Venezuela has become a test case for the world. If external control backed by force is allowed to stand, then sovereignty, international law, and democratic accountability all become conditional, tyranny rules and care has been consigned to history.
This video argues that Britain can no longer pretend to sit on the fence. Outside the EU, the UK must decide whether to subordinate itself to US power or recommit to Europe, multilateralism, and the defence of international law.
This is the choice of 2026. Tyranny or care. Power or principle. Silence or resistance. The cost of getting it wrong will be enormous.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
Something deeply troubling happened in Venezuela on Saturday.
The US revived gunboat diplomacy, although it says it didn't.
It has revived empire, although it says it did not seek to undertake regime change in Venezuela, although it appears that it has.
It says it did not invade Venezuela, although it very obviously did.
And in the middle of all this, there's something deeply troubling going on, which is that Venezuela no longer controls its own political future, but no one is sure who does.
This matters, and let's leave Venezuela aside for the moment and the Maduro regime, because this is not a discussion of whether his government was good for the country or not, because there are plenty of reasons to be worried about that. Nor is it a discussion about the validity of that government because we know there are doubts about that, too. This is instead a discussion about how power is exercised globally and whether international law still restrains it.
The official narrative from the US is that there will be no US troops on Venezuelan soil. There is no declared occupation and no attempt, supposedly, to install a new regime; indeed, the Vice-President, Maduro's Vice-President, is now supposedly running the country.
But, that is the story we are being asked to accept, and official narratives and the truth don't always coincide, of course. The story that is not being told is that military force remains positioned offshore, just outside Venezuela, and political authority in the country is very clearly being dictated externally, with threats being used to ensure that compliance is achieved. The condition for power is now given to be consent. That is coercion; that's not diplomacy, that's not negotiation. It is just plain, straightforward, old-fashioned bullying, and that is what is going on here.
Who decides legitimacy in this case? What we knew was that there was an opposition in Venezuela. Its leader was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize only a month or two ago, but apparently, they, too, have been discarded by Trump. Apparently, they don't command sufficient support in the country to ensure that they could deliver a government, and that's not because of democratic failure; it's just because Trump has decided that it would be too inconvenient to have another Venezuelan in charge of Venezuela.
Washington has now decided it determines who is acceptable to govern Venezuela. And Washington's might has now replaced sovereignty. Venezuela has been placed under conditional authority. Power is only being held as long as instructions are followed, and policy direction is very clearly determined in Washington, whatever anybody in Venezuela now wants to say. Venezuela's independence has, as a consequence, obviously been lost. It is now colonised, whatever is being said. We might be seeing a new form of colonisation, but nonetheless, that's what's happening.
We might call this guardianship. This is rule by supervision. The claim is that one state knows better than another how the first state should be run and, therefore, backed by the threat of force, it will impose its will on the state in question. The USA is not annexing Venezuela; it's just exerting control over it.
It's a new form of colonialism, and there are three dynamics now in play.
Violence is assumed to be persuasive.
Compliance is the overriding objective of the USA with regard to Venezuela.
And sanctions remain as the permanent threat for non-compliance.
The choice that is offered is submission or punishment.
Call it what it is, this is open thuggery.
Diplomacy has been abandoned.
Gunboat politics has returned.
And colonial power is being exercised in a modern form.
And what follows from this is abuse is not incidental; it is structural. Puppet governments always lack legitimacy, and resistance to them becomes inevitable, and that will be happening. In fact, the one thing that we can be sure that will be happening in Venezuela is that there will be opposition to whoever is now in power because they're going to satisfy no one, because they are obviously a US puppet. Everyone in opposition in Venezuela will now be united with the one goal of getting rid of any puppet government that the USA imposes on the country.
Instability is therefore being manufactured and not prevented by US action. Chaos is inevitable, as all previous US interventions in South America have shown, because that's the way they've ended.
There are bigger consequences as well.
International law is being weakened for everyone.
Smaller states are being placed on notice throughout the world.
The US targets of Cuba, Colombia, Greenland, Canada, and more are all now at risk, but so too, of course, are other countries elsewhere.
Taiwan from China.
The Baltic states from Russia, and so on.
Power is replacing rules. The world has become less safe and not more ordered right at the start of 2026.
