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regime change
US Troops Near Venezuela Reportedly Denied Holiday Leave as Fears Grow of Unpopular and Lengthy Trump War
Meanwhile, newly released documents suggest the administration is gearing up to have troops in the region until the end of Trump's term.
Nov 25, 2025
Following reports that the Trump administration is eyeing a "deadly new phase" of military actions against Venezuela, including land strikes, a new report suggests that the US troops stationed near the South American nation are being denied holiday leave in anticipation of immediate action.
On Monday, NewsNation White House Correspondent Kellie Meyer reported via social media that the United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) is "restricting/limiting leave over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays in preparation for possible land strikes in the next 10 days to two weeks."
SOUTHCOM has denied the claim, with a spokesperson saying: "Our service members and civilian employees are always afforded the opportunity to take leave throughout the year, and that includes holiday periods."
As of yet, reports only suggest that the US may be planning imminent airstrikes against Venezuela. But as documents reported Tuesday by The Intercept revealed, the US is planning to maintain "a massive military presence in the Caribbean almost to the end of President Donald Trump’s term in office—suggesting the recent influx of American troops to the region won’t end anytime soon."
According to the report: "One spreadsheet outlining supplies for 'Puerto Rico Troops' notes tens of thousands of pounds of baked goods are scheduled for delivery from November 15 of this year to November 11, 2028. Foodstuff set to feed the troops include individually wrapped honey buns, vanilla cupcakes, sweet rolls, hamburger rolls, and flour tortillas." The food is slated to be delivered to every branch of the military, including the Coast Guard, Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps.
“The procurement’s length of time and the level of effort seemed to point to these operations continuing at the current level for several years,” said Mark Cancian, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “That’s significant because it means that the Navy will maintain a large presence in the Caribbean that is far larger than what it has been in recent years. It further implies that the Navy will be involved in these counter-drug operations.”
The Pentagon currently has more than 15,000 troops stationed in the region, the most since 1989, when the US launched a land invasion of Panama to topple the drug-running dictator Manuel Noriega, whom it had previously supported.
The reports came shortly after the US State Department designated the so-called "Cartel de los Soles," which the US accuses Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of leading, as a "terrorist organization." This is despite the fact that it is not actually an organized cartel at all, but a media shorthand developed to refer to the alleged connections that high-level Venezuelan officials have to the drug trade.
“It is not a group,” Adam Isaacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America organization, told the Associated Press Tuesday. “It’s not like a group that people would ever identify themselves as members. They don’t have regular meetings. They don’t have a hierarchy.”
Colombian journalist Juan Esteban Silva explains that the terrorist designation, despite its factual flimsiness, "gives the US authority to conduct covert operations, bring terrorism and drug charges, issue international arrest warrants, freeze assets, and block transactions. It also enables extraterritorial prosecution, travel restrictions, broader law enforcement and military cooperation, and asset seizures."
Maduro's government called the designation an "infamous, vile lie to justify an illegitimate and illegal intervention against Venezuela under the classic US format of regime change."
It comes after Reuters reported Sunday that “covert operations" in Venezuela "would likely be the first part of the new action against Maduro" and that the US was “prepared to use every element of American power” to achieve its goals in the region.
While stopping drug trafficking was the initial justification for the administration’s push for regime change, White House messaging has shifted in recent days, with officials telling Fox News that it "goes beyond the Maduro regime" and is also about "getting Russia, China, and Iran out of the Western hemisphere."
On Monday, US Rep. María Salazar (R-Fla.) gave a more candid explanation for the potentially imminent military action and the need for regime change on Fox Business.
Maduro, she said, "is understanding that we're about to go in." She went on: "Venezuela, for the American oil companies, will be a field day, because it will be more than a trillion dollars in economic activity. American companies can go in and fix all the oil rigs and everything that has to do with the Venezuelan petroleum companies."
Prior to returning to office, Trump said at a rally in 2023 that he regretted not invading Venezuela during his first term: "We would have taken [Venezuela] over; we would have gotten to all that oil; it would have been right next door.”
Though the White House appears increasingly committed to military action against Venezuela, it is overwhelmingly unpopular among Americans.
A CBS News/YouGov survey published on Sunday found that 70% of Americans—including 91% of Democrats and 42% of Republicans—are against the “US taking military action in Venezuela,” and a majority don’t believe a direct attack on Venezuela would even achieve the Trump administration’s stated goal of reducing the flow of drugs to the United States.
