Venezuela: From Anti-Imperialism to Pluralized Dominance
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Venezuela has revealed more clearly how Trump understands power and global order. That view centers on power, leverage, and unilateral action. It also involves a withdrawal from international law, institutions, and norms that the political right has long criticized. In this rejection, his position overlaps with parts of the anti-imperialist left, which share skepticism toward those same neoliberal institutions for different reasons.
Different critiques of neoliberal hegemony, pursued for very different reasons, can still converge once universality is rejected rather than challenged. When that happens, the ability to judge power erodes, and people are pushed aside in favor of borders, states, and geopolitics.
The impact of Trump’s actions produces, by default, spheres of power and a form of multipolarity, even though he describes this reality in looser terms of winners and losers. A multipolar structure is also promoted by parts of the anti-imperialist left with different intent and expected outcomes. Trump’s actions expose the dangers for the left of relying on geopolitical configurations. Without universal concepts that inform international solidarity, power merely adjusts to new realities.
Debates around Venezuela reflect this by omitting the voices of the people involved unless they can be reduced to binary geopolitical categories such as pro-U.S., pro-Maduro, and anti-U.S. What is ultimately at stake is the loss of any means to judge power itself, as converging critiques of neoliberal globalization make universal claims suspect, and a politics of pure negation undermines the possibility of creative alternatives in internationalism and solidarity.
In a contentious meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, President Trump said, “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards.” Trump’s statement provided far more insight than he intended or might even realize. It defines a worldview based on power, who can implement it, and who can survive escalation for doing so. It omits consent, universal rights, and limits on power, undermining both Enlightenment ethics and the material basis of collective agency and social struggle.
Doing so makes sovereignty conditional, predicated on relative strength. Even though the intended framework is geopolitical, it includes the people who inhabit these nations, too, making their sovereignty conditional as well. Trump did not create this framing, and it extends well beyond Ukraine.
This view of “cards” applies to recent actions in Venezuela. The Trump administration has been slowly building a case for the capture of Maduro, ranging from reclassifying the definition of terrorism to include cartels, to targeted military actions against alleged drug boats. This justification has been happening ideologically as well, and most precisely with the reemergence of the Monroe Doctrine in speeches, articles, and official documents.
Inherent in the Monroe Doctrine are spheres of influence. The terms originate in different historical times but share the concept that a country should have dominion over extraterritorial regions without outside interference. It applies not just to U.S. imperialistic actions in Central and South America. It is shared in very different traditions, such as international relations in the form of some realist analysis and anti-imperialist critique of NATO expansion into former Soviet countries. This overlap is structural and not ideological, but produces similar organizing logic. Still, it is a recognized framework and integral to worldviews.
For example, in a 2022 interview, Noam Chomsky described a resolution to Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine, stating: “It might be spelled out as an agreement to refrain from placing heavy weapons aimed at Russia in Ukraine, no further joint military maneuvers, etc. In short, a status rather like Mexico.”
It is striking that Chomsky would invoke an analogy that implicitly treats a Central American nation as little more than a satellite state. This is especially notable given his extensive documentation of U.S. interventions in the Western Hemisphere. It is not an endorsement, but the choice of analogy confers legitimacy on the underlying framing or at the very least recognizes its established acceptance. If the point were merely illustrative, another comparison could have been used.
Beyond this, Chomsky’s and many other anti-imperialist critiques frame Ukraine primarily through NATO expansion rather than through the voices of Ukrainians themselves. The perspective is clearly shaped by figures like John Mearsheimer, Anatol Lieven, and Richard Sakwa, and not by leftist mutual aid groups or activists in Ukraine. Pieces with titles like “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin” are given more attention than leftist, grassroots documents from the region. The question is why?
Before Venezuela and Ukraine, some anti-imperialist and leftist authors had already spent considerable time criticizing post-Soviet U.S. foreign policy. Chomsky and others criticized what he called the post–Cold War “new humanism.” This critique centered on the rhetoric of human rights, humanitarianism, and democracy being applied selectively to benefit Western imperialism.
In truth, human rights were enforced unevenly. International law was subordinated to geopolitical interests. Universalist language of globalization was used to mask power. In reaction, some on the left gradually shifted orientation from transnationalism to a politics of negation. Opposition to the U.S. replaced a generative effort for reimagining an internationalism or new global alternatives.
