The ‘drug war’ is a war for control of Venezuela’s oil

Donald Trump has opened a war in the Caribbean — without Congress, without evidence, and without limits. What was once called “drug interdiction” has been renamed a “non-international armed conflict” by Trump on Oct. 2. The new label hands the White House a blank check to kill, no questions asked.

In the past month, U.S. forces blew apart three small boats, killing 17 people. None were arrested, none put on trial. They were gunned down at sea — and only afterward did the White House declare them “combatants,” dressing up executions as acts of war.

To justify it, the administration claims drug shipments themselves are “armed attacks” on the United States. By this logic, smuggling cocaine is the same as launching an invasion — a stretch so absurd it borders on parody.

Of course, this also ignores that Venezuela is not involved in any way with the global drug trade. Pino Arlacchi, former head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), says that decades of annual reports on drug trafficking never once mention Venezuela, because it doesn’t exist. 

Pino Arlacchi continues: “Yet Venezuela is systematically demonized, contrary to every principle of truth. In his memoir following his resignation, former FBI Director James Comey revealed the unspoken motives behind American policies towards Venezuela. Trump told him that Maduro’s government was ‘sitting on a mountain of oil that we have to buy.’ This is not about drugs, crime or national security. It is about oil that the U.S. would rather not pay for.”

The Quantico show of force

On Sept. 30, Trump and his handpicked “Secretary of War,” Fox host Pete Hegseth, ordered every four-star in the country and around the world — more than 800 generals and admirals — to Marine Corps Base Quantico.

On the surface, it was staged like a pep rally. But while the brass gathered, U.S. warships piled up off Venezuela’s coast, and military spotters tracked waves of U.S. jets and refueling tankers heading toward the Middle East. The movements looked almost identical to the days before Trump’s June strike on Iran.

On June 22, Trump launched Operation Midnight Hammer. Undetectable warplanes flew into Iran and dropped the most powerful non-nuclear bombs in existence, the GBU-57A/B, on Iranian facilities.

Former CIA officer Larry Johnson suggested the Quantico spectacle was a cover for a smaller, closed-door war council. If Trump is gearing up for simultaneous action against Venezuela and Iran, he’d need his top commanders in the room — and away from prying eyes.

Venezuela in the crosshairs

To sell the escalation, the White House has begun hyping Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang as a “terrorist organization.” (“Tren de Aragua” isn’t a tightly organized gang but rather a brand name for a loose network of criminals who operate without any structure.) Yet the official memo never even names who the U.S. is supposedly at war with. That’s by design. Trump picks the enemy, hands himself kill authority, and brushes Congress aside.

Meanwhile, Navy ships linger off Venezuela, and leaks suggest plans for strikes inside the country itself. Semafor reported, “The Trump administration isn’t ruling out launching military strikes inside Venezuela … a senior Trump administration official confirmed.”

On Oct. 3, Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López denounced the presence of five U.S. fighter jets flying near Venezuelan territory, specifically north of the country’s central Caribbean coast, El País reports. “It is a provocation, a major threat against the nation’s security,” the general declared.

This isn’t about narcotics. It’s about expanding U.S. domination — and using the “drug war” as the excuse. 

The real target is not drugs but regime change in Venezuela, home to the largest proven oil reserves globally. Trump administration officials privately call the Naval operations in the Caribbean “Noriega Part 2” — a reference to the 1989 invasion of Panama that toppled Manuel Noriega. Last August, the U.S. Justice Department issued an arrest warrant for Maduro.

The drug war has always been a tool of empire. Now the mask is off. Trump’s doctrine is blunt: call anyone a “combatant,” move the battlefield wherever he wants, and keep Congress out of it.

This is not a war on drugs. It’s a war for domination. A war to turn the Caribbean and Latin America into live-fire zones. A war to normalize summary executions as U.S. foreign policy.

We are told, endlessly, that we live in the age of the entrepreneur. You know the story: a lone genius tinkering in a garage, pulling miracles out of solder and silicon, eventually conquering the world with nothing but grit, brains, and a half-dead Macintosh. This is the catechism of Silicon Valley.