The same poll found that just 13% of Americans consider Venezuela to be a "major threat" to "US security," while 48% consider it a "minor threat," and 39% consider it to be "not a threat."
Alfons López Tena, a former member of the Catalan parliament and an analyst on public and international affairs, expressed shock at the Trump administration's brazenness despite the total lack of public consent for war.
"The US doesn’t feel at all like a country marching into war, 70% oppose military action in Venezuela," he said. "The government's cursory explanations show they are so heedless of public opinion that they don't even feel the need to mount a proper propaganda campaign."
Nathan J. Robinson, the editor-in-chief of the left-wing magazine Current Affairs, meanwhile, said he's not surprised.
"It's no mystery to a leftist when the US government's foreign policy is out of step with popular opinion," he said, "because we understand foreign policy is shaped by narrow elite interests."
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The US War on China, Venezuela, and the Global Left
Because of the economic and political alliance between China and Venezuela, it is impossible to understand the growing push for war on Venezuela without also considering the buildup to war with China as well.
Nov 15, 2025
Resistance movements against US imperialism have sprouted up all over the world in response to its indiscriminate violence and disregard for human life. Together, they form the living front of the international left, a network of people and organizations that seek liberation from the same systems of domination and colonial control. While their forms differ, from student encampments to workers’ strikes, the purpose remains the same: an end to empire and the creation of a new multipolar world rooted in the simple truth of our shared humanity and the equal worth of every nation and people.
The alliance between China and Venezuela is part of this broader project. And the US push for war against both nations is but a violent reaction to the impending truth that US hegemonic status is slipping, and with it, its control on global resources, political power, and the ability to dictate the terms of development and sovereignty for the rest of the world.
Over the past month, the Trump administration has unleashed a series of strikes on Venezuelan fishing vessels, claiming to be cracking down on drug smugglers. The lie is as unoriginal as it is absurd, and a stark example of the waning facade of the supposed “morality” of liberal internationalism. Truth is often exposed during these periods of turbulence, when agitation overrides calculation; the knowledge of its imminent demise is so dire that the empire is barely trying to hide its true intentions anymore.
What is the truth, then? The truth is that the US war on Venezuela has nothing to do with drugs and everything to do with control. For years, Venezuela has faced relentless pressure, economic warfare, sanctions, and constant threats designed to undermine its sovereignty and keep it under the boot of US empire. As with most nations, US interest in Venezuela is about strategic resources and power. First, Venezuela sits atop the largest proven oil reserves in the world, along with significant deposits of gold, coltan, and other minerals critical to technology and energy production. Control over these strategic resources means control over global markets and energy security. Second, Venezuela’s geographic location within Latin America makes it a pivotal point of leverage within the region.
The lesson is clear: Where there is a US-backed war or intervention, you are likely to find some strategic resource or monetary interest beneath it.
Yet Venezuela’s defiance did not emerge in a vacuum. It followed more than a century of US domination across the hemisphere, from the invasion of Haiti and the occupation of Nicaragua to the coups in Guatemala, Chile, and Honduras. What unites these histories is a single message from Washington: No Latin American nation has the right to chart an independent course.
The Bolivarian Revolution, launched with Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998, was a direct challenge to that order. Emerging from the ruins of neoliberal collapse, it confronted Venezuela’s historical condition as a rentier state subordinated to US interests. Chávez redirected oil revenues to social programs, such as mass education and healthcare, while expanding access to political participation through communal councils and cooperatives.
Venezuela’s defiance took continental form 20 years ago, in November 2005, when Latin American leaders gathered in Mar de la Plata, Argentina, for the Summit of the Americas. There, Washington sought to impose the Free Trade Area of the Americas (ALCA)—a hemispheric agreement that would have locked the region into permanent subordination to US capital.
The summit instead became a turning point in modern Latin American history. Before tens of thousands of people chanting “ALCA, ALCA, al carajo!” the governments of Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, and others rejected the deal. That rejection, led politically by Hugo Chávez and supported by social movements across the continent, signaled the collapse of the neoliberal consensus and the rebirth of Latin American sovereignty. Out of that victory came ALBA and Petrocaribe, mechanisms of regional cooperation that prioritized social development over corporate profit. The US has spent decades trying to reverse it through sanctions, coups, and now, open militarization in the Caribbean.
