The understanding of any phenomenon requires context, and the larger context of the US attack on Venezuela involves the declining trajectory of America’s geopolitical empire. There are a number of excellent books by historians and geopolitical scholars on the decline of the US empire, of which I will mention only one: To Govern the Globe by Alfred W. McCoy (2021).

The USA inherited the mantle of the British Empire with the end of World War II. It built a network of more than 800 (known) military bases worldwide and underwrote a global economic system in which the US dollar was the standard reserve and trade currency everywhere on the planet.

The military-industrial-academic complex of the United States became the backbone of the empire, producing not only immense financial investments in this system but also the propaganda claiming the US was the leader in defending democracy, freedom, and human rights on every continent.

Yet, as a matter of fact, since the end of World War II, the US has embraced persistent foreign policy objectives of world military and economic domination, regardless of which party is in power at the time. Since that time, it has assassinated leaders, invaded countries, severely sanctioned many others, prosecuted wars, financed proxy wars, overthrown stable governments, or engineered coups in more than 100 countries worldwide.

As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the propaganda of “promoting democracy” was not primarily directed at other countries (who often knew exactly what was happening and whose opinions mattered very little). The propaganda was for the people of the USA, whose tax money was being squandered to the tune of trillions of dollars on endless wars and foreign clandestine or military operations.

The momentum of this vast industrial-military-academic complex (i.e., the “Oligarchy”) has been so powerful that every president of the USA must conform to its momentum. Both Democrats and Republicans bought into the myth of American superiority, exceptionalism, and the need for planetary military domination.

Perhaps the high point of the illusion of planetary domination came with the collapse of the Soviet Union when that entity was formally dissolved as a sovereign state in December 1991. There was rejoicing in the USA halls of power, and the “victory” was hailed in such popular books as The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama (1992), in which the triumph of “liberal democracy” was touted as the great worldwide achievement of the USA. During that same year, the secret US Defense Planning Guide (DPG), formulated by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, was leaked to the media.

It explicitly declared that the US posture from that time forward would be to allow no country on Earth to rival US hegemony and dominance. The main possible threat identified by the defense establishment at that time was Russia, which, even without the former Soviet-bloc nations, remained a vast, resource-rich portion of the globe spanning Europe and Asia. This larger theoretical perspective (on the “natural” domination of the world by the USA) was expressed in Zbigniew Brzezinsky’s famous book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997).

After the Soviet collapse, under the guise of “helping” Russia with the transition from state socialism to a “free market,” the US sent legions of advisors to Russia to help steer the decisions of its manipulable new President Boris Yeltsin.

The clandestine goal was the appropriation of Russian resources by Western capital and the dismemberment of this vast country into weak fragments that would be easily controlled by the Superpower. However, there were forces in Russia that discerned what was happening and who were taking steps to protect their motherland.

After 1996, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, became one of the top figures in Yeltsin’s administration. Superior in critical intelligence to Yeltsin, he discerned exactly what was happening and rallied the Russian resistance in the name of saving their country from the Western economic and political assault. By 1999, he had pressured Yeltsin to make him Prime Minister, and in 2000, after Yeltsin’s retirement, was elected President. He has been reelected ever since because the Russian people see him as a hero who has saved their country and restored its culture, traditions, autonomy, and dignity.

The industrial-military-academic complex and its minions in the US government, therefore, hate Putin. He has defied the Wolfowitz doctrine, which had been articulated not only by The Grand Chessboard but by a militaristic organization and document called the “Project for the New American Century.” This group was founded in 1997, and its official document was signed by people (such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz) who later became high officials in the George W. Bush Administration.

Their doctrine forecasted planetary domination by the USA throughout the 21st century. However, it said, the American people were not likely to make the sacrifices necessary for this intensified militarization of their country unless there was an attack on American soil, a “new Pearl Harbor,” that would galvanize their patriotism.

Lo and behold, such an attack came on September 11, 2001, shortly after George W. Bush came to power and appointed these hawkish leaders to high posts in his administration.

The reader is likely familiar with the subsequent events. The US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, and has continued to target countries (such as Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Iran) in Asia since that time. The ultimate goal of ousting Putin and dismembering Russia remains. Following (believe it or not), a 1904 British geopolitical military analyst named Sir Halford Mackinder, the US industrial-military-academic establishment sees Asia as “the world island” and believes that “he who controls the world-island controls the world.”

