Against Methodological Nationalism: Post-Chávez Venezuela Under Washington’s Gun

On January 3, 2026, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela became the first South American country to come under US aerial bombardment in a military aggression that resulted in the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores. But the present US onslaught that threatens to dismantle the national sovereignty regime and transform Venezuela into a semi-colonial protectorate did not begin on January 3. My contention is that the incessant US-led hybrid war waged against Venezuela over the past thirteen years comprises the inescapable context for evaluating the post-Chávez history of the Bolivarian Revolution (2013-2026), including the fundamental questions of anti-imperialism, social justice, and political stability. This approach runs counter to the consensus in the academic, think tank, and mass media spheres, embraced by many on the nominal Northern left, which focuses on liberal proceduralist categories of authoritarianism and dictatorship, while systematically downplaying or ignoring US sanctions and other modalities of warfare in what critical scholars of imperialism have dismissed as “methodological nationalism” (Ajl, 2024; Capasso, 2021; Koerner, 2022).

From its inception, the Nicolás Maduro government faced an escalation of Washington’s regime-change campaign that had begun under Hugo Chávez. This hybrid war involved diverse modalities, including mass media disinformation (Macleod, 2018; Emersberger and Podur, 2021), NGO infiltration (Gill, 2022), guarimbas, assassination attempts and mercenary invasions (Ellner, 2023), as well as sanctions (Rodríguez, 2025; Weisbrot and Sachs, 2019). Washington and the Venezuelan opposition initially refused to recognize Maduro’s 2013 victory, initiating the first round of right-wing insurrectionary violence known as guarimbas. A subsequent round in 2014 effectively torpedoed the Maduro administration’s plans to culminate macroeconomic adjustment, incentivizing prioritization of short-term political survival and ultimately exacerbating the external shock of collapsing global oil prices caused by the US shale boom and Saudi obstruction of OPEC cutbacks (Rodríguez, 2025: 147–66). Coupled with the onset of US sanctions in late 2014, the outcome was to thwart a progressive economic stabilization – similar to that implemented by Correa’s Ecuador and Morales’ Bolivia (Weisbrot, Johnston, and Merling, 2017; Weisbrot, Bunker, Johnston, et. al., 2019) – that may have mitigated Chavismo’s landslide defeat in the 2015 legislative elections and bolstered its popular legitimacy in the face of ongoing regime-change efforts. Throughout 2016, the opposition-controlled National Assembly continued the dual-track strategy of attempting to oust Maduro by constitutional and more dubious means “within six months” (Koerner, 2016), to which the government-aligned Supreme Court responded by stripping it of its powers and blocking convening of a recall referendum. The following year, the opposition with the full backing of the Trump administration launched a further “color revolution”-style insurrection, alongside efforts to sever Venezuelan government access to external financing, formalized under the August 2017 US financial sanctions aimed at asphyxiating the nation’s oil industry. Pursuant to this “maximum pressure” strategy, the radical wing of the opposition boycotted the 2018 presidential elections, in which a moderate anti-government candidate stood a strong chance of coming to power through a negotiated transition (Rodríguez, 2025: 274–96). Washington subsequently imposed a full-scale economic embargo and recognized the parallel Guaidó interinato, to which it turned over control of Venezuelan state assets abroad.

Faced with the escalating assault, the Maduro government and grassroots movements proved unable to mount a coherent strategic response in the absence of Chávez, whose leadership articulated subaltern interests in the Venezuelan state while simultaneously conciliating rival factions within the bureaucracy. Washington and its local allies exploited this impasse to undermine Chavismo’s popular bases, wielding political violence and economic warfare to block alternative paths and degrade Venezuelan state capacities, especially the social missions, that helped anchor the government and ruling party among the masses. While the US-led offensive failed in overthrowing Maduro, it did nonetheless manage to impose a creeping ideological defeatism among the upper and middle echelons of the state (Kadri, 2016). In a phenomenon that sociologist Reinaldo Iturriza (2022) has called “resigned loyalty,” the government leadership pursued following its 2015 electoral defeat a pragmatic and piecemeal liberalization that was later formalized in 2018 with the implementation of an orthodox monetarist adjustment package. The latter included elimination of consumer price controls, privatization of state enterprises, de facto dollarization, and as well as freezing of wages, credit, and public spending. The Maduro government was successful in dividing sections of local capital, both traditional and emergent, from the radical opposition and inaugurating a period of political stability and modest economic growth amid ongoing US sanctions that blocked substantial recovery (2020-2024). However, the temporary “peace” came at a price of further eroding Chavismo’s historic support in the barrios and the countryside. Resentment grew over old and newly amassed fortunes, alongside high-profile corruption scandals involving top-level officials, while the recuperation of workers’ purchasing power, exclusively through non-wage bonuses, was contingent on approval from business sectors. For their part, popular movements launched several creative experiments such as the Admirable Campesino March (2018) and the Communard Union (2022) aimed at retaking the political initiative and correcting deviations in the revolutionary process. These grassroots Chavista forces accumulated important organizational strength and experience, though they remained territorially scattered and heavily dependent on state support. In retrospect, we can view 2013-2014 and 2017-2018 as critical junctures in which the Maduro government might have embarked on an alternative path of revolutionary advance and consolidation, notwithstanding the enormous countervailing pressures (Ellner, 2019).

