workers’ councils and workers’ governments, construction of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to lead an international socialist alternative—these constitute the only realistic defense of oppressed nations and working people everywhere. As the WSWS stated: “The answer must be to make 2026 a year of class struggle and the development of a mass movement for socialism. The fight against war is a fight against the capitalist system that breeds it.”[15]
The objective conditions for revolutionary struggle are maturing with extraordinary rapidity. Across the United States, the kidnapping of Maduro has provoked widespread anger and concern among workers in factories and workplaces. This opposition must be organized on independent class foundations, rejecting all factions of the bourgeoisie and pseudo-lefts that secure capitalism’s rule. Latin American workers must orient not toward their “own” national bourgeoisies but toward their class brothers and sisters internationally in unified struggle to overthrow imperialism.
Only through the independent political mobilization of the international working class and the oppressed masses, armed with a Marxist program and the historical lessons embodied in the ICFI, can the descent into barbarism and annihilation be halted and the conditions created for genuine human emancipation through world socialist revolution.
References:
[1] “Oppose Trump’s criminal invasion of Venezuela! Release Maduro!” WSWS, 4 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/04/avdu-j04.html>
[2] “US imperialist bandits parade kidnapped Maduro in show trial,” WSWS, 6 January 2026
[3] “Trump and Miller’s ‘iron law’ of imperialist barbarism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/07/erjx-j07.html>
[4] “After Venezuela attack: White House threatens Venezuelan acting president, Cuba and Greenland,” WSWS, 5 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/05/crzb-j05.html>
[5] “Trump and Miller’s ‘iron law’ of imperialist barbarism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] “US imperialist bandits parade kidnapped Maduro in show trial,” WSWS, 6 January 2026 , <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/06/zyve-j06.html>
[9] “Latin America’s bourgeois governments bow to US attack on Venezuela,” WSWS, 6 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/06/slwp-j06.html>
[10] “Oppose Trump’s criminal invasion of Venezuela!” WSWS, 4 January 2026
[11] “After Trump’s attack on Venezuela: Germany’s Left Party supports European imperialism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/07/sfqt-j07.html>
[12] Ibid.
[13] “Trump and Miller’s ‘iron law’ of imperialist barbarism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026
[14] Ibid.
[15] “Oppose Trump’s criminal invasion of Venezuela!” WSWS, 4 January 2026
US imperialism rings in the New Year with a new war
By the WSWS Editorial Board.
Reposted below is the statement of the Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, published on the same website on the 04 January 2025.
U.S. F-35 fighter jets are parked on the tarmac as military personnel walk among the aircraft at José Aponte de la Torre Airport in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Alejandro Granadillo)
The World Socialist Web Site, the Socialist Equality Party in the US and the International Committee of the Fourth International unequivocally denounce the invasion of Venezuela and the criminal abduction of President Nicolás Maduro in the early hours of Saturday morning. We demand the immediate release of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and the full withdrawal of all US troops and military forces from the region.
The invasion, which included the killing of at least 40 people, is a total repudiation by the Trump regime of any semblance of legality. It is an unprovoked war of aggression launched in flagrant violation of international law and carried out to reimpose colonial control over Venezuela and all of Latin America. This imperialist assault must be opposed by the working class in the United States and throughout the world.
Speaking at Saturday’s press conference, Trump’s “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth, declared, “Welcome to 2026.” Only three days into the New Year, the assault on Venezuela is an unmistakable signal that the imperialist violence that marked 2025—in the Gaza genocide and the bombings of Lebanon, Syria and Iran—will escalate in 2026.
There is no concrete wall between foreign and domestic policy. Imperialist gangsterism beyond the borders of the United States will be accompanied by the acceleration of the conspiracy to impose a fascistic presidential dictatorship within the United States.
In his remarks at Saturday’s press conference, Trump declared that the United States would “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” In the past, American imperialism sought to legitimize its wars with hypocritical invocations of democracy and human rights. Trump dispensed with pretenses. The purpose of the assault on Venezuela, he declared on Sunday, was to seize control of the country and its oil resources.
