The recent military exercises in the southern Caribbean merit serious attention from the Irish working class. From 15th September to 6th October, 25 countries participated in large scale invasion drills explicitly targeting Venezuela. This represents the latest phase in a decades-long campaign by US imperialism to overthrow the revolutionary Bolivarian government.

Understanding the real motivations behind this aggression is essential. The United States consistently justifies its hostility by labelling Venezuela a “narco-state”. The facts contradict this narrative entirely. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Venezuela is free from cocaine production  and only 5 per cent of Colombian cocaine transits through Venezuela, with the vast majority intercepted by Venezuelan authorities. Meanwhile, Ecuador – a US client state – operates the port of Posorja as a primary cocaine gateway to Europe without facing sanctions or military threats.

The actual driver of US aggression is political, not criminal. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution represents an alternative economic model to that which US, British, and European capital seeks to impose globally. Its system of popular democracy through communes, public ownership of oil and key industries, and refusal to submit to International Monetary Fund austerity programmes demonstrates that another path is possible. This is intolerable to the United States, which requires the entire hemisphere to remain subordinate to American corporate interests. That Venezuela also possesses 350 billion barrels of oil and significant mineral wealth compounds this hostility, but even without these resources, a successful socialist experiment in Latin America would face US subversion.

This pattern should be familiar for Irish workers. Ireland itself experienced centuries of British imperialism justified through similar propaganda, with accusations of barbarism, the incapacity for self-government, and threats to civilisation.

Today’s “narco-state” rhetoric follows the same template as yesterday’s characterisation of colonial subjects as inherently inferior. The mechanisms of imperialism adapt whilst the underlying logic remains constant.

What are the prospects for direct US military intervention? Several factors make invasion unlikely in the immediate term.

1. Venezuela maintains a trained militia with 4.5 million members prepared for armed resistance – The US faced a force of similar proportions in Vietnam and were soundly defeated by the Vietnamese.

2. Strategic alliances with Russia, China, and Cuba provide political and potentially material deterrence. Regional opposition from ALBA, CELAC, and the Non-Aligned Movement raise the diplomatic costs.

3. Most significantly, US imperialism is severely overstretched across the Ukraine, Palestine, and the Pacific, limiting its capacity for additional major wars.

The real danger lies in what imperialism terms “low intensity” warfare. Economic sanctions strangle Venezuela’s economy, creating artificial shortages and suffering designed to turn the population against their government. The US engages in “lawfare”, media psychological operations, and other tactics to delegitimise popular governments in the eyes of the rest of the world. The Wall Street Journal has described Nobel Prize winner Maria Corina Machado as seeking forceful US action against her own country. There is nothing peaceful about Machado, yet she won the prize over candidates – one would suspect the US and its allies sought to make the “conservative firebrand” (Bloomberg) more cuddly. US intelligence agencies fund and organise fascist opposition groups. False flag operations provide pretexts for escalation. This strategy allows imperialism to wage war whilst denying responsibility. Ukraine’s trajectory from colour revolution to proxy war demonstrates how these tactics escalate.

The Irish working class has material interests in opposing imperialist aggression, regardless of where it occurs. Every success for imperialism strengthens the same forces that enforce capitalism here, e.g. austerity, privatisation, and subordination to US, British, and EU capital. Every defeat for imperialism creates space for working class movements globally. Venezuelan workers defending their revolution against US backed coups are engaged in the same fundamental struggle as Irish workers resisting health service privatisation or housing crises. The enemy is the same system.

Venezuela’s resistance demonstrates that popular organisation can withstand imperialism. Their communes, militias, and strategic alliances represent concrete examples of how working people can defend gains against a vastly superior military and economic power. These are lessons the Irish working class should study carefully.

The struggle against imperialism is the struggle of the international working class.