However, if you follow the wires backward, the story is entirely different. The most significant technologies of our time — the internet, GPS, touchscreen devices, and even artificial intelligence — were not born in garages. They were incubated in government laboratories, nourished on Pentagon contracts, and carried into the world on the shoulders of public universities.

From the Cold War’s sprawling defense labs to the current supremacy of Google’s AI empire, the state has been the real venture capitalist: planner, financier, and enforcer. It was the government that absorbed the risks, that spent billions on projects whose payoff might take decades, or never arrive at all. And when those gambles produced results, private corporations were waiting to privatize them.

The working class supplied the brains and the labor, as graduate students, engineers, and technicians, often underwritten by public grants. The capitalist class reaped the profits. Innovation, in other words, was socialized. Wealth was privatized.

The marriage of state and monopoly

There is an enduring myth that big business and big government stand on opposite ends of U.S. life. But if you look at Wall Street bailouts or Big Tech’s entanglement with the Pentagon, you see something closer to a marriage.

The pattern is consistent: subsidies for research and development, bailouts when markets collapse, regulations drafted to suit monopolies, copyright and patent law weaponized to keep rivals at bay, and defense contracts that run into the tens of billions. The state doesn’t just oversee the game — it bankrolls the team.

Monopoly capitalism has never meant a weakened state. It has always meant a stronger one: imperialist powers fusing state resources with corporate power, ensuring their “national champions” can outgun competitors abroad. The more advanced the technology — especially in the case of artificial intelligence — the clearer this fusion becomes.

Forget the garage

The myth of the tinkering genius is fictional; the reality is blunt.

• The Internet began life as ARPANET, a Pentagon communications project designed to survive nuclear war.
• GPS was conceived and maintained by the U.S. Air Force before being transferred to the U.S. Space Force.
• Radar, microwaves, composite materials — all poured forth from wartime research budgets in the 1940s and 1950s.

The sequence rarely varies: The state socializes risk, spending billions on long-horizon research. Once the technology proves viable, it is delivered into the hands of private corporations, which harvest the profits while the government is left with the costs.

It is, arguably, the largest wealth transfer in modern history. But it is disguised under the genteel euphemism of “innovation.”

The University-Industrial Complex

The state’s role extends far beyond the Pentagon. Public universities, lubricated by federal grants, train the engineers and computer scientists who are quickly absorbed into the orbit of companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Faculty labs — often government-funded — produce breakthroughs in algorithms and hardware that are then patented, licensed, or outright purchased by private firms.

The result is a vast ecosystem: the military, public universities, government research agencies, and corporate monopolies locked together. Far from being “footloose” or stateless, Silicon Valley’s firms are firmly tied to the U.S. empire, rooted in infrastructure and research pipelines subsidized by the public.

Google is not Google without DARPA (the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Microsoft is not Microsoft without the National Science Foundation. Amazon Web Services is not AWS without Pentagon contracts.

Case study: Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is the purest distillation of this system.

• Military birth. From the Cold War onward, the Pentagon poured money into AI for logistics, surveillance, and battle management. DARPA kept the field alive during its lean decades.
• Government-funded breakthroughs. The intellectual backbone of AI — machine learning and neural nets — emerged from university labs funded by the state. Today, the government remains the single largest customer for AI applications, from predictive policing to drone warfare.
• Privatized profits. Tech monopolies scoop up researchers trained at government expense, buy the data infrastructure, and commercialize algorithms whose foundations were laid with federal money.

The result is a textbook demonstration of monopoly capitalism: costs socialized, profits privatized.

Empire, not entrepreneurship

AI isn’t a triumph of the free market. It’s proof that big government and big business still move in lockstep, working for empire.

The state remains the ultimate venture capitalist, underwriting research, guaranteeing markets, and shoring up monopolies when they falter. Innovation is steered not toward public needs — such as clean energy, public health, and accessible housing — but toward war, surveillance, and corporate control.