Today, matters are complicated by the introduction of a new, increasingly powerful actor. China has, over the past few decades, maintained a strong alliance with Venezuela. Starting in the early 2000s, China began providing Venezuela with tens of billions of dollars in loans to be repaid in oil shipments. This has enabled Venezuela to fund social programs and infrastructure while bypassing Western-controlled financial systems like the IMF and World Bank. A US Institute of Peace report states, “China’s industrialization boom in the early 2000s created new opportunities for its resource-rich trade partners in Latin America and Africa. Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez… was enthusiastic about advances from China.”
Since then, China has also helped Venezuela build railways, housing projects, and telecommunications infrastructure as part of its broader Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to foster development across the Global South. The partnership, unlike those with the US, is not coercive but strictly noninterventionist. China does not advocate for regime change like US leaders, but maintains steadfast diplomatic support, referring to itself as an “apolitical development partner” while criticizing the history of US interference in the internal affairs of Latin American and Caribbean countries. Meanwhile, the US criticizes China’s lack of desire to instigate regime change.
Because of the economic and political alliance between China and Venezuela, it is impossible to understand the growing push for war on Venezuela without also considering the buildup to war with China as well. They are, after all, part of the same battle. As the USIP report writes, “Venezuela will remain a key site for the rapidly expanding strategic rivalry between the United States and China.” US leaders are fully willing to sacrifice the lives of Venezuelan civilians if it means destroying the Venezuelan economy, installing a US puppet government, and destroying the budding solidarity movement between the two nations. As it stands, Venezuela has also provided a source of economic sovereignty to China by helping diversify its energy sources away from the Middle East and US-controlled suppliers, acting as a lifeline against US sanctions and economic isolation.
So though the US certainly has a vested interest in Venezuela itself, the nation is also another battlefront for the US war on China, which under the Trump administration has manifested as an escalating trade battle over strategic resources, a hyper-militarization of Pacific allies around China, and a domestic crackdown on Chinese nationals and Chinese Americans in the US. Of course, China is no existential threat to US citizens themselves. The only threat it poses is to a US-dominated world system and the perpetuation of the international division of labor that keeps a few Western elite wealthy, while the rest of the world struggles.
The US push for war on China is part of an ongoing campaign to hinder China’s rise. While the world hurtles inevitably toward a new multipolarity, US leaders lash out through military posturing, economic coercion, and war propaganda. President Donald Trump’s recent tariffs on China are only one small part of that larger strategy. At the heart of this confrontation lies a struggle over control of the strategic resources and technology that will define the future—rare earth minerals, semiconductors, AI, and more. China currently dominates the global supply of rare earth elements, the essential components in everything from smartphones and wind turbines to missiles and fighter jets. For the US, this is intolerable. It threatens its monopoly over high-tech production and, by extension, its military and economic supremacy. That’s why you’ll see political leaders and media sources perpetuate the narrative that China is weaponizing trade, even though it’s Western countries that have killed millions of people through unilateral sanctions since WWII. But China, as a sovereign nation, has the right to protect its strategic resources, especially when they are being used against it. Rare earth minerals, for example, are used by the US to create advanced weapons systems in preparation for war with China. And if economic warfare fails to hinder China’s rise, which it undoubtedly will if the recent Trump-Xi meetings are anything to go by, then it is increasingly likely that US leaders will force a physical confrontation, and those weapons will be used.
This isn’t the first time the US has waged war over strategic resources while using propaganda to paint a prettier picture. The Gulf War and invasion of Iraq, while justified as “defending democracy” and “protecting the world from weapons of mass destruction” that didn’t actually exist, were ultimately about carving up Iraq’s oil fields for US corporations. The NATO bombing campaign in Libya was in response to Gaddafi’s nationalization of oil and the threat to the US dollar. The continued occupation of Syria is about securing oil and gas fields. The overthrow of Bolivian President Evo Morales was connected to his nationalization of lithium, often referred to as the “new oil,” as well as attempts to thwart competition with Russia and China. The list goes on and on and on.