Neoliberal co-optation of phrases with universal implications, such as democracy, human rights, and humanitarianism, helped convince the public that its globalization project was not only politically or economically advantageous but also morally necessary. Many of these concepts had long been theorized and struggled over by the left in the form of bottom-up internationalism and solidarity.
While moral arguments are viewed skeptically from a strictly materialist critique, many of the ethical considerations embedded in these concepts remain important to internationalism. Whether by design or not, the neoliberal project of globalization took many concepts, not the least among them internationalism, and filtered them through a neoliberal free market lens. In other words, they were co-opted by the ruling class. However, that act should not have made them politically irrelevant.
The leftist critique of neoliberal globalization built upon itself and, in some cases, reached extreme levels of cynicism and negation that led to the collapsing of categories. This resulted in universal principles being dismissed as opposed to being understood as manipulated. A consequence is the notion that universalism is itself imperialist.
Once universalism is rejected at a foundational level, people facing repression are required to pass a double test. This burden has been imposed on Syrians, Ukrainians, Bosnians, Rwandans, Iranians, and others who must show that the abuse they describe is not propaganda, but also that they themselves are not being used as instruments of hegemony. It represents a break in solidarity that dehumanizes people into objects of suspicion, often resulting in pre-emptive disqualification. In this way, it overlaps in structure with Trump’s logic of who holds the cards because both determine who is a viable participant and who is not.
The political right has also been engaged in very different depictions of power and politics. The clearest legal precedent for Trump’s actions in Venezuela comes from the trial of Manuel Noriega. In 1989, the U.S. invaded Panama, captured the leader, and transferred him to the U.S. to stand trial for drug trafficking. Court arguments invoked the Ker-Frisbie doctrine that stated how the defendant is brought to court is not relevant to the court’s jurisdiction. This means that if the person is abducted or otherwise seized in violation of international law, the trial itself can still proceed once the defendant is in U.S. custody.
An angle that receives less attention is the period in which the case occurred. Noriega’s capture took place shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as the Cold War was beginning to end. This was a transitional period in which spheres of influence still existed, but the threats that had once justified them were shifting.
In this unsettled context, power still required justification to assert itself within changing global dynamics. A turn toward narco-terrorism provided such a rationale, particularly because it mapped easily onto the Western Hemisphere and existing sphere-of-influence logic.
As spheres of influence continued to change after the collapse of the Soviet Union, other justifications for power were necessary. This was the beginning of the neoliberal globalization experiment that both the political left and right intensely critiqued.
Democrats favored jurisdiction generated through managed legal architectures, including extradition treaties, sanctions regimes, international financial pressure, and human rights conditionality. Republicans framed these mechanisms as weakening American power. The Bush-era War on Terror marked a shift away from this order by emphasizing unilateral action and expanded executive authority over legal mediation.
Trump is attempting to usher in a new era of U.S. power, building on precedents set during the Bush administration to reassert spheres of influence. The difference is that this shift lacks a Cold War ideological justification. Instead, narco-terrorism is repurposed as the legitimating framework, reviving arguments familiar from the Manuel Noriega era. At the same time, this framing serves a new function by drawing on the post-9/11 Department of Homeland Security architecture to justify expanded forms of domestic control, including the increased use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Trump is often portrayed as an anomaly, but he is better understood as carrying through a reactionary project that began years earlier. Trump treats the “constraints” described by the Bush-era politics as evidence of bias. It is an old complaint from the right, institutional bias, but Trump is using it to justify the consolidation of executive authority as outlined in Project 2025. The result is a view in which checks and balances are treated as tools that institutions use to protect their imposed political programs, rather than mechanisms for maintaining the rule of law and the separation of powers. This belief sits at the core of his “deep state” logic, applying both domestically and in foreign affairs.
Parts of the anti-imperialist left share this structural institutional distrust and for good reason. There is no claim that the two share intent, but there is clear structural overlap in perspective and outcome. When conclusions are rejected due to their institutional source, analysis is replaced with pre-emptive delegitimation, often relying on a genetic fallacy. Delegitimation means deciding in advance that a claim does not count, simply because it comes from a particular institution. This reasoning often takes the form of a genetic fallacy, where conclusions are rejected because of their origin rather than because the evidence supporting them has been examined.