The history of U.S. technology isn’t about daring entrepreneurs. It is the story of monopoly capital and the imperialist state, marching in lockstep. Until that bond is broken, technology will remain what it has been for more than half a century: a servant of empire, rather than of people.

Every speech Benjamin Netanyahu gives is an exercise in utter evil. At this point, Bibi’s evil rantings should shock no one. With that said, the fascist demagogue’s recent speech to the United Nations represented a stark display in U.S. imperialist arrogance and Nazi brutality. 

Netanyahu ranted for a little over half an hour. His speech was full of the typical lies, racist vitriol, and genocide apologia that have been Bibi’s hallmark throughout his political career. The Israeli Prime Minister again repeated accusations against Hamas of rape and beheadings on Oct. 7 – accusations that have been thoroughly debunked. Bibi painted a picture of an aggressive Iran hell bent on the eradication of the Jewish people. Another lie. 

One of the largest lies played a central role in the speech, this lie being that the current genocide against Gaza is all an attempt to rescue Israeli hostages from Gaza. If the current genocidal effort against Gaza was remotely related to Israeli prisoners of war, Netanyahu would have made a deal two years ago. Exacerbating the transparency of this lie is the fact that Zionist strikes have consistently killed their own citizens held prisoner in Gaza. 

This genocidal war is not about hostages or Jewish safety or self-defense. This war is about the imperialist attempt to break all resistance to their ambitions in the Middle East. Bibi’s speech highlighted these ambitions in substance and structure. He opened the tirade with not just firebrand anti-Palestinian rhetoric, but with a complete condemnation of the entire Muslim world. The Prime Minister bragged that Israel had assassinated so many religious and political leaders in countries like Yemen, Iran, and Lebanon – as if this should be a source of pride. 

At full froth, Netanyahu displayed a map identifying “The Curse.” The map is marked in red: Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen. While Israel is the face of imperialist war in the Middle East, there is importance in understanding that all these countries are enemies of Israel because they are enemies of the United States. 

Yemen, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran all represent two core problems for U.S. imperialism. One, they provide varying levels of resistance against U.S. / Israeli military rule in the region. Two, all five of these places have been historically or currently are markets closed to the U.S. on some level. In the present day, Western billionaires can’t make a profit from Gaza’s beaches, Iran’s oil, or southern Lebanon’s agriculture. And in the imperialist mind, if they can’t profit, then they would rather destroy completely. 

That is not to say all these places are politically homogeneous or share the same form of government. However, at one period or another, one way or another, these “curses” have represented a problem for U.S. imperialist economic and political domination of the region. Imperialism in its current phase is not willing to accept loss of profit or influence, no matter how small. 

This is exactly why Israel has so aggressively waged war against the people of the entire region for daring to assert any self-determination. Netanyahu said as much: 

“You know deep down that Israel is fighting your fight. I want to tell you a secret. Behind closed doors, many of the leaders who publicly condemn us, privately thank us. They tell me how much they value Israel’s superb intelligence services that have prevented time and again terrorist attacks in their capitals. Time and again saving countless lives.”

Netanyahu may be a liar, but here he’s telling somewhat of a truth. Many European leaders have publicly criticized or denounced Israel for their actions. However, the criticism has often proven to be performative as those same leaders approved new weapons sales to Israel. It isn’t hard to believe that these same leaders would thank Netanyahu privately for his country’s fascist service on behalf of imperialism. 

Netanyahu’s speech is a reminder of the role Israel serves. Israel’s role is not to avenge the Holocaust, or protect the Jewish people, or to preserve democracy in the Middle East. Israel’s role is to carry out brutal and asymmetrical warfare on behalf of Western billionaires while they sit safely in New York, Washington, London, Berlin, and Brussels.

To fight the enemy, that enemy must be identified. Luckily, Benjamin Netanyahu has consistently done the work making obvious who the true enemy of the working class and the Global South is: U.S. imperialism. 

Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, the Foreign Minister of Cuba, delivered a powerful message calling for “all human rights for all human beings,” as the keynote speaker at “Cuba and the U.N.: A Fight for the Global South.” 