The lesson is clear: Where there is a US-backed war or intervention, you are likely to find some strategic resource or monetary interest beneath it. This is what it means to be an imperialist power. In order to sustain its dominance, the US must continually extract, control, or deny access to the materials that sustain global industry and technology, such as oil, gas, lithium, and rare earth minerals. And when another nation dares to assert sovereignty over its own resources, it is branded a threat to freedom, sanctioned, bombed, or toppled to keep it dependent, weak, and loyal. China, Venezuela, and all nations seeking sovereignty over their own development in ways contradictory to the capitalist imperial order threaten this, and that is why they are targeted—not for any moral or legal reason. As we’ve so clearly seen from two years of US-funded genocide in Gaza, neither morality nor legality guides US policy.
The struggle against US imperialism is a global struggle. To stand with Venezuela, with China, or with any nation resisting domination is to stand for the possibility of a new internationalism rooted in solidarity across borders. That is our task—to connect these struggles, to see in every act of resistance the reflection of our own, and to build a world of shared humanity and global equality.
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'Regime change' in Venezuela Is a Euphemism for US-Inflicted Carnage and Chaos
If there is one lesson from the long history of US interventions, it’s that “regime change” doesn’t bring democracy or stability.
Nov 12, 2025
For decades, Washington has sold the world a deadly lie: that “regime change” brings freedom, that US bombs and blockades can somehow deliver democracy. But every country that has lived through this euphemism knows the truth—it instead brings death, dismemberment, and despair. Now that the same playbook is being dusted off for Venezuela, the parallels with Iraq and other US interventions are an ominous warning of what could follow.
As a US armada gathers off Venezuela, a US special operations aviation unit aboard one of the warships has been flying helicopter patrols along the coast. This is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR)—the “Nightstalkers”—the same unit that, in US-occupied Iraq, worked with the Wolf Brigade, the most feared Interior Ministry death squad.
Western media portray the 160th SOAR as an elite helicopter force for covert missions. But in 2005 an officer in the regiment blogged about joint operations with the Wolf Brigade as they swept Baghdad detaining civilians. On November 10, 2005, he described a “battalion-sized joint operation” in southern Baghdad and boasted, “As we passed vehicle after vehicle full of blindfolded detainees, my face stretched into a long wolfish smile.”
Many people seized by the Wolf Brigade and other US-trained Special Police Commandos were never seen again; others turned up in mass graves or morgues, often far from where they’d been taken. Bodies of people detained in Baghdad were found in mass graves near Badra, 70 miles away—but that was well within the combat range of the Nightstalkers’ MH-47 Chinook helicopters.
Trump’s manufactured crisis with Venezuela exposes the deep contradictions at the heart of his foreign policy.
This was how the Bush-Cheney administration responded to Iraqi resistance to an illegal invasion: catastrophic assaults on Fallujah and Najaf, followed by the training and unleashing of death squads to terrorize civilians and ethnically cleanse Baghdad. The United Nations reported over 34,000 civilians killed in 2006 alone, and epidemiological studies estimate roughly 1 million Iraqis died overall.
Iraq has never fully recovered—and the US never reaped the spoils it sought. The exiles Washington installed to rule Iraq stole at least $150 billion from its oil revenues, but the Iraqi parliament rejected US-backed efforts to grant shares of the oil industry to Western companies. Today, Iraq’s largest trading partners are China, India, the UAE, and Turkey—not the United States.
The neocon dream of “regime change” has a long, bloody history, its methods ranging from coups to full-scale invasions. But “regime change” is a euphemism: the word “change” implies improvement. A more honest term would be “government removal”—or simply the destruction of a country or society.
A coup usually involves less immediate violence than a full-scale invasion, but they pose the same question: Who or what replaces the ousted government? Time after time, US-backed coups and invasions have installed rulers who enrich themselves through embezzlement, corruption, or drug trafficking—while making life worse for ordinary people.
These so-called “military solutions” rarely resolve problems, real or imaginary, as their proponents promise. They more often leave countries plagued by decades of division, instability, and suffering.
Kosovo was carved out of Serbia by an illegal US-led war in 1999, but it is still not recognized by many nations and remains one of the poorest countries in Europe. The main US ally in the war, Hashim Thaçi, now sits in a cell at the Hague, charged with horrific crimes committed under cover of NATO’s bombing.
In Afghanistan, after 20 years of bloody war and occupation, the United States was eventually defeated by the Taliban—the very force it had invaded the country to remove.
