WE HAVE entered a phase of naked imperialism driven by the Trump gang who are hurling the world towards catastrophe.

No-one believes that the piratical act of war on Venezuela and kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro were about drugs. Last month Trump pardoned the pro-US former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, despite his 45-year sentence for trafficking.

Trump himself dispensed with any pretence that this is about democracy by telling puffed-up oppositionist Maria Corina Machado that she won’t be running Venezuela: he will. How, remains to be seen. At the moment it looks like trying to force the Venezuelan government into accepting a restored neocolonial subordination. That would be overturning the Bolivarian revolution led by Hugo Chavez. At the start of this century it provided inspiration for radical developments across Latin America and beyond.

The Iraq war back then was masked in the language of “humanitarian” imperialism.

Trump is clear the issue is oil. Venezuela has the world’s largest reserves; the US, far fewer with vast demand. Trump says: “Very large US oil companies [will] go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure…” (shattered by the sanctions regime). He failed to add: and extract huge sums for US shareholders, who before oil nationalisation used to get 12 per cent of all of what was produced in Venezuela.

Chevron’s former head of Latin American operations has said his private equity fund has identified Venezuelan assets to take over. US corporations are explicit that making foreign investments is dependent on pliant, authoritarian governments allied to Washington. Trump gave his far-right ally Javier Milei in Argentina a financial bailout. A US fracking giant is now moving in.

This is part of an imperial plan set out last November in the US’s National Security Strategy. It recognises the end of the “rules-based international order” through which the US with its system of alliances and leadership of global institutions had exercised a (declining) hegemony.

The Trump response is not an end to wars, as some of his Maga base believed. It is to restore direct US domination across Latin America, hurl back the “pink tide” of progressive movements and from there to assert naked US power in different parts of the globe. The NSS says: “After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the western hemisphere… We will deny non-hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our hemisphere.”

Central is to reverse growing economic relations between Latin America and China. It is an intensification of the drive to stop China’s rise and force it back to being a regional economic power operating in a world where the US controls key pinch points. Whether in trade, the Panama Canal where Trump threatened the government to end Chinese investment, or strategic resources, such as Venezuela’s oil — and Iran’s hydrocarbons.

At the weekend Trump not only threatened Mexico, Colombia and Cuba, whose governments refuse subordination to the US. He also reiterated his demand for control of Greenland. It is not some fantasy of a corrupt New York real-estate thug. US ruling-class consideration of obtaining Greenland — either by purchase, as with Alaska, or by force — goes back to the 1860s.

In a diabolical death loop, global warming means Arctic mining exploration becomes more feasible. There is already a scramble for control. It pits the US against Russia (so much for Trump and Putin being as one) and Canada, whose sovereignty Trump questions as he backs the hard-right state government of oil-rich Alberta against Ottawa.

Not just oil. Crucially, strategic minerals, access to which is part of the Trump plan for Ukraine — where Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday recklessly called on Trump to do to Putin what he has done to Maduro, regardless that it would bring direct war between two nuclear powers.

The Danish prime minister, with EU support, tried to sound tough over Trump’s Greenland provocation. But didn’t they tell us it was Russia that is trying to seize large tracts of Europe and that’s why we need warfare states across the continent with all guns pointing east?

Despite bluster about independence in defence and economy from the US, the EU and Britain are operating as if the old Western alliance still obtains. Same as before but with just a bit of disruption by the transactional Trump, who wants them to spend more on weapons, buy US ones and deal with problems in their own backyard. All the while US corporations get to break in and regulatory constraints are ripped up.

That Western order has gone. There is now an explicit far-right, fascistic direction to US policy rather than the honeyed words of Obama-era liberalism. That was no comfort for those droned, bombed or with a bounty on their head. It was Obama who raised the bounty on Maduro.

But the implications of this shift are far-reaching. The Trump gang are open about advancing the fascistic and deeply racist right.

