Their decision to wreck the existing world order can be stopped but it will not happen if governments like ours choose to shelter under the Eagle’s wings.
Jon Trickett is the Labour MP for Hemsworth
The facts and the immediate response to the American assault on the Venezuelan government are well known. But we need to see the action not simply as the fevered imagination and irrational mind of Donald Trump. The truth is that the US National Security Strategy published in November spelt out precisely and in chilling detail what Washington intends to do. It is a document written by key elements within the American state which shows their intention to protect and expand America’s weakening economic and political hegemony at a time of rapid changes in the global economy. In this context we need to understand that America’s goal was not the recreation of democracy but the seizure of the largest known reserves of oil anywhere in the world.
But let’s start briefly reviewing the events immediately surrounding the military intervention.
This week I intervened in the Foreign Secretary’s statement about the events in Venezuela. Many Members from all sides of the House had questioned the legality of Trump’s raid. The Minister said the government had long since desired regime change in Venezuela but she gave three tests for a transition: that it be peaceful, that it be legal and that it be – in effect – conducted by the Venezuelan people.
By these tests, it ought to be the case that the Labour government criticises Trump since the action used lethal violence, was not legal under the UN Charter and certainly wasn’t launched by the local population. After all, it was planned and executed by Washington. In my intervention I also asked whether the Minister could say whether it was the government position that the oil belonged to the Venezuelan people and that there should be no neo-colonial control by Washington of the Venezuelan state apparatuses.
However, US based oil companies have seen continuing rises in their share values in the aftermath of what is effectively an attempted coup. In the meantime, Trump announced that there would be no election in Venezuela. He ruled out supporting a prominent opposition leader and said that he would make decisions about the future of the country. Our government ought to have seen all this coming and shown that it was prepared to call out the Americans’ illegal use of force.
The bigger picture is American relative economic decline
The US is still the world’s largest economy measured by GDP. But its share of global output is diminishing. Last year American GDP was about 26% of world output. But in 1938 just before WW2 their share is estimated to have been 30% and just after the war about a half of the output of the world economy was generated by the US. The decades around the middle of the last century showed overwhelming US economic dominance as well as military and political hegemony. The collapse of the Soviet bloc then effectively created a unipolar global dominance by Washington.
But history tells us that empires never last forever. Take manufacturing. In 2023, the United States produced 16.6 % of global manufacturing, but China’s share was significantly higher, at around 28.4%.
China has risen dramatically: in 2025 it was the second largest economy with a much larger share of global manufacturing and output than before. These changes matter because historically manufacturing was linked to productive output as well as trade competitiveness. Equally importantly it explains the increasingly strident responses which we have seen in the American industrial ‘rust belt’ from where Trump gains electoral support.
However, even if Silicon Valley still dominates in the digital age, the truth is that this domination is being challenged again by China. It was interesting recently that Tesla’s electric car sales were superseded by China’s equivalent for example. Global competition in technology and innovation is diversifying especially in Asian economies like South Korea, with increasingly heavy investment in AI, robotics, and renewable energy.
In this context, although we have focused on the Chinese challenge, we can see the wider group of BRICS countries finding new routes to economic growth amid talk of de-dollarisation. Of course the dollar continues to be the dominant global currency (58% of allocated foreign exchange reserves, for example). But there is now a growing appetite to discuss how to move away from the American currency. Their actions in Venezuela will only speed up this process.
The truth is that the US economy is no longer the powerhouse that it once was. In terms of economic growth, infrastructure investment and even in the very high levels of public debt Washington faces problems. It’s too soon to suggest that we have seen the end of the American Century or the full development of a truly multipolar world. But the American administration appears to have the tea leaves and decided to act. In this context it is important to see the one arena where Washington remains dominant and that is in its military capacity.
The question which has emerged in the minds of American decision makers is whether they can use their armed power to reverse the direction of travel. They need a larger captive domestic market and they need access to raw materials especially oil as well as the rare earth materials which allows dominance of key parts of the manufacturing needs of silicon valley. This explains the National Security Strategy claim that they exercise dominion over the Western Hemisphere by which they mean all the western hemisphere including Greenland.
They need something else too in the short to immediate term. They need to break up the economic bloc in the EU and have stated their intention to infiltrate American support for the plethora of extreme Right ethno-nationalist parties leading the insurgency against the dominant liberal values currently embraced by the Europeans.
And finally they need to destroy what has been called the rules based international order. We are likely to see further uses of America’s military power in order to restore their previously unchallenged economic dominance. This is the real meaning of the intervention in Venezuela. This truth is chilling. Their decision to wreck the existing world order can be stopped but it will not happen if governments like ours choose to shelter under the Eagle’s wings.
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