So, a fair question to ask is, where does this leave the UK? Britain no longer has an independent sphere of influence; we abandoned it when we left the EU. Brexit ensured this outcome, but now we must therefore exist within somebody else's sphere of influence because we have none of our own.
So we only really have two options available to us. One is alignment with Europe, and the other is subordination to the USA. There is quite literally no third path for us to choose from now. There are no hidden alternatives. We do not have a voice of our own. We are simply not a global power anymore. But there is a danger of pretence, and that is that we will still try to pretend that we do have an influence which is entirely absent, and we will claim in this situation that we cannot decide where to sit. But that indecision is itself a decision; it risks making Britain America's Trojan horse in Europe.
Our power is, in fact, drifting away, putting us at risk as a result, and who will save us now? Remember, we've been dependent before. We didn't win the Second World War single-handedly. We didn't win the First World War single-handedly. You'd think we did because of all the jingoism that goes on around these issues now. In practice, we always worked with allies, and the point is, we now have to decide, whom are we allied with?
Are we going to be allied with imperial power without restraint, and where international law is being hollowed out, and where democratic accountability is being sidelined, with Venezuela being the warning? Or are we going to openly choose Europe and recommit to multilateralism and defending international law consistently, not least by using our influence as a permanent member of the Security Council at the UN to stand up against abuse from the world powers who now exist, of the USA, China and Russia.
The fact is that Venezuela is, in this context, a test case. If the US takeover, however we describe it, of Venezuela stands, then nothing else is off limits. The real question is not what the US will do next; it is whether anyone will try to stop it.
This is a key question. The world is already a more dangerous place in the first week of 2026 than it was in 2025. That is quite an extraordinary thing to have to say, and yet it's glaringly obviously true. Despite that, in the UK, our politicians are pretending otherwise. They're pretending that we can sit and make up our minds in due course about something that is clearly wrong, that is going on, where the USA is breaching international law, using force - effectively terrorism - to subject a country to its power, and we are saying, "Let's wait and see what's going on." That is unacceptable.
The time for fence-sitting has passed. Now we must decide: are we on the side of tyranny with the USA, which will then enable the same actions from Russia and China, or are we going to stand up with other states who have already spoken out inside Europe and say, "This is unacceptable. Sovereignty must be respected. International law must be respected. People must be respected. Care matters."
This is the choice that has to be made in 2026. It's arrived sooner than I expected, but we now must demand that our politicians decide on whose side are we, tyranny or care, the US or Europe? There is nothing else for them to decide upon. The choice is clear. Which one are they going to make? Because the cost for us of them getting it wrong will be enormous.
What do you think? There's a poll down below.
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I don’t think anyone thinks that what Kier Starmer says speaks for Britain. Those speaking for the Labour government look even more ridiculous than usual. Although I agree with you that what’s happened is extremely bad for international stability, I think it might help us realise how ridiculous our situation with the US is and that the only sensible option is to align with Europe and strengthen our ties with our nearest neighbours.
Zack Polanski has got a lot of stick for suggesting we should leave NATO, but what he actually said was that the US was no longer a reliable partner, which no one can disagree with. The special relationship has not been anything useful to us for a very long time but with Trump in power it is more obvious the US would do nothing to help a NATO ally in trouble.
China and Russia hate the US, but will they retaliate? The EU probably needs to strengthen its own position as it cannot rely on the US who also have their eyes on Greenland. I don’t want to think about what happens if Trump acts upon his threats in that direction.
Hi Richard,
I have a slightly related, slightly tangential question… is there a relationship between the size of government debt and the trade deficit? If we want to pay down government debt and stop transferring interest payments to wealthy ‘depositors’ with the UK government in the form of gilts, would becoming a net exporter help us do that? Am I wrong in having a hunch that low post-WWII asset prices were a contributing factor to high post-war productivity growth? Is there something wrong in my feeling that a pretty high, properly anti inflationary wealth tax designed to drastically lower asset prices could contribute to productivity growth in the UK economy, allowing us to export more and allowing us to pay down our government debt without employing austerity against our population? The way this relates to my thoughts on Trump in Venezuela is that I wonder if the rich in the USA do not want to address their asset price bubble with asset price drops and are looking to resolve their trade deficit issues and prop up asset values by incorporating exports of Venezuelan oil wealth into the U.S.A. ‘export ledger’ instead of addressing their internal economic problems? My feeling here being that if the trade deficit and government debt are linked in this way, is a long term government debt a sign that a country is living ‘beyond its means’? That is, importing more value than it exports? And that in the end that will have to be accounted for by a period of rebalancing by exporting more value than we import if we want to avoid a trajectory towards wars of imperialism to shore up our excess consumption?