So Milei in Argentina, Kast in Chile, Noboa in Ecuador, Bukele in El Salvador and others.

On one level, such has always been US policy with the associated coups and dirty wars. In Central America alone between 1975 and 1991, the death toll stood at nearly 300,000 in a population of less than 30 million.

Latin American reaction today looks less like a 1970s military junta and more like the European contemporary radical and fascist right. And in a major shift, that is what Washington is now promoting in Europe — openly in its security strategy — against the dying liberal continent it wants to open up for US capital.

Vice-president JD Vance is the key player. He is a protege of the extreme right tech-billionaire Peter Thiel, who is lavishing cash from monetising our data on think tanks and enterprises devoted to rehabilitating biological racism of the kind that animated the Third Reich and apartheid South Africa.

US state policy is now infected with this extreme reaction promoted by the likes of Elon Musk, the apartheid nepo-baby. And it explains what might seem irrational Trump obsessions.

Trump is not Hitler. But he too is engaged in an “ideological war of extermination.” This time of the vestiges of the liberal order but even more so of the gains that progressive and left movements have made.

His claims about “white genocide” in South Africa might seem unhinged. Until you consider that the fall of apartheid is mourned by white supremacists and South Africa brought the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

Or the filthy racism against Somalia. The US and Israel are trying to carve out a territory which Tel Aviv has floated transferring Palestinians to. Add in that Somalia since “Black Hawk Down” in 1993 has been the site of several US humiliations and with Yemen bottlenecks the Red Sea.

Trump is fixated on his place in history. You imagine him obsessed with being the white warrior hero who overturned all previous US setbacks: Venezuela, returning the mafiosi to Cuba, ending an independent-minded South Africa… Iran, where the 1979 revolution was one of the greatest blows the US has suffered.

A monument in Tehran to Trump, in the gaudy style of a restored Pahlavi dynasty, as “Liberator of Persia.” Deranged, perhaps. But so is the racial-supremacist thinking at the centre of this violent attempt to reorganise the world with the US from “its” western hemisphere demanding tribute and trophies globally.

The implications for the left and all our movements are profound. We face a New Militarism that entails not only more wars, but what the Polish-German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg on the eve of the first world war called “armed peace.” More resources to arms production, which she explained itself becomes an area for capital accumulation as other investments shrink and consumption by workers is curbed.

Absent the AI bubble in the US and that is largely what we see with stagnant investments, falling living standards and Germany, for example, turning closed car plants into weapons factories.

Luxemburg, her comrade Karl Liebknecht and others observed that militarism distorted every aspect of society. The promotion of the most chauvinistic and racist ideas. The glorification of violence and of the strongman under arms. With it, as Liebknecht explained in a series of talks for European young socialists, the sacrifice of youth on the altar of war even before going to the front.

And then as now, the drive to turn women into the wombs of a garrison nation, whose duty is to provide the canon fodder and preserve the ethnic balance within the state territory.

The head of the French military says France must be prepared to sacrifice its children. Echoed in Starmer’s Britain. First steps to conscription in Merz’s Germany. Reaction is pulsing out from Trump’s US.

Imperialism, racism, war, rising authoritarianism, fascism, hurling back the position of women, immiserating the working class… all of these are fusing in the barbaric New Militarism.

So then must our movements against all those things find new points of convergence. That the liberal mask is off makes it easier to draw different fronts together — though each with their specific focus. Is Trump’s US going to liberate women or protect an oppressed national minority? To ask is to answer.

Strong opposition to the war on Venezuela extends way beyond the left. It unites people of different political traditions in common purpose and action. It includes a lot in the Labour Party and trade union movement who a decade ago came across as if the priority was to oppose the Stop the War coalition, not illegal wars.

There is popular reaction to the growth of the fascist right. Millions are desperate for their lives to improve at home rather than blowing people up abroad.

We have good grounds to be confident of bringing our fronts of battle together.

But even stronger reasons to act with the utmost urgency.