The path that was taken led to the outcome of the July 28, 2024 elections. Under strangulating US siege and with Washington throwing its weight behind the ultra-right faction of the opposition headed by María Corina Machado, there was no way Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election could possibly be “free and fair” (Ellner, 2024). The fact that the Venezuelan Electoral Council refused to publish the results, as it did in all contests in the previous 20 years, supports no conclusion other than that a majority of Venezuelans voted for Machado’s candidate. Yet most did so, as in 2015, less out of ideological conviction than accumulated frustration and exhaustion, expressed as both a protest against the Maduro government and the political class – Chavista and opposition – as well as a hope that an opposition administration might lead to sanctions relief, greater economic recovery, and a return of migrant relatives. In the absence of credible security guarantees in the framework of a negotiated settlement, Maduro and the leadership had no realistic alternative than to stay in power, or risk repeating the fate of Muammar Gaddafi with the catastrophic potential of state fracture. The government subsequently embarked on a series of tactical maneuvers in a bid to regain popular support, including the communal consultations and the JUNTOS public works program, but it was unwilling or unable to break with its neoliberal macroeconomic package, likely out of fear of alienating business sectors and upending the modest economic recovery. From there, the path to the US kinetic attack on January 3 was largely overdetermined: consummating its ideological defeat, the political and military establishment opted for capitulation in lieu of “prolonged people’s war” as Venezuela’s asymmetric doctrine dictates (Farnetano, 2025).

It is only in the above context of permanent US intervention that we can properly assess the Maduro government’s record. At stake here is the late Marxist political economist Samir Amin’s crucial distinction between Thermidor and restoration. Whereas the former is a “step back,” only the latter represents the definitive abandonment of the revolutionary project (Amin 2018). Though the state under Maduro remained open to limited interpellation and contestation from below, the US hybrid war progressively weakened the subaltern classes and strengthened the traditional and emergent bourgeoisie (Koerner, 2022). Popular movements pushed forward remarkable local experiments (Pascual Marquina and Gilbert, 2020) and made institutional inroads with the designation of Angel Prado as communes minister. But they were unable to radically shift the overall correlation of forces and conservative policy direction that saw the contradictions between the state and the masses become increasingly antagonistic, as evidenced in the repression of worker and campesino organizers and in the return to mano dura policing (Surgentes, 2021).

Nevertheless, despite the major concessions to capital that compounded US sanctions’ devastating toll on Venezuelan labor and partially rolled back state control of the oil industry and other sectors, the Maduro period did not constitute neocolonial restoration. While leftist critics have accused the Maduro administration of definitively turning its back on Chávez’s legacy, the historical reality is more complicated, with important continuities persisting alongside transformations and ruptures. The national-popular edifice erected under Chávez had indeed been hollowed out, yet so long as it was still standing, revolutionary movements had a chance to refortify the foundation and continue building upwards. The Venezuelan working masses remained highly politicized, if largely disaffiliated from Chavismo (Mayor and Iturriza, 2026), and there was still a window, however limited and dependent on improved geopolitical conditions, for rectification and gradual reconstruction of the national-popular bloc articulated through the state. And the internationalist scaffolding of the Bolivarian Revolution endured, with Maduro maintaining and deepening Venezuela’s strategic alliances with anti-systemic actors from Cuba and Iran to China and Russia. The unceasing US hybrid war against Venezuela, accelerating especially during this period of retreat and retrenchment, is perhaps the best testament to the “strategic risk,” in the words of Secretary of State Marco Rubio (Vaz, 2026), that the Bolivarian Revolution under Maduro continued to pose for US imperialism.