The following is adapted from an article by Battaglia Comunista written just before the US attack on Venezuela, and expanded upon by the Communist Workers' Organisation in light of the attack.

The US government’s actions against Venezuela in recent days – massive airstrikes killing at least 40 people, and the apparent abduction of President Maduro by US special forces for a show trial in New York – are a huge escalation of tension in the region and another indication of the drive to generalised war across the world that has been evident for several years now. President Trump has said that the US will ‘administer’ Venezuela to prevent it falling into chaos and threatened the stand-in president Delcy Rodriguez if she does not go along with US demands. But is direct and open war between the US and Venezuela on the cards? Will Trump order a ground invasion?

The answer at the moment is – probably – no, but the calculation the US is making is hardly less dangerous. Trump certainly wants to eliminate Maduro’s unwelcome figure from the Caribbean and across the whole of South America, both because of Maduro’s strategic sympathies to Russia and China (the Venezuelan government had asked for military aid if attacked), and because Venezuela has been lucky enough to take advantage of huge oil reserves whose control would be economically and strategically important for the US. Venezuela is also an important component in a bloc of ‘anti-US’ states in the region which also includes Cuba. But an invasion would be tactically, at this time, counterproductive.

The most likely scenario at this point is to rely on anti-Maduro forces inside Venezuela and among the exiles, fostering a political change that would be friendlier to US interests. Whether this will be from inside Maduro’s own ruling clique, or headed by someone like María Corina Machado, is not yet clear. Trump has publicly stated the latter does not have the support in Venezuela, but then, he really wanted that Nobel Peace Prize and is a noted sore loser. It is not clear whether he’s speaking out of anything more than spite against the woman who took ‘his’ prize. Perhaps the US will succeed this time, unlike with Juan Guaidó, the former ‘recognised’ President-in-Exile in 2019, and get a safe, right-wing candidate in the presidential palace.

Not even the alleged war on drugs (the US has accused Venezuela of being crucial to the export of fentanyl to the US) is enough to explain the mammoth deployment of American forces in the Caribbean waters with the assaults on three Venezuelan oil tankers, perhaps in international waters, and on boats which were, still allegedly, taking their drug load towards the US coast – a campaign that in recent months claimed the lives of an estimated 100 people, alleged once again without evidence by the US government to be drug-smugglers but claimed by Venezuela, Colombia and Trinidad to be fishermen.

So what is going on? If the US has massively built up its forces around Venezuela, but is not planning to invade, what is it all for? The most likely answer is that Trump’s policy has deliberately taken on an aggressive posture to intimidate Venezuela’s allies big and small, some of whom, even in an area that the US regards as its backyard, are manoeuvring in a manner hardly less blatant than the US itself. Chief among these is China, but also Russia, and closer to home, Cuba, which Trump has already indicated is in the firing line, and also Colombia, which Trump also accuses of being complicit in the international drug-trade.

The facts tell us how recently both President Putin and President Xi have sent substantial funding to Cuba with the risk that they are, in addition to economic support, the precursor of future military bases. We don’t know whether the military “goods” have already arrived as, of course, there is no news, but the possibility cannot be excluded. So at stake is the opening of another imperialist front of great political, economic and strategic value. A strategic-military repositioning as part of the likely scenario of increasingly generalised conflict.

The Lead Up to the Attack

The US has been patrolling the waters off the coast of Venezuela with what is the largest deployment of American ships in the Caribbean since Cuba’s 1962 missile crisis. On Wednesday 10 December 2025, the Venezuelan tanker Skipper was attacked and seized by American warships while still off the coast of Venezuela. The success of this piratical military operation (piratical, because it was clearly a violation of international laws and demonstrative of the Trump administration’s hypocrisy that condemns other leaders as criminals while acting as criminals themselves) was announced in person by Trump with all the propaganda emphasis that the operation deserved in order to put the Maduro regime in Venezuela under greater pressure. At the same time, the US Attorney General, Pam Bondi, spread the entire attack operation on X to give as much support as possible to her President’s imperialist arrogance. Bondi justified the operation by saying that the oil tanker had been under US sanctions for years, as it was involved in an alleged “oil shipping network supporting [of course, unspecified] foreign terrorist organisations”. According to Washington, the ship was carrying oil from Venezuela and Iran, and Trump proudly specified that it was the “largest tanker ever seized”. Caracas denounced the seizure of the tanker as a “theft” and an “act of international piracy” underlining the real target of the prolonged US attacks on Venezuela as its natural resources, in particular oil. The US does not particularly need Venezuelan oil, but China does, and ultimately US control is a move against China. Two more tankers were seized in the same piratical way in the days following the capture of the Skipper, and on Wednesday 17 December 2025, the US announced a “blockade” on “sanctioned oil tankers” travelling in and out of Venezuela.

A second excuse to put Maduro’s government under pressure is the war on drug trafficking that allegedly starts out from the South American country, where according to Trump a so-called “Cartel de los Soles”, distributor of that fentanyl that could kill thousands of US citizens, is controlled directly by Maduro himself. For this purpose, the American President has launched a ground operation on the Venezuelan coasts with drones and men trained for the purpose. In a press conference during the Israeli Prime Minister’s visit, in response to questions as to whether the US military or secret service was behind the operation, Trump stated (29 December 2025), “I don’t want to say that…I know exactly who it was, but I don’t want to say who it was. But you know, it was along the shore.” This serious incident involving an assault on a third country was called a “non-international armed conflict.”

