Abduction of Nicolas Maduro: Sign of the Decline of US Imperialism

Empires in decline always act recklessly

The recent experience of the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores represented the recklessness of an empire in decline. This desperate action by the US ruling elements exposed to the whole world the crisis of white supremacy and imperialism. In this editorial, we highlight the legal issues coming out of the abduction, especially in relation to international law. But more importantly, this editorial seeks to highlight the abduction of President Maduro as an example of inherent instability, moral bankruptcy, and multi-level systemic failure emerging from sustained anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance to US imperialism. This "crisis" is not a single event, but rather an explanation of the compounding social, economic, racial, gendered, environmental, and political contradictions that the system of racial capitalism has produced. 

The United States is attempting to reverse the long-term decline of American capitalism through expanded militarization, war, and white supremacy on steroids. War speeds up the processes of transformation or regression. Humanity is now poised between the two and clarity on what occurred in Venezuela has the possibility of tipping the scale on the side of the transformation away from racial capitalism. In this period, the challenges of militarization and war place a special responsibility on the peace and social justice movements in the United States. The political campaign of Zohran Mamdani in New York has opened one possibility of the kind of political movement that can speed the process of social transformation globally. We call on youths, on social movements in Global Africa and across the United States, to learn from this movement. We call on left movements in Global Africa to grasp the reality that they cannot be anti-war, anti-imperialist and be sexist, regionalist, and homophobic at the same time. 

The material foundations of U.S. imperial dominance, built on racialized extraction and global exploitation, have entered a period of irreversible erosion. Dollar instability, rising U.S. debt, and coercive U.S. geopolitics are accelerating a multipolar shift that presents strategic openings for Africa, particularly via the Alliance of Sahelian States and the Pan-African Gold Council initiative.

Do not get sidetracked by the noise

Pambazuka News unequivocally denounces the invasion of Venezuela and the criminal seizure of Venezuela’s resources. We demand the immediate release of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and the full withdrawal of all US troops and military forces from the region. The demand for the release of Maduro and respect for international law has been the refrain of the Secretary General of the United Nations and the statements from the African Union and the governments of South Africa and Ghana.

Pambazuka welcomes these clear statements but will add that the international law and the ‘rules based international order’ had been based on colonialism, International Monetary Fund (IMF) bullying, militarism and white supremacy. Pambazuka News seeks to remind those leaders in Global Africa who are condemning the US military adventurism in Venezuela that so called "rules-based international order" (RBO) has in the past often presents itself as a neutral universal framework of law, but African freedom fighters and economists have always pointed out that this ‘international system’ is actually a specific historical project designed to preserve Western hegemony.  Progressive forces in Africa must deepen the analysis of racial capitalism to transcend the current narratives that frame the desperation of US imperialism as the foundation of a multipolar world that places equal weight of military adventurism on other societies, especially those opposing US militarism.

As Chandran Nair argued in Counterpunch,  The USA Today: a Derangement Threatening the World, pundits are already drawing up scenarios of greater Chinese control over Africa, the Caribbean and the global South. Chandran Nair argued that when the U.S. commits clear violations of international law—such as seizing a foreign head of state and controlling another nation’s resources—media and think tanks rapidly recast these actions in relation to global competition for energy resources and as threats posed by rivals like China or Russia, with BRICS as a front. This temporal shift erases the actual wrongdoing, turning American criminality into “future villainy” and diverting public attention from concrete crimes to speculative scenarios, especially in the case of pundits now presenting visions of a new world order divided between China, Russia, and the U.S. It should not be overlooked that Africa remains largely excluded from self-determination and control over her resources, continuing to be parceled out by external powers.

Pambazuka News is calling on progressive intellectuals, activists and patriotic businesspersons to grasp the crisis of US imperialism as an opportunity to refocus attention on the necessity to delink from imperialism. There are now opportunities for diversification away from the US dollar and from the Central African Franc (CFA) and to establish stronger Pan African trading networks. This will necessitate breaking with patterns of capital flight that drains valued resources out of Africa into bank accounts in the United States and offshore dollar accounts.  Progressive Africans must seize the opportunity to advance reserve diversification (especially via gold), stronger Pan African trade integration, reduced exposure to dollar shocks, and alternative financing and monetary arrangements that challenge the Bretton Woods institutions -The IMF and the World Bank. On the commentaries, many statements draw a direct line between the US destruction of Libya and the present campaign against the Bolivarian Revolutionary process. 