In Mackinder’s view, as in the view of Brezinsky, the area that includes Ukraine is an essential key to dominating the world-island and therefore of strategic importance. These views also help us comprehend the absolute commitment of the USA to the genocidal, colonial-settler projects of Israel. Israel is seen as an essential US foothold in the Middle East and a key component in the struggle to control the “world-island.” The war to destroy Russia, therefore, is very much a continuation of the war previously waged against the Soviet Union.

The world empire must prevent multipolarity at all costs. In 2014, sources claim the US spent some 5 billion dollars financing a coup in Ukraine that threw out the Russian-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych. This led to the installation of a series of anti-Russian (even neo-Nazi) governments that began persecuting and actually bombing the Russian-speaking population of that country. This was seen by many analysts as an attempt to antagonize Russia and draw it into a war to defend this Russian-speaking population.

At the same time, the USA engineered severe economic sanctions against Russia. The strategy was to lure Russia into a war that would bankrupt the country, and, in conjunction with brutal sanctions, lead to the failure of the Russian state and the removal of Putin. By 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky came to power and, never free from Western militaristic backing and pressure, began intensifying the attacks on the Russian-Ukrainian population.

Russia took the bait and undertook its “Special Military Operation (SMO)” in February 2022 to show the Ukrainian government that it was serious in its demands for protection of this Russian-speaking population, as well as its demands for a “security framework” that ensured a stable peace and beneficial trade with all of Europe.

Russia’s demands were simple and have not significantly changed since that time: (1) that Ukraine not join NATO and that it be substantially demilitarized; (2) that the Ukrainian government be “denazified” and end its fanatical hostility toward Russia; and (3) that the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine be respected and treated as equal citizens with all other Ukrainians. After the Ukrainian army counterattacked massively with NATO-organized forces, Russia also demanded that (4) the peoples of Eastern Ukraine and Crimea get to vote on what country they wished to live in. They did, and the people overwhelmingly voted to be with Russia.

The US attempt to destroy Putin and Russia through the Ukraine War has failed and even backfired. Russia has substantially won the war, and this winter of 2026, it will likely be solidifying its victory and, instead of “negotiations,” will be dictating the terms of Ukraine’s surrender. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian population has been decimated and sacrificed to this geopolitical “grand chessboard” move (as if the current figure of some 1.7 million dead or missing in Ukraine was of any concern to the USA Oligarchy). Europe has been significantly damaged economically, and many of its NATO nations are in political and economic turmoil.

Meanwhile, Russia has diversified its trade relations and redirected its energy exports to China, India, and other non-Western nations. Its military industries are pumping out weapons systems faster than the US and NATO combined can do this. Russia’s population remains strongly behind the war and its objectives, and the Russian military has proved its supremacy in a conventional (proxy) war sponsored and organized by NATO and the USA.

As mentioned earlier, the propaganda of the “benevolent superpower” was swallowed primarily by the people of the USA. The victims of military domination and economic exploitation worldwide were far less likely to embrace that narrative. The thought of an alternative world-system has been brewing for a long time, but it lacked forces that could lead the way. In Washington’s view, a multipolar world of equal sovereign nation-states (as envisioned by the UN Charter) must be stopped at all costs in the name of American hegemony.

Then there came BRICS, and real signs of the declining US empire began to emerge. China had been a technologically backward, largely rural, and impoverished nation through the late 20th century and for that reason did not significantly register on the list of “threats to the empire” compiled by the US Oligarchy. Nevertheless, China (after Mao Tse-Tung’s drive for industrialization, going back to 1949) adopted what some have called “state capitalism,” in which the lion’s share of investment and return is centrally controlled by the government.

In a series of well-designed 5-year plans, China rapidly transformed into a global economic superpower that includes widespread industrialization, high levels of technological sophistication, state-of-the-art transportation, and commercial outreach to nations across the planet. It joined the World Trade Organization in 2002 and has economically outperformed all the world’s nations since that time. And there were other fast-growing economies, including Russia’s survival of sanctions under Putin’s supervision. In 2009, China, Russia, India, Brazil, and South Africa held the first BRICS summit.

They established the New Development Bank (NDB) to develop alternatives to the universal dollar-based financial and trade system. Many other nations have become interested in participating in this alternative system, in which development loans and trade deals appear much more equitable and more likely to develop the countries involved.