I will be replying to this and also with a post on sectoral balances either this afternoon (the latter, probably) or tomorrow morning (the former).
Thanks for posing it.
Starmer will align with the tyrant in Washington for two reasons – fear of the tyrant’s petty wrath, and fear of the right-wing media’s screams of xenophobic rage about any attempt to build bridges with the EU or individual European states.
But see the response of Australia, New Zealand, S Korea and Japan, joining Canada in Europe’s S.A.F.E. Defence procurement and investment programme. (Canada is already in, the others announced their applications in response to Trump’s Venezuela fiasco.
These are very important Far Eastern American allies and one important neighbour, who have smelt the coffee. This is an economic, military and political disaster for the USA.
Starmer appears to have lost his sense of smell (if he ever had one).
Starmer has to show leadership to have any chance of survival. He cannot just be pushed by back benchers or events.
The post-Brexit ‘Global Britain’ strategy has faded into oblivion.
Apologies if my questions make no sense or if I am wrong about things … I am interested in being corrected and pointed towards more lucid understanding of the global situation… I am trying to find texts to help me… todays reading came from https://gimms.org.uk/2019/02/10/uk-government-spending-taxation-bank-lending/ and https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2019/10/why-trade-wars-are-inevitable?lang=en . I’d be interested in any critique of these sources. Many Thanks again for the economic education I am able to access through your blog.
I admit I do not have time to read them…sorry. GIMMS should be reliable. Carnegie I have my doubts about, usually.
Both links are essential reading in my view to understanding why Brexit was a big mistake.
These are the two sentences in the Ellis Winningham article that links to the Michael Pettis article:-
“In terms the general public can understand, a budget surplus is the act of the UK government reducing the number of British pounds available for people to save and to spend. Rarely is a budget surplus for the UK government appropriate unless the UK is exporting far more than it imports.”
Hi Schofield, that was the sentence that made the biggest impression on me. It made me wonder who is doing the excess ‘consuming’ that contributes to the UK or the US trade deficit. Whether it is the average person, or whether it is somehow the very rich with their overpriced assets that they use to extract rents from the average person. Whether significant wealth taxes domestically could bring down both asset prices and wealthy people’s consumption or their rent extraction through asset ownership… whether post war growth in Europe was in part facilitated by low asset prices… whether we could grow our productive economy and reduce the trade deficit if we taxed wealth to suppress asset prices domestically to assist growth and simultaneously reduce rich people’s over-consumption… In relation to our current frightening situation with Trump, whether the US annexation of Venezuela is intended to assist the US balance of trade in some way to prop up domestic asset prices so that the rich don’t lose ‘book value’ and can continue to extract high rents from the average American… that, in short, wealth inequality and a desire to prop up asset prices and maintain high levels of rent extraction and consumption for the rich leads in some way inevitably to wars of imperialism to acquire other countries’ assets and production to add to your own ledger…. I’ll admit all these thoughts arise from hunches and eclectic economic reading, and not from confident systematic knowledge, and I’d be grateful to have any erroneous thinking on my part clarified….
I hop0e the answer I am working on for tomorrow will also address this…
My view is that I would like to proceed on a number of fronts:
1. To repair the relationship with Europe – in particular to trade well and get rid of those BREXIT barriers but I would fall short of a joining any clubs with regard to military co-operation, currency (no way) etc. Sorry.
2. I would like to loosen ties with America – that includes asking them to leave where they have a military presence but trade with them where possible.
3. I would stand us down from the UN, WHO and NATO etc., in protest.
4. I would close down our legacy presence in so-called British colonies/bases around the world.
5. I would reverse all privatizations that have led to foreign ‘inward investment’ from Europe and elsewhere. Bye, bye and fuck off.
This to me would be the re-set that we have denied ourselves for some time, enabling us to accept our real status in today’s world. Hopefully, we could then turn our resources to regenerating the country from within (across the board, all infrastructure, including military) whist asserting a new neutrality on the world stage, with a strong humanist bent in helping others in a crisis. We would build our world diplomacy on selling peace and an expertise in coping with global warming.