The event was held at the SVA Theater in New York City on Sept. 27. Rodríguez called for a new world order free of blockades and exploitation, both in Cuba and in Palestine. His speech echoed the words of Assata Shakur, “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

His speech began in solidarity with Palestine. Rodríguez strongly proclaimed that it is the U.N.’s duty to condemn the genocide committed by Israel. He continued that the global community cannot accept that the U.N. has no responsibility to the Palestinian people. The foreign minister further demanded that Palestine become a full member of the U.N., with the borders established before 1967. The opening speaker of the program also highlighted Cuba’s continuous history of solidarity with Palestine. From when Cuban leaders took the first steps in the 1960s by visiting Gaza and establishing relations to this week, when Cuba opened in the U.N. by speaking of how 2.2 million people in Gaza face a blockade and genocide, Cuba has demonstrated solidarity with Palestine.

Rodríguez’s speech continued with the struggle against imperialism by discussing the U.S. military presence in the Southern Hemisphere. Fighting drug trafficking is the excuse the United States uses to assert military rule and dominance as an imperial power in Latin America. Recently, U.S. naval forces have been deployed in the Caribbean and have committed strikes on Venezuelan ships, killing civilians. The Cuban people and the Cuban government reject the U.S. militarization of the Caribbean and targeting of Venezuela.

Cuba has been a target of an asymmetrical war of attrition by the U.S., with an aim to conquer Cuba by isolating it with a blockade to cut off international trade. This year alone, the U.S. blockade on Cuba has cost the Cuban people 7.5 billion USD. The goal of the U.S. blockade is not hidden; in April 1960, a U.S. memorandum stated that the only means to stop Cuban support for Castro was to cause such great financial and life hardship that the people would turn against the government, so that it could be overthrown. 

This blockade continues today, resulting in blackouts, threatening the water supply, and restricting access to essential health and medical supplies. The U.S. propaganda campaign asserts that Cuban socialism is the cause of these hardships, when in reality, the cause is the U.S. blockade. The blockade has not stopped Cuba from persisting; Cuba is investing in solar power to decrease the economic deficit and provide the people with energy. 

Despite the U.S. propaganda campaigns against Cuban medical programs, Cuba will continue its commitment to medical cooperation. Currently, there are approximately 24,000 Cuban medical practitioners providing services in 56 countries worldwide. Rodríguez asserted that imperialism cannot erase Cuba’s economic and social accomplishments. 

The speech ended with a strong statement: Imperialism cannot cause Cuba to stray from the path of socialism. In a call to action, he concluded by speaking of how Fidel Castro believed a better world is possible, and that the only way to achieve this is for the oppressed and exploited to struggle. Together, no empire can hold back the change that is coming.

¡Cuba Sí, Bloqueo No!

President Donald Trump’s appearance before hundreds of generals and admirals at Quantico was not a routine address. It was a declaration of war — not on foreign rivals, but on the people in the U.S. 

At a time of austerity budgets and cuts everywhere, the two-hour special assembly of all admirals and generals in command positions worldwide cost approximately $6 million, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It could have been done on Zoom for a few thousand dollars.

Flanked by his so-called Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, Trump laid out plans to transform the U.S. military into a domestic instrument of repression, targeting immigrants, Black and Brown communities, unions, women, LGBTQ+ people and anyone who dares resist his agenda.

“We’re going to straighten them out one by one,” Trump told the brass. “That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.” He announced the creation of a “quick reaction force” to put down civil disturbances, casting protest as an “enemy from within.” 

He went further: U.S. cities, he suggested, should be used as “training grounds” for the armed forces. The meaning was clear — the normalization of military occupation on U.S. soil.

This was not theater. Trump has already sent National Guard units and Marines to Los Angeles, ordered federal forces into Portland, overseen the occupation of Washington, D.C., and named Chicago, Baltimore, San Francisco, and New York as future targets. 

The plan is clear: concentrate military power against the working-class, multinational centers of resistance that anchor U.S. cities.