From these premises, the obvious goal of Trump is to destabilise the Venezuelan regime and to favour the rise of a more pro-US government. All to make the most of its energy resources and remove from the international scene an oil competitor that, among other things, holds reserves equal to 300 billion barrels of oil and is the second-largest energy supplier to China, after Russia. Lastly, the US’s ability to attack its neighbours and kidnap their leaders with impunity is intended to intimidate any other local elites who are thinking about getting too cosy with China or Russia. So at stake is not only the war on drugs, wielded as an excuse, but the opening of another potential imperialist front with political, economic and strategic value. Trump is abandoning Europe to its fate, focussing on regaining ground in South America and preparing for the most important challenge, the one with China, for Taiwan and for the economic and financial game that Xi is playing against him.

These are dangerous games for the working class. US adventures in the Caribbean are already being seen by some in China as a potential justification for actions against Taiwan. If Trump can attack sovereign nations and kidnap their leaders, justifying his actions by citing the war on drugs, is China not justified in doing the same in Taiwan? After all, through Xi’s eyes, Taiwan is merely a rebellious province and not a sovereign nation, with corruption problems of its own. Putin no doubt sees the hypocrisy of America attacking its neighbours while condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine and will likely make great propaganda use of it. The international rules-based order was never much more than a figleaf, as states have selectively ignored the rules when it suited them, but the US tidying up its backyard in such a manner as this is a worrying sign that it is preparing for a conflict ahead. It is taking out minor rivals in its own region as a preparation for fighting global rivals further down the line. It is another sign of a world marching onward to generalised slaughter.

Internationalists and the Working Class

Only the working class is in a position to stop this, because it is the working class that through its labour keeps the system working. Only a working class organised to fight for its own interests – which are ultimately the interests of the human race – can end the system of capitalist competition that drags us to war for the sake of profits. This can never be through supporting one state against another, one bloc against another, one imperialist power against another. Our enemy is nationalism in whatever form it takes. The working class has faced decades of retreat in the face of capitalist austerity which has intensified poverty and insecurity; we need it to come together to resist the drive to world war. Though we cannot expect this to happen overnight, the working class needs to create its own international organisation of revolutionaries as a necessary tool of the working class to fight against the predatory system of world capitalism that controls our lives and brings us ever-closer to global slaughter. That organisation does not yet exist, and we in the ICT are certainly not it, though we hope to be a component of such an organisation in the future, but we recognise that there are internationalists who oppose the drive to war in similar terms to us. We are aware of the following internationalist statements in the wake of the recent events:

The US military attacks in Venezuela are a further step in the ongoing tendency toward generalised war. The US intervention should be analysed within the context of the competition for global capitalist hegemony between the United States and China. The winds of war are blowing in the dispute between a declining power and a rising one.
The proletariat must reaffirm its historical programme in the face of this situation: no support for any bourgeois government, revolutionary defeatism against all imperialist blocs.

Grupo Barbaria, our translation, t.me

With Iran, and now quite possibly Cuba which is dependent on Venezuelan oil in the sights of the US, all of strategic interest to China, the fault lines of global capitalist rivalry are now aflame in South America as well as Africa, Europe,the Middle East and elsewhere in Asia.
Our role as revolutionary internationalists must be to denounce each side of serving its respective capitalist state or factional masters and call for an escalation of the Class War at home to hinder the warfare state…No return to capitalist peace. just a repressive pause and austerity assault preparing for the next bloody conflict! For resistance and escalation on all fronts. Class War against imperialist war! Working class resistance and solidarity against capitalist and state brutality!

Network of Anarchist Internationalists, anarcomuk.uk

The attacks of the US army in Venezuela are an expression of imperialism...From a working class perspective and the perspective of international emancipation, the battle cry for ‘sovereignty’ is a dangerous myth. The situation in Venezuela is part of a global panorama of block confrontation and as international workers we have to find ways not to get crushed in the middle.
We currently witness a global arms race, led by the US…It is clear that they pay for this by cutting our income and welfare, such as health and education. Every government wants to normalise this preparation for future wars…We have to refuse this in our day to day struggle.
We have to gradually expand this battle over control to the social level. Against global war, for a free and communist future.

Angry Workers of the World, angryworkers.org

The US attacks on Venezuela January and its president Maduro’s kidnapping the night of January 3 mark a new stage in the race toward widespread imperialist war.
In order to defend its imperialist interests at the level required by the situation today, the American bourgeoisie will also have to redouble its attacks on its own proletariat. The same is inevitably true for other imperialist rivals. They must attack their own working class if they want to have even a small stake at the table.
It is a race against time between capitalism, and the increasingly impoverished proletariat. The former, in dire straits, is plunging us into war. The latter must cope with worsening living and working conditions as a result of this general preparation for war. International proletarian revolution or generalized imperialist war: this is the alternative facing humanity. The historical responsibility of the proletariat, a class that is both exploited and revolutionary, as well as that of its communist minorities, is all the more pressing.

International Group of the Communist Left, igcl.org

There are certainly others. At this point genuine internationalists, whatever their tradition, can come together and, on the basis of such revolutionary defeatist statements, engage in dialogue and where possible work together to give impetus to global working class resistance to imperialist war. This internationalism does not include the traditional capitalist left supporters of fake socialism (including that of Maduro and the so-called “Bolivarian Revolution”). Real socialism can only be built by the workers themselves through their own organisation and not those of a new form of state-controlled capitalism. Our historic choice is between world working class revolution or more imperialist massacre.

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Image: commons.wikimedia.org