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars,” Trump declared. If there is any resistance, Trump threatened a more brutal military onslaught. “We are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so,” Trump warned.
The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that top hedge funds and asset managers are preparing to send a delegation to Caracas in March to assess what one investor called $500–$750 billion in “investment opportunities” over the next five years.
The invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of its president are meant, as Trump put it on Saturday, as a “warning” to “anyone who would threaten American sovereignty.” Referring to his new National Security Strategy, Trump declared that “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” hailing the assault as a reassertion of the “iron laws that have always determined global power.”
The immediate targets are governments in Latin America that may act against US imperialist interests. Speaking of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, Trump warned in the language of a street thug, “He has to watch his ass.” The fascist Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, added: “America can project our will anywhere, anytime,” drawing a direct parallel between Venezuela and last year’s US bombing of Iranian nuclear sites. “Maduro had his chance,” he sneered, “just like Iran had their chance—until they didn’t.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio—Trump’s Ribbentrop—issued his own gangster threat to the Cuban government, saying that if he were the leader of the island nation, “I’d be concerned.”
But the threats are not confined to Latin America. In addition to Venezuela and Iran, the United States bombed five additional countries last year: Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and, most recently, Nigeria in December. Trump has issued threats of war against Mexico, floated the annexation of Greenland and Canada, and declared the Panama Canal “non-negotiable” for US control.
The aggressive message to China was unmistakable. Just hours before the assault, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro met with a high-level Chinese delegation led by Beijing’s Special Representative for Latin American and Caribbean Affairs, Qiu Xiaoqi, to discuss joint energy cooperation. The US raid, timed to coincide with this meeting, was an act of aggression aimed at disrupting growing ties between China and Latin America.
The actions taken by the Trump administration are not only criminal, they have the character of sheer madness. In 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq, the World Socialist Web Sitewarned that American imperialism had entered into a “rendezvous with disaster. It cannot conquer the world. It cannot reimpose colonial shackles upon the masses of the Middle East. … It will not find, through the medium of war, a viable solution to its internal maladies.”
That warning was confirmed. What is now being set into motion is even more reckless—a rendezvous with catastrophe.
Trump declared on Saturday the intention to impose a dictatorship over Venezuela, proclaiming that the country will be “run” by Rubio, Hegseth and other officials in the Trump regime, as though this colonial fantasy could be imposed with a press conference. In reality, such an occupation would require the deployment of hundreds of thousands of US troops and a brutal campaign of urban warfare amid mass resistance. Trump said as much when he said he was not afraid of “boots on the ground.”
It should be recalled that the 2003 invasion of Iraq required approximately 180,000 coalition troops, including 130,000 from the United States. In total, nearly half a million US personnel were deployed across the region in support of the war effort. And Iraq, with a population smaller than Venezuela’s, was already devastated by a decade of sanctions. The scale of military occupation required to enforce the subjugation of Venezuela would rapidly spiral into a bloody, protracted conflict across all of Latin America, and indeed throughout the world.
The recklessness of the Trump government can only be understood in the context of the crisis of American imperialism. Politically, there are no doubt many calculations behind Trump’s actions, including an effort to distract from the explosive revelations surrounding the Epstein network, which has implicated top figures within the financial aristocracy and state apparatus.
But more basic issues are at stake. The United States is attempting to reverse the long-term decline of American capitalism through militarism and war. The economic foundations of US global dominance have dramatically eroded. Gold has surged past $4,300 an ounce, a de facto measure of the collapse in confidence in the dollar as a global reserve currency. The national debt has soared past $38 trillion. The seizure of Venezuela’s oil and the reassertion of American control over the Western Hemisphere are seen by the ruling class as essential to the survival of its economic and geopolitical position.
The realization of this policy will require a massive escalation of the assault on the working class. The astronomical costs of militarism and global conquest will be borne through an intensification of austerity and the destruction of what remains of vital social programs. To impose neocolonial domination abroad, the administration must also overcome mass opposition at home. The inevitable disasters flowing from this strategy will be met with even greater violence, both internationally and within the United States.
