Imperial Playbook: How Washington manufactured crises in Ukraine and Venezuela, as commentators increasingly claim that Donald Trump’s actions in Venezuela mirror Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine, calling for equal condemnation in the name of consistency.
This view, however, overlooks the fundamental power dynamics at the heart of global politics. As Jeffrey Sachs has argued, both Venezuela and Ukraine represent attempts by the United States to impose its strategic dominance. In this sense, they are not opposing cases but parallel ones. Each illustrates what Thomas Friedman once memorably described as the reality that “McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas”: economic globalisation ultimately rests on military power. Both crises are microcosms of the wider struggle between entrenched imperial systems and an emerging multipolar world order.
As Sachs notes in relation to Ukraine, it was a thirty-year project aimed at drawing the country into the American military sphere. It is therefore misleading to suggest that the United States is behaving in Venezuela as Russia behaved in Ukraine. Rather, the United States is acting in Venezuela as it previously acted in Ukraine. In both cases, the conflicts were provoked by Washington and formed part of long-term US strategic projects.
“These are not isolated events,” Sachs argues, “but deliberate initiatives of the United States.” Understanding this requires a clear-eyed view of how US foreign policy operates: what it means to be a military-industrial state, what an unconstrained military-industrial complex entails, and the role intelligence agencies such as the CIA play in such operations. Seen through this lens, Ukraine and Venezuela are not distinct phenomena, but variations of the same underlying strategy pursued by a would-be global hegemon through different methods.