Implications of US decline for the people of the Americas

The January 2026 military strike and capture of Nicolás Maduro have sent clear messages of the US seeking to reconstitute old-style colonialism, racism and destruction. While the abduction initially sent shockwaves through Latin America and the Caribbean, once the reality of the criminal action became clear, the region had four different responses.

1 Argentina, Ecuador, Panama – those supporting US imperialism

2.  Jamaica, Costa Rica, Barbados, Peru - those that seek to play safe as bystanders

3.  Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana- those whose leaders supported US militarism

4. Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras - those that vociferously opposed US imperial actions. 

Pambazuka News salute those leaders who have been steadfast in opposing the crimes and call on all peoples to be vigilant as the spokesperson for US imperialism issue threats against Cuba and Colombia. Pambazuka News calls upon all those in Global Africa to study the lessons of the struggles of Simon Bolivar who speeded up the weakening and decline of European colonialism in Latin America. The Bolivarian Revolutionary process in Venezuela has the same potential in this period to speed the dismantling and weakening of US imperialism.

There will be a response from the working peoples, and not only in Venezuela and Latin America. Trump declared that the United States would “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” The boast of the US leadership that they will run Venezuela will confront immense resistance. The efforts to militarily take what could not be achieved through capitalist competition will inevitably lead to war. It is this push for war and neo fascism that places a special responsibility on the working peoples of the United States, especially the growing multi-racial anti-fascist alliance that is now blossoming inside the United States.

Decline begets decline

At Pambazuka News we have been reaching back into recent historical examples of imperial decline to learn lessons about the current decline and desperation of US imperial and military overreach. The examples that immediately come to mind are those of the decline of Britain and France after their unsuccessful bid to reverse the self-determination project in Africa, especially in the case of the Suez Canal nationalization.

The 1956 Suez Crisis is the textbook example of a "reckless" lashing out by declining powers. For Britain and France, it wasn't just a military operation; it was a desperate attempt to prove they were still global heavyweights in a world increasingly dominated by the push towards the Bandung Project for political independence and social peace. Western social science has framed the decline of Britain and France in the context of the so called “Cold War’ but the reality was that the nationalization of the Suez Canal and the political independence of states in Africa and Asia effectively served as the “death certificate” for the British empire, marking the moment that France and Britain realized they could no longer act independently on the world stage. The decline of these ‘powers’ was only salvaged by a subservient alliance with US imperialism and racism. 

This moment of the crisis of global imperialism is inspiring neo-fascism, re-armaments, jingoism and military adventurism. It is at this moment where there is a special responsibility of the citizens of the United States.

Lessons from The Zohran Mamdani Campaign in New York

The abduction of President Maduro of Venezuela took place two days after the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani as the Mayor of the biggest city in the United States. The Mamdani campaign demonstrated that radical, multi-racial alliances succeed by replacing vague promises to working peoples with a "materially radical" agenda focused on the fundamental costs of survival. By centering the campaign on crystalline promises—free buses, a citywide rent freeze, universal childcare, and city-owned grocery stores and against Zionism, genocide, and military occupation—Mamdani bypassed the traditional "culture war" traps that often divide the working people. This approach proved that a diverse coalition of South Asian, Black, Latino, and working-class white New Yorkers could be unified through a shared "opposition to oligarchs, neo fascism and war" that prioritizes pocketbook relief over donor-class approval, effectively de-weaponizing the financial blackmail typically used by the city's billionaire elite.

Beyond policy, the campaign provided a blueprint for institutionalizing movement power into the new sites of politics with the new militants of politics. Through the creation of the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement, Mamdani has attempted to transition a "volunteer army" into a permanent social infrastructure, treating door-knocking and neighborhood-level listening as a continuous tool for permanent mobilization rather than a one-time election tactic. This shift, combined with an "authenticity-first" digital strategy that utilized viral joy and cultural fluency, successfully re-engaged a "disinvited" youth electorate and shored up labour support. It offers a hopeful sign that an anti-racist people-powered machine can defeat entrenched establishment interests by making politics feel like a site of belonging and tangible change.