At Saturday’s press conference, Trump’s erratic remarks shifted seamlessly from boasting about the “snatch and grab” abduction of Maduro to threatening major American cities. Praising the National Guard deployments to Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Memphis and New Orleans, he declared, “They should do it with more cities.” The same “iron laws” of violence that govern US conduct abroad will be imposed on the population at home.
It is necessary to understand that Trump does not act as an individual. He is the chosen instrument of the American ruling class, a gangster elevated to power by the oligarchy to enforce policies that can no longer be pursued through democratic or legal means.
In 2025, US billionaires—roughly 900 individuals—amassed an 18 percent increase in their net worth, bringing their combined holdings to nearly $7 trillion. Ten individuals alone accounted for $750 billion of this total. Just as the German ruling class brought Hitler to power to implement policies that could not be carried out except through dictatorship, Trump serves the same function.
Notably, the Washington Post, owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, published an editorial exalting the abduction of Maduro as “one of the boldest moves a president has made in years.” The paper hailed the “unquestionable tactical success” of the military operation, called Maduro’s downfall “good news,” and praised Trump’s willingness to “follow through” where previous administrations hesitated.
The Democratic Party represents the same class and defends the same system as Trump. There will be no serious opposition from its ranks. Their differences with Trump are purely tactical, not strategic. This was made clear in the muted response to the assault on Venezuela. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries grumbled about the lack of congressional notification, while reaffirming that Maduro was “not the legitimate head of government.”
Just weeks ago, Democrats and Republicans joined together to pass a $900 billion military spending bill, in an unambiguous endorsement of the imperialist agenda now being ruthlessly enforced.
For his part, anticipating broad popular opposition, Senator Bernie Sanders issued a statement calling the action against Venezuela “illegal and unconstitutional,” but he did not propose any strategy to stop the war or call for a popular mobilization against it.
There will be a response in the working class, and not only in Venezuela and Latin America. The reimposition of colonial domination will confront immense resistance throughout the world. In the United States, polls show overwhelming opposition to a war against Venezuela. Trump’s approval rating, at just 36 percent at the end of his first year back in office, is the lowest of any president at the same point in their term in more than half a century.
Demonstrations broke out within hours of the assault on Venezuela, an initial indication of popular opposition that will expand and grow. However, the experience of the mass protests against the Gaza genocide has shown that demonstrations alone are not enough. Without a program and leadership, popular outrage is funneled back into the political structures of the capitalist state.
What is required is the conscious intervention of the working class into political struggle. The conditions for such a struggle are rapidly maturing. The war abroad is inseparable from a social counterrevolution at home—soaring inflation, AI-driven job destruction, deepening poverty, and the systematic dismantling of every democratic and social right.
The oligarchy sits atop a social powder keg. The world volcanic eruption of American imperialism will set into motion a global tsunami of class struggle. Both arise from the same contradictions of the capitalist system.
And while it is expressed most violently in the US, the same basic tendencies exist throughout the world. All the imperialist powers are now engaged in a global redivision of the world. In Europe, the major capitalist governments are undertaking the most massive rearmament campaigns since the Second World War as they clamor for war against and destroy social programs. The German ruling class is nurturing dreams of a Fourth Reich, asserting its military power across the continent and beyond.
The ruling class has made clear what they want 2026 to be: a year of unrestrained military violence. The answer must be to make 2026 a year of class struggle and the development of a mass movement for socialism.
The fight against war is, at its root, a fight against the capitalist system that breeds it. This struggle must be led by the working class, the only social force capable of ending imperialist violence and establishing genuine democracy and equality. The alternative to dictatorship and war is revolution, the building of an independent political movement to overthrow capitalism and reorganize society on the basis of social need, not private profit.
The Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International call on workers, students, and young people across the United States, throughout Latin America, and internationally: Join our ranks. Build the Socialist Equality Party in the US and the sections of the ICFI around the world. Take up the fight to unify the working class across all borders, to abolish capitalism, and to establish socialism as the foundation of a new society.
[2] “Russia as a Great Imperialist Power,” Revolutionary Communism, No. 21, March 2014, p. 3. සම්පූර්ණ ප්රකාශය:http://www.thecommunists.net/theory/imperialist-russia/
