 Empire hardly ever makes its own announcements. Instead of this, it veneers itself in moral vocabularies which mostly deals with words like humanitarian rescue, anti-corruption, democracy promotion, counterterrorism, and today it is delving in narco-trafficking. The recent escalation of United States against Venezuela, which is led by naval destroyers to the Caribbean and doubling the bounty on the head of Nicolás Maduro to $50 million, heralds not just another attempt at overthrowing the government but also leading to an obscure politics. Chávez and the Imperial Order's Disruption One of the most glaring challenges to imperial hegemony in the post-cold war world was Hugo Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution. It was the union of redistribution and oil nationalization, which led to construction of houses, schools, and health clinics in the land where decades of neoliberalism only led to its evident outcome which is austerity. Most significant is that it reoriented Latin America by defenestrating the U.S. from its assumed tutelage through the regional organizations like ALBA. Venezuela under Chávez saw the disruption in the global accumulation circuits and halted what David Harvey has referred to as “accumulation by dispossession” by redispatching the resource rents toward social reproduction as opposed to the imperial extraction. It attempts to perforate dependency, even if it was only partial, still it was sovereignty asserted rather than socialism being fully realized. Conceptualizing The Regime Change It is pertinent to interrogate the idea of regime change itself. An important element is to alter sovereignty to bring peripheral states in line with the demands of imperial capital, not just replacing one government with another. The essence of regime change lies in the denial of autonomy which is the repression of initiatives which aim to deviate even slightly from imperial circuits. The American state usually does not acknowledge that it is an agent of regime change. Rather it creates a hidden narrative, that the leader of a particular state is a trafficker, criminal or a tyrant. This is an attempt to criminalize sovereignty which is done through reducing political antagonism to police procedure. A sovereign nation as a whole is reduced to a crime scene. Imperial violence is normalized as worldwide policing by this legal fantasy. In this way, U.S. enacts performative delegitimation that fizzle out Venezuela’s sovereignty into the realm of criminality when it calls Maduro “one of the largest narco-traffickers in the world” without any iota of evidence. This is the justification for regime change: the restoration of law, not war. Political Economy of Besiegement The material aspect of the siege is obscured within the discourse. Frozen assets, credit strangulations, and sanctions are all forms of slow violence. The bludgeon dollarization leads to the depletion of economy in the long run which culminates into shortages which starves individuals and creates a crisis. This conversion of scarcity into political leverage is the core of the political economy of regime change. Humanitarian crises in such societies are media narratives created to hide the purposeful impact of sanctions which are aimed to cause a collapse. This intricacy is profound as Imperialism fuels deprivation and later on uses it as an excuse to invade. Venezuela is not the only country on the receiving end. Iraq, Iran and Cuba have all been experiencing it for many decades. Venezuela is put on the other side due to its enormous oil reserves. Thus, the discourse around “narco-trafficking” is ideological equivalent of sanctions as they also consist of a complete conflict against sovereignty that is waged on both an economic and symbolic level. The Return of the Monroe Doctrine The case of the persecution of Venezuela is important to study. Imperialism, in particular to Latin America, is not just seen in the material sense as seizing the resources but also countering an alternative thinking or viewpoint. The intention of the message is directed not just on Caracas but to the entire hemisphere that a deviation is not tolerated. This can be seen as the revival of Monroe Doctrine. Latin America has long been in a dependency relationship with the west but this time it's a direct coercion. Previously it was used to justify military occupations but now it encompasses the character of hybrid warfare which includes financial blockades, media slaughtering, naval deployment, and legal indictment. The teleology remains the same, to deny Latin America any agency to decide its own path and destiny in global history. The inversion of causality is the root of this obscurity. Imperialism, which is creator of the crisis in Latin America and elsewhere, works in the facade of portraying as the guiding light against these crises. Imperialism here is seen as corrective against the failures, authoritarianism, crime and corruption in the third world. The U.S. is very skeptical of renewed Bolivarianism and seeks to punish anyone who follows this path. Sovereignty as Crime One of the most interesting features of this conjuncture is the coercion of sovereignty itself, into a state of malfeasance. The cry for a bounty on the head of an elected head of state is to challenge the line between sovereign and the criminal, which is not only rhetorical excess but a calculated shift in ontology. Sovereignty is not recognized if it is opposed to imperial order. This is the abstruse kernel of regime change where sovereignty is reserved for the allies and criminality for the enemies. Washington recognizes in a very selective manner and can weaponize the act of legitimate recognition itself as legitimacy becomes a subsidy to neoliberal order. In this manner, regime change is not only a form of material coercion but also a complete symbolic annihilation: the annihilation of actual meaning of sovereignty. Resistance and the Peoples Militias Venezuela has been staunchly opposing this symbolic annihilation for a long time now. In August 2025, the mobilization of more than four million citizens into the militias revealed that the Bolivarian project is embedded in the popular consciousness, even if not in a formal setting. This mobilization is not simply reducible to state propaganda. It is a material fact that millions are adamant to defend their sovereignty against the imperial attack. This is the fundamental contradiction for the empire; sovereignty was criminalized but the people cannot be criminalized easily. The sentiment of allegiance to the Bolivarian vision, regardless of how beleaguered, has shown that sovereignty is not simply formal, but rather its collective in its very essence, embedded in the reified memory of resistance to centuries of domination. Conclusion The lesson of Venezuela is not just that the U.S. wants regime change. The lesson is that the regime change itself is empire’s obfuscated form of paramountcy in the 21st century. By making sovereignty criminal, weaponizing scarcity, and militarizing legality, imperialism is conducting its assault on the periphery while pretending it is constructing global order. The task of Left here is the struggle to find the obfuscation. To do this, there is a need to challenge the liberal moral vocabularies which conceal empire’s will and focus on terms and discourses on class and imperial domination. The defense of Venezuela lies on the premise that sovereignty cannot be criminalized, and self-dependence cannot be deemed illegal and that imperialism cannot camouflage itself behind legality. As Bolivar said, "The United States appears to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.” Today, that destiny remains, not as providence but policy. The peoples of Latin America remain revolting against it. And in their struggle is the promise of a world beyond empire. Author Harsh Yadav is from India and has just recently graduated from Banaras Hindu University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry. Harsh is a Marxist Leninist who is intrigued by different Marxist Schools of Thought, Political Philosophies, Feminism, Foreign Policy and International Relations, and History. He also maintains a bookstagram account (https://www.instagram.com/epigrammatic_bibliophile/) where he posts book reviews, writes about historical impact, socialism, and social and political issues. Archives September 2025
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