For the youths of New York state (who are called Gen Z in Global Africa), the Mamdani campaign offers a blueprint for transforming "doom-scrolling" into a "real-life army" by reclaiming the concepts of self-organization, self-mobilization and self-emancipation who will oppose war militarism and racial capitalism. Of the many lessons is the move from top down leaderism to mobilized and conscientized anti-imperialist and anti-racist.  Rather than demanding young people "earn their stripes" in stale bureaucratic structures, the campaign built a political home that looked and felt like the multi-racial, multi-religious and multi-ethnic world that the youths and working people actually inhabit. By embedding policy into culture— conscious rap and hip hop, using viral joy, memes, and a "rizz-based" digital strategy Mamdani proved that what is often dismissed as "youth apathy" is actually a rational response to exclusion. For movements in Port of Spain, Bridgetown, Lagos, London, Nairobi, or Lagos, the lesson is clear: to engage the so called Gen Z, you must stop treating them as a voting bloc to be "messaged at" and start treating them as a class that is "disinvited" from power, providing them with real life lessons of Ubuntu and direct executive influence. In neo-liberal parlance, this is called ‘empowerment’ and ‘governance’ but the USAID discourses of demobilization have now been removed from official arsenals. Youths are now being reminded of the old values of sharing and caring that had prevailed in pre-capitalist societies.

The second lesson is the triumph of real political engagement over divisive ideas about human beings.  Africa is plagued by the politicization of regionalism, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion. In a global era of rising white racism and chauvinism from Trump to Victor Orban and the National Front in France, Mamdani showed that a multiracial alliance can only hold if it is anchored in the "major pillars" of survival: meaningful work, housing, transit, clean environment, childcare, and food. All over Global Africa, youths have been demobilized and divided to be pawns of military entrepreneurs. Many youths see no prospect for decent livelihoods in their own societies. By promising a $30 minimum wage and city-owned grocery stores, the Mamdani campaign created a shared economic identity that de-weaponized the racist and xenophobic narratives used by the establishment to fracture the working peoples. Internationally, this serves as a powerful sign that the youths in Africa can defeat entrenched dynasties by refusing to play the "culture war" on the elite's terms. Instead of pursuing incremental "representation”, the lesson is to fight for a "radical common sense" that makes the necessities of life a public utility, proving that even in the world's financial capital, people-power can successfully stare down the moral rot of the billionaire class.

In this issue, we have published the position of the Left Alliance in Kenya. This is not an endorsement of that alliance but an effort to draw the African Left into a deeper debate on what constitutes left politics in Africa. The Left alliance in Kenya, like their counterparts in South Africa, must be commended for clarity in opposing US militarism as they opposed the Zionist genocide in Gaza. One major lesson that can be taught is that opposing global militarism must be accompanied by a global assault on chauvinism, on so-called tribalism, homophobia, sexism and religious intolerance. The Mamdani campaign has provided a lesson for South Africa and all other African countries that it is possible for the left to rise above xenophobia. Mamdani is of Indian descent and is proud of being an African. This is an important lesson on the politics of inclusion in the era of neo-fascism.

The urgency of raising the political consciousness of all social classes and groups in Global Africa can be gleaned from those social forces in Africa who are supporting the US adventurism in Venezuela. There are political groups, especially some who are supporting ‘democracy and human rights’ who are calling for US military intervention in Africa. This call was issued by elements within Tanzania who opposed the violence and killings of thousands in Tanzania. Pambazuka News sees the urgency of educating Global Africans of the real dangers of US imperialism and that the reckless behavior must be exposed.

The US abduction of Nicholas Maduro and Cilia Flores was a reckless act meant to reverse US imperial decline and prop up global white supremacy. But this military incursion is only representative of a trend that has been witnessed in this century, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Haiti and Palestine. This recklessness and decline mean that the downward trend, that has been amplified by US debt and the weakening of the dollar, has become a recursive process that will produce further deterioration and failure. These self-reinforcing loops of white supremacy, neo-fascism and war will feed into themselves, amplifying the initial decline over time. Global anti-racism mobilization and a break from racial capitalism in the short run is the only antidote to the recklessness of US imperialism.