In Haiti, the CIA and US Marines toppled the popular democratic government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, plunging the country into an ongoing crisis of corruption, gang rule, and despair that continues to this day.
In 2006, the US militarily supported an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to install a new government—an intervention that gave rise to Al Shabab, an Islamic resistance group that still controls large swaths of the country. US AFRICOM has conducted 89 airstrikes in Al Shabab-held territory in 2025 alone.
In Honduras, the military removed its president, Mel Zelaya, in a coup in 2009, and the US supported an election to replace him. The US-backed president Juan Orlando Hernandez turned Honduras into a narco-state, fueling mass emigration—until Xiomara Castro, Zelaya’s wife, was elected to lead a new progressive government in 2021.
Libya, a country with vast oil wealth, has never recovered from the US and allied invasion in 2011, which led to years of militia rule, the return of slave markets, the destabilizing of neighboring countries, and a 45% reduction in oil exports.
Also in 2011, the US and its allies escalated a protest movement in Syria into an armed rebellion and civil war. That spawned ISIS, which in turn led to the US-led massacres that destroyed Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria in 2017. Turkish-backed, al-Qaeda-linked rebels finally seized the capital in 2024 and formed a transitional government, but Israel, Turkey, and the US still militarily occupy other parts of the country.
The US-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014 brought in a pro-Western leadership that only half the population recognized as a legitimate government. That drove Crimea and Donbas to secede and put Ukraine on a collision course with Russia, setting the stage for the Russian invasion in 2022 and the wider, still-escalating conflict between NATO and Russia.
In 2015, when the Ansar Allah (Houthi) movement assumed power in Yemen after the resignation of a US-backed transitional government, the US joined a Saudi-led air war and blockade that caused a humanitarian crisis and killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis—yet did not defeat the Houthis.
That brings us to Venezuela. Ever since Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998, the US has been trying to overthrow the government. There was the failed 2002 coup; crippling unilateral economic sanctions; the farcical recognition of Juan Guaido as a wannabe president; and the 2020 “Bay of Piglets” mercenary fiasco.
But even if “regime change” in Venezuela were achievable, it would still be illegal under the UN Charter. US presidents are not emperors, and leaders of other sovereign nations do not serve “at the emperor’s pleasure” as if Latin America were still a continent of colonial outposts.
In Venezuela today, Trump’s opening shots—attacks on small civilian boats in the Caribbean—have been condemned as flagrantly illegal, even by US senators who routinely support America’s illegal wars.
Yet Trump still claims to be “ending the era of endless wars.” His most loyal supporters insist he means it—and that he was sabotaged in his first term by the “deep state.” This time, he has surrounded himself with loyalists and sacked National Security Council staffers he identified as neocons or warhawks, but he has still not ended America’s wars.
Alongside Trump’s piracy in the Caribbean, he is a full partner in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the bombing of Iran. He has maintained the global empire of US military bases and deployments, and supercharged the US war machine with a trillion dollar war chest—draining desperately needed resources out of a looted domestic economy.
Trump’s appointment of Marco Rubio as secretary of state and national security adviser was an incendiary choice for Latin America, given Rubio’s open hostility to Cuba and Venezuela.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made that clear when he met Trump in Malaysia at the ASEAN conference, saying: “There will be no advances in negotiations with the United States if Marco Rubio is part of the team. He opposes our allies in Venezuela, Cuba, and Argentina.” At Lula’s insistence, Rubio was excluded from talks over US investments in Brazil’s rare earth metals industry, the world’s second largest after China’s.
Cuba bashing may have served Rubio well in domestic politics, but as secretary of state it renders him incapable of responsibly managing US relations with the rest of the world. Trump will have to decide whether to pursue constructive engagement with Latin America or let Rubio corner him into new conflicts with our neighbors. Rubio’s threats of sanctions against countries that welcome Cuban doctors are already alienating governments across the globe.
Trump’s manufactured crisis with Venezuela exposes the deep contradictions at the heart of his foreign policy: his disastrous choice of advisers; his conflicting ambitions to be both a war leader and a peacemaker; his worship of the military; and his surrender to the same war machine that ensnares every American president.
If there is one lesson from the long history of US interventions, it’s that “regime change” doesn’t bring democracy or stability. As the United States threatens Venezuela with the same arrogance that has wrecked so many other countries, this is the moment to end this cycle of imperial US violence once and for all.
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