Trump’s Air Blockade and Threats Against Venezuela Require a United Anti-Imperialist ResponseDonald Trump’s neocolonialist offensive against Venezuela has escalated sharply. He “decreed” the “total closure” of Venezuelan airspace, announcing “imminent attacks on the territory,” and set ultimatums for the Venezuelan government to yield to Washington’s demands. Trump is intensifying his campaign of threats and “maximum pressure” to bring about regime change in Venezuela. This would be favorable to the interests of U.S. imperialism in its rivalry with the “revisionist” powers challenging the unipolar world order led by the United States after the end of the Cold War. As an anti-capitalist socialist current that opposes the the Maduro–Venezuelan Armed Forces government from the left, we once again call for a firm repudiation of this new escalation of imperial and colonial aggression, just as we have consistently denounced and rejected every act of imperialist intervention against the country. Trump’s ambitions must be defeated; the current imperialist offensive must fail. Its aims are to brutally deepen Venezuela’s semi-colonial condition, subordinating the country’s political regime to the dictates of the White House.
https://www.leftvoice.org/trumps-air-blockade-and-threats-against-venezuela-require-a-united-anti-imperialist-response/Ukraine Faces an Imperial Carve-UpOn November 21, Ukrainians found themselves staring at a peace proposal that demanded near-immediate acceptance. The leaked twenty-eight-point peace plan, drafted by Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and Russian official Kirill Dmitriev, reads like a real estate transaction. Russia gets the land, the United States takes its cut, Europe foots the bill, and Ukraine can choose between surrendering now or surrendering later. Under pressure, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, addressed the nation bluntly: “Loss of dignity or of a key partner. Twenty-eight difficult points or an extraordinarily difficult winter.” Stunned European leaders — taken aback by the initiative’s provisions — scrambled to improvise counterproposals. Amid outrage in the White House over the leak, emergency talks in Geneva produced a revised nineteen-point framework, deferring the hardest questions to future high-level dialogue. Trump declared ”tremendous progress” and announced Witkoff’s sixth visit to Moscow this year. The Kremlin, meanwhile, dismissed European revisions and signaled that only the initial twenty-eight points matched the “spirit of Anchorage” — that is, Trump’s overtures to Vladimir Putin at their summit in Alaska this summer. Russia has made it clear that it remains ready to achieve its overall aims through military means — a position that leaves little room for compromise. Thanksgiving passed, and Ukraine’s position weakened further. On November 28, just before his departure to Miami for another round of consultations, Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff and lead peace negotiator, resigned after anti-corruption investigators raided his home as part of a $100 million energy sector kickback probe. That same day, reports emerged that Washington was prepared to unilaterally recognize Russian control over Crimea and other occupied territories. The next day, Ukraine’s former commander in chief Valeriy Zaluzhny lamented the absence of clear political goals, noting that even a temporary peace could offer a window to recover and prepare for what comes next. This chain of events might not end the war — the latest talks in the Kremlin on Tuesday were inconclusive — but it exposes how the major powers currently imagine its outcomes and how little Russia’s core demands have changed even as Ukraine’s leverage has shrunk. Moscow has made marginal concessions from its maximalist positions expressed this June but still expects to coerce Kyiv into permanent neutrality, secure recognition of Russian territorial conquests, impose military restrictions packaged as “demilitarization,” and extract ideological concessions under the label of “denazification.” What has changed is not the substance but rather the context: a more exhausted Ukraine, a more divided West, and a geopolitical environment more conducive to pressure than to any even rhetorical notion of justice.
https://jacobin.com/2025/12/ukraine-russia-war-concessions-trump V. I. Lenin: Proposals Submitted by the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. to the Second Socialist Conference 1. Just as all war is but a continuation by violent means of the politics which the belligerent states and their ruling classes had been conducting for many years, sometimes for decades, before the outbreak of war, so the peace that ends any war can be nothing but a consideration and a record of the actual changes brought about in the relation of forces in the course of and as a result of the war. 2. As long as the foundations of present, i.e., bourgeois, social relations remain intact, an imperialist war can lead only to an imperialist peace, i.e., to greater, more extensive and more intense oppression of wreak nations and countries by finance capital, which grew to gigantic proportions not only in the period prior to the war, but also during the war. The objective content of the policies pursued by the bourgeoisie and the governments of both groups of Great Powers before and during the war leads to intensified economic oppression, national enslavement and political reaction. Therefore, provided the bourgeois social system remains, the peace that follows upon the war, whatever its outcome, must perpetuate this worsening of the economic and political condition of the masses. To assume that a democratic peace may emerge from an imperialist war is, in theory, to substitute vulgar phrases for an historical study of the policies conducted before and during that war. In practice, it is to deceive the masses of the people by beclouding their political consciousness, by covering up and prettifying the real policies pursued by the ruling classes to prepare the ground for the coming peace, by concealing from the masses the main thing, namely, that a democratic peace is impossible without a whole series of revolutions. 3. Socialists do not refuse to fight for reform. Even now, for example, they must vote in parliament for improvements, however slight, in the condition of the masses, for increased relief to the inhabitants of the devastated areas, for the lessening of national oppression, etc. But it is sheer bourgeois deception to preach reforms as a solution for problems for which history and the actual political situation demand revolutionary solutions ’That is precisely the kind of problems the present war has brought to the fore. These are the fundamental questions of imperialism, i.e., the very existence of capitalist society, the questions of postponing the collapse of capitalism by a re-division of the world to correspond to the new relation of forces among the “Great” Powers, which in the last few decades have developed, not only at fantastic speed, but—and this is particularly important—also with extreme unevenness. Real political activity working a change in the relation of social forces, and not merely deceiving the masses with words, is now possible only in one of two forms—either helping “one’s own” national bourgeoisie to rob other countries (and calling this “defence of the fatherland” or “saving the country”), or assisting the proletarian socialist revolution fostering and stirring up the ferment which is beginning among the masses in all the belligerent countries, aiding the incipient strikes and demonstrations, etc., extending and sharpening these as yet feeble expressions of revolutionary mass struggle into a general proletarian assault to overthrow the bourgeoisie.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/apr/22.htm