Building a political guard

Hegseth railed against “woke garbage,” vowed to purge dissenting officers, and pushed directives that would gut protections against racism and sexual abuse, including rape. Even seemingly trivial rules — like beard bans — carry a racist edge, aimed at forcing out Black and Muslim soldiers, sailors and marines.

Hegseth has begun an “anti-woke” purge of the officer corps. He has fired dozens of senior officers, including the previous chairman of the Joint Chiefs, other top generals, combat commanders, and other commanders.

The goal in eliminating Black, Latine, women, lesbian, gay and trans officers is to ensure a political guard in the mold of the Waffen-SS.

Trump’s demand was explicit: any officer unwilling to join this war on the “enemy within” should resign. 

This was no isolated provocation. It is the spearhead of a coordinated, multi-front offensive to consolidate personal rule and unleash a historic assault on the U.S. working class.

This authoritarian offensive reaches far beyond the barracks. Trump has moved to neutralize every potential source of opposition — indicting critics, hounding media outlets, and leaning on corporations and social media platforms to silence dissent. TikTok, newly brought under oligarchic control, is being reshaped as a tool for suppressing digital protest.

Harshest on the most oppressed

As always, the harshest blows fall on the most oppressed. ICE operates as a Gestapo-like force, detaining tens of thousands without charge and deporting two million, according to Homeland Security, within months — spreading terror in immigrant neighborhoods and leaving families too frightened to leave their homes.

Meanwhile, the assault on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is a calculated attempt to roll back the gains of the civil rights movement. Corporations are eagerly complying, weaponizing discrimination to strip workplace rights from Black, Asian, Latine, Indigenous, women, lesbian, gay and trans workers.

Trump’s vow to use major cities (all with Black mayors) as “training grounds” makes the racist logic clear. Deployments to Los Angeles, Portland, Memphis, and the occupied capital (Washington) are not about “crime waves.” They are military operations designed to crush popular protest and silence resistance.

Purges and austerity

The authoritarian offensive extends deep into the government itself. The administration has purged an estimated 300,000 federal workers, clearing the way to turn the machinery of government into Trump’s personal party apparatus.

But authoritarianism here has a class purpose. “Make America Great Again” is not a carnival slogan or nostalgic appeal. It is a program to restructure U.S. capitalism by restoring profitability and global supremacy. And the chosen method is as old as capitalism itself: the ruthless intensification of exploitation.

Wages must be driven down, unions crushed, with the police and military force unleashed to discipline labor.

Trump’s bombast is camouflage; his tantrums are tactics. The real goal is to expand the U.S. government’s role in repressing working-class resistance and securing the conditions for renewed profits.

Class war budget

Trump’s budget exposes the blueprint: massive tax giveaways to the wealthy, financed through deep cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, and every program working people depend on to survive. 

In Marxist terms, this is not mere fiscal policy — it is the government acting as the executive committee of the capitalist class, orchestrating a direct transfer of value from labor to capital. Workers lose the meager social wage they fought to win; capital reaps the reward in the form of subsidies and tax relief.

And this is only the opening salvo. What is being prepared is not one round of cuts but a rolling offensive — a sustained assault on living standards and democratic rights until resistance is broken.

Dictatorship of the bourgeoisie

This is not McCarthyism in the midst of a booming postwar economy, when red-baiting was used to pacify a labor movement still on the rise. What we face today is far more dangerous: repression unfolding in the middle of a crisis economy defined by what capitalist economists call a “K-shaped recovery.”

The metaphor is telling. The upward line represents the soaring fortunes of the asset-owning capitalist class, fattened by imperialist super-profits and speculative bubbles. The downward line marks the opposite reality: a working class pushed into stagnation and decline, with its wages flat and its social wage gutted by austerity. 

The conclave at Quantico, the ICE raids, the mass purges, and the austerity budget are not disconnected episodes. They are interlocking parts of a single program: the construction of a dictatorship to wage open war on the working class.