This may well be pie in the sky but I could not give a damn. The politics of care start at home for sure. Playing big boy games and flag waving the union jack around the world is a vacuous existence I am long bored with and seems extraneous when compared to our real problems.
I am not sure why we old want to leave the UN, WHO and NATO etc. What would be the gain in that? There is a need for a world order.
I totally understand your query.
I do not think these institutions are working. They seem dominated by countries with little power and without any real buy-in from the more powerful and aggressive states. We could work just as well without them.
I think that going forward it would be wise to find some new friends. I think that the people this country hangs out with are dangerous or weak. I think the time has come for some selective isolationism, a pivot or two. I think that now is the time to lie low and sort ourselves out domestically.
I also think that this would raise a few eyebrows but that would create the opportunity for us to state our concerns and put forward a programme of improvement. I think it is time that we became more difficult, less compliant with the ‘world order’. I am tired of moral cowardice being passed off as some form of higher intelligence. It all disgusts me.
We will have to disagree.
Isolationism is dangerous.
Pushing out the pariah states – starting with the US, Russia and Israel would make sennse.
A new international order – building on what has been good – makes sesne. Isolation does not.
Following your correspondent Hannah’s letter in the Grauniad yesterday, it published one from me today, written last week before the latest exhibition of pussyfooting. (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jan/05/let-me-explain-why-we-cant-stand-keir-starmer) Slowly but surely, the readers of your blog are getting through.
I am looking forwqard to thsio trend continuing.
Thank you, and for sharing.
I would encourage others to try.
@ Anja Cradden
I would highly recommend you and other readers of this blog read Klein’s and Pettis’s book “Trade Wars are Class Wars” to understand how global capitalism is lacking in a democratic solution to unfair trade imbalances.
Thanks
Hi,
Thanks for the suggestion, it’s my next read!
I am a broken record on this I know, but do they consider rent abolition?
That is, legal reform of rental or tenancy contracts such that asset ownership always incrementally transfers over time…. always circulating to the latest people to pay for those assets. My theory is that starting with buildings and land we could easily create a system of 30 year/ 360 month ‘time share’ contracts that roll around continuously. I think there is a role for wealth and asset taxes to curb wealth concentration and asset price inflation, but at a more fundamental level I think we need to challenge the principle of rent so that the ability of a minority to accumulate the assets and perpetually extract/extort our productive earnings from us in return for places to live and work is tackled at source. A ‘Post Rent Economics’ if you like. If you’ve read any other comments I’ve made you will be correct in noticing that I am completely obsessed with the potential for such a fundamental reform to stabilise market economies and strengthen democracy and restore nature by allowing low or zero growth prosperity/ sufficiency for all. So apologies if I am boring people with repetition…. Looking forward to reading Klein snd Pettis’s suggestions, thanks again for the tip.
Essentially, you seem to be suggesting hire purchase, not rent. That may be a simplistic version – but simplicity sometimes helps.
Funnily enough, hire-purchase is how I used to describe it to my friends but I changed to the term ‘time-share’ after a game special rules Monopoly where I tried to demonstrate the concept. My friends said that ‘time-share’ seemed to describe it more clearly…. that every month of ‘rent’ buys a 1/360 ownership out of 360 sequential fractions… so if I pay rent for the 40th to the 80th months of the contract, when the 30 year contract rolls around in 30 years time, I will receive rent for the 40th to 80th shares when payment for those falls due. Those payments would be made at contemporary ‘rent’ prices, so that it’s a form of inflation proofed saving for people who can’t afford to buy or get a mortgage. As well as ensuring that assets always transfer, and a minority of people in our communities cannot accumulate property portfolios on which they collect the perpetual rent that is the moral hazard that leads to asset hoarding, rent seeking, asset price inflation, distorted incentives in the economy etc etc etc…..
I am not convincved this is thought through sufficiently. Youy are, after all, making rents into a sale. I think there are needs for rental properties. The issue is control of rents, not ending rents, I suggest.
Can you give me an example of a situation where rent is preferable to ownership?
Yes. When people want high degrees of mobility and purchase and same would impose significant costs.
For example, how could students buy when their situation is highly mobile?
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