This amounted to abandoning the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) models in which exploitative loans were granted to nations with the exclusive purpose of keeping them indebted, impoverished, and beholden to Western domination. The idea of a multipolar world now had leadership in a group of countries not easily overthrown or sabotaged.

This context now puts us in a position to comprehend the recent actions of Donald Trump. The seemingly erratic and impulsive actions of Trump do not depart from the Wolfowitz-Brzezinski geopolitical script that is awaiting each new president. Nevertheless, the larger context of these actions contains a growing awareness on the part of US elites that the empire is in decline. This decline is graphically illustrated in the attraction of dozens of nations who want to join BRICS, and in the rapid investments being made by China and Russia in African and Latin American nations.

We can now comprehend the new “Trump-Monroe Doctrine” (“Donroe”) in which the US reasserts its supremacy over all the Latin American nations. They want to stop the exodus of Latin American nations to BRICS, within which China and Russia have been investing heavily, offering real development and mutually beneficial terms of trade.

We are now also in a position to understand the US attacks on Venezuela. These attacks have been going on in the form of sanctions and one attempted coup for 23 years. They escalated into a military attack on January 1 that crippled Venezuela’s defense system and resulted in the kidnapping of President Maduro and his wife.

The US claims it will put them on “trial” for shipping drugs to the US, although multiple reliable sources concerning drug patterns confirm that almost no drugs come to the US from Venezuela. President Trump has made clear that the real issue is Venezuelan oil. The USA, he proclaims, will now run Venezuela and take over the pumping and distribution of its vast oil reserves.

What he does not mention is that Russia, in diversifying its trade relations to circumvent US sanctions, has, for many years, invested heavily in Venezuela. Venezuela, under similar severe US sanctions, naturally sought investment and trade elsewhere, including Russia and China. Since the presidency of Hugo Chavez, beginning in 1999, Russian oil companies have provided technical assistance and trade agreements involving Venezuelan oil, resulting in a robust economic relationship. In fact, on November 20, 2025, Venezuela and Russia announced another 15-year partnership in developing Venezuelan oil.

In attacking Venezuela, the US was therefore attempting to hit at least three birds with one stone: first, it was attempting to end the independent and quite successful Venezuelan endurance of its sanctions and continuing political independence with national control of its vast oil reserves.

Second, it is cutting off one of Russia’s major development lines in its attempt to find alternative trade partners outside the brutal US sanctions regime; and third, it is sending a warning to all Latin American nations that trade with Russia and China (and growing BRICS involvement) will not be permitted in the “backyard” of the global hegemon.

This brutal lashing out and its domination project will fail, but perhaps not without causing much bloodshed and misery in the meantime. My wife and I have been to Venezuela three times: in 2016, 2018, and 2024. We have traveled to different parts of the country, met many people, and seen for ourselves the “Bolivarian spirit” and solidarity of the people and their love for their beautiful country.

The propaganda mantra that Maduro was a “brutal dictator” was not what we experienced. On our first trip to Venezuela, we participated in a celebration march of indigenous peoples in Caracas that then culminated in an outdoor assembly presided over by President Maduro. Here is one of the photos we took of him on the low stage in front of the assembly of perhaps a thousand citizens of Venezuela:

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I was watching everything carefully because I could not believe that we were perhaps 50 feet from Maduro and we had walked into this outdoor arena in a semi-circle around the low stage with no metal detectors, no “security” frisking, and no armed guards with machine guns. There were no snipers on the tops of buildings nor in any of the windows facing the crowd. This man on the stage, talking about governmental systems that allowed people to access money for food, housing, and fuel, was clearly not afraid of his citizens.

A random crowd of Venezuelan people surrounded him on three sides, and it was clear that they loved and respected him. The stage was separated from the crowd by perhaps 20 young women in dress uniforms (and only women) who stood in a semi-circle at the foot of the stage, looking very proud and in their role at this public event featuring their President. No other military was visible anywhere.

To me, along with our subsequent trips to Venezuela, this was an eye-opener in which the propaganda of the empire fell from my eyes, and I began to see what real solidarity and cooperation for the good of the whole might look like.

The declining empire will lash out violently, perhaps destroying the lives of millions in the process, but the course of history is on the side of justice and freedom. This solidarity is becoming planetary, and the world will move rapidly through the multipolar phase of BRICS toward a true Federation for the Earth under the Earth Constitution. If we want a decent future on this planet, then we must stand together in terms of the deeper understanding that “the world is one family.”