At the U.N. on Sept. 25, just days before the assembly of generals and admirals, Trump laid the groundwork for a U.S. invasion of Venezuela. In the last month, U.S. forces sank three boats off Venezuela’s coast. 

Speaking from the podium at the U.N., Trump warned, “We will blow you out of existence / obliterate you.”

Trump is not merely eroding norms. He is actively constructing an apparatus of power designed to crush organized opposition. His invocation of “the enemy within” is not rhetoric. It is a declaration of class war.

Quantico was a show of force and a statement of intent. The White House is remapping the instruments of state toward political domination. The question now is whether the working class meets this offensive with fragmented outrage — or with collective power strong enough to turn back the billionaire oligarchs who would trample democratic rights to secure their domination.

The State Department recently updated its list of wars that Donald Trump allegedly ended. Trump now claims that he has brokered a peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Trump would have the world believe that this is another feather in his cap as a peacemaker. Previously, Trump and his State Department have taken credit for six other conflicts: India and Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, Serbia and Kosovo, Egypt and Ethiopia, Israel and Iran, Thailand and Cambodia. 

We have previously reported on the patent factual inaccuracies of these claims. India and Pakistan have both denied that any third party played a role in mediating the Kashmir-centered skirmishes of 2025. The last war between Egypt and Ethiopia ended in 1876. Trump started the war between Israel and Iran, which he also claims to have ended. Does an arsonist really deserve credit for dousing the fire they started?

Even where Trump and his administration have played some role in mediating conflicts, there is still an inherent Western arrogance in claiming complete credit for any brokered peace. This arrogance is compounded when considering the continued U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza and the U.S.-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. 

Just three days before Trump’s claim that he was “the President of Peace,” his administration approved $6.4 billion in weapons sales to apartheid Israel. That is $6.4 billion to bomb hospitals and murder children — some President of Peace. 

While claiming to be a peacemaker, Trump simultaneously announced a strategy that ensures NATO’s war in Ukraine continues indefinitely. Three hours before his seven wars ended claim, Trump ranted on Truth Social that “with the support of the European Union is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form. With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and in particular, NATO, the original Borders from where this War started, is very much an option.” 

Trump’s latest rant makes the U.S. imperialist strategy in Ukraine even more apparent. As we wrote in March, Trump and his cohorts never planned to end the war in Ukraine. U.S. imperialism had no intention of ending its NATO war in an attempt to bleed Russia of resources and political will. Burden shifting the Ukraine war to Europe is an imperialist strategic decision aimed at refocusing for war on China. The Republican Party effectively used war weariness to parlay a 2024 election victory over the deeply unpopular Joe Biden. However, rhetoric is not the same as policy. 

Outright U.S military aid to Ukraine may have ended, but the Trump administration has continually arranged for Ukrainian purchases of U.S. weapons with NATO funds. In the end, the result is the same. The war rages on, and with it, so do massive profits for U.S. defense conglomerates. 

Donald Trump is nothing more than an imperialist war monger. The proof is in the pudding. Trump’s first fascist administration murdered Qassem Soleimani in cold blood. Just a few months ago, Trump ordered strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. Strikes on Iran followed a several-week-long naval and air campaign against Yemen. With Trump’s approval, Israel has launched its largest-ever ground offensive into Gaza. Bloodshed has not been limited to the Middle East. The U.S. military destroyed multiple small boats off the coast of Venezuela under the pretext of fighting “narco-terrorism.” These extrajudicial executions have accompanied an unprecedented U.S. naval buildup across the Caribbean Sea. 

To be clear, the fascist demagogue is not acting alone. He is supported by a whole circus of generals, DOD staffers, the defense lobby, and fascist demagogues like Pete Hegseth. Trump’s administration unleashing war across the planet is not a matter of one man or even a Republican majority in Congress. Imperialist escalation against the entire Global South is a reflection of the imperialist goal to break all resistance.

Trump’s continued war drive is a threat to the entire working class across the globe. Workers everywhere face a literal fight for survival. The only way forward is global working-class resistance against the global billionaire class.