Recently, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared, “Out with idealistic utopianism,” “In with hard-nosed realism,” at the Reagan Defense Forum. Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy document echoes this sentiment. It does not frame U.S. interests in terms of democratic ideals, humanitarianism, or universal concepts. Instead, it focuses on control of the Western Hemisphere and a return to spheres of influence, singling out narco-terrorism as a justification. While the legal logic circles the Noriega case, so does its place in the timeline as Trump attempts to institute a new geopolitical order.
A tangible example of shared structural overlap emerged in early interpretations of Trump’s imperial intentions that framed him as a peace candidate, particularly when juxtaposed with Hillary Clinton in 2016. As argued in the Substack piece Trump’s Imperialism, which is also published on the 161 Crew website, Trump does not reject empire. He strips it of its liberal euphemisms. Empire continues to operate, but without human-rights theater, humanitarian pretense, or appeals to universal order, and this is disorienting for some on the left.
It is disorienting because of convergence. The point of convergence is grounded in the ontological claim that universalism is inseparable from hegemony, and that both the left and the right are therefore engaged in opposing it. For the right, U.S. dominance is recoded as neoliberal institutional dominance, extended to global bodies such as the United Nations, the European Union, or transnational elites. For the left, U.S. dominance is recoded as neoliberal globalization itself, with international institutions being treated as instruments of imperial power.
This is where certain strands of left anti-imperialist critique and nationalist realism begin to overlap structurally. In both cases, universality is framed as a mechanism of domination. When internationalism is collapsed into universalism, and both are coded as neoliberal globalization, solidarity shifts away to spheres of influence, borders, and states. It moves away from people and to geopolitics.
These components converge with geopolitical concepts such as multipolarity. The argument holds that a multipolar world is the necessary alternative to U.S. unipolar dominance, which is rightfully blamed for war, sanctions, regime change, and economic coercion. Multiple power centers could constrain unilateral action and reduce the capacity of any single state to impose its will globally. This claim rests on assumptions and carries additional consequences.
One such outcome is the pluralized dominance advocated by Trump. He accepts the idea that there should be multiple powerful actors, but he rejects the idea that those actors should be bound by shared rules or limits. For him, power is not something to be balanced. It is something to be exercised. Samir Amin warned about such a result. He argued that multipolarity is not an inherently emancipatory project but a redistribution of power among states. Without popular struggle, a multipolar order does not dismantle domination but fragments it instead.
The decline of a single dominant power can limit what any one state is able to do on its own, but it does not automatically empower ordinary people. If social forces still lack the capacity to constrain state power, then decision-making remains concentrated. In that situation, multipolarity can end up protecting those who rule, insulating them from both internal opposition and external pressure. Essentially, multipolarity alone cannot deliver emancipation and can generate new forms of concentrated power.
A plural empire of competing spheres of influence, justified as a rejection of neoliberal globalization, appears as easily in Alexander Dugin’s fascistic writings as in some leftist accounts. If anti-hegemony devolves into negation that highlights sovereignty as opposed to internationalism, then politics of borders, refugees, race, and religion can easily be included.
This is why the transition to populism is so smooth. Populism thrives on distrust of institutions, rejection of abstract principles, and the conviction that politics is a zero-sum struggle between insiders and outsiders. The shift feels intuitive because cynicism has already been internalized.
Once these premises are accepted, then populism becomes structurally syncretic. Anti-imperialist language merges with nationalist rhetoric and sovereignty. Critiques of neoliberal globalization bleed into civilizational or ethnic narratives. Left skepticism toward humanitarianism overlaps with right-wing rejection of universal human rights. Once universality is treated as fraud, any narrative that promises protection against it can be combined with any other.
This environment benefits powers such as the United States, Russia, and China. Europe loses normative and institutional leverage while smaller states are further marginalized. What happens in Ukraine becomes a “regional matter.” What happens in Taiwan becomes “internal.” What happens in Venezuela becomes “hemispheric.” Once everything is internal to someone’s sphere, nothing is fully contestable anymore. Universal principles are abandoned rather than contested, and the political agency of ordinary people fades from view along with internationalism and solidarity.
None of this is inevitable. Ontological claims based on category collapse can be challenged and revised. There are many people in Venezuela who have struggled under Maduro and who will continue to do so. They have lessons to offer for those willing to listen. Their stories and struggles can be centered and given priority. Cynicism does not have to become a permanent posture. It is possible to criticize power without dismissing people in advance. For any of this to happen, politics will need to shift from negation toward building and recognizing struggles where they already exist. Venezuela could be a place to begin.