Welcome to Jacovin Radio. I'm your host, Susie Wiseman. This week, we're looking at a turning point in global politics.

With the January 3rd U.S. military assault on Venezuela and the capture of Nicolas Maluro, the Trump

administration has made explicit what earlier U.S. governments often cloaked in the language

of democracy or humanitarianism, the open assertion of spheres of influence enforced by

military and economic coercion. Some have called this the return of the Monroe Doctrine.

Others, including Pedro Palo Zalupastas, our first guess, argues it goes further.

He calls it a Dunrow doctrine, the term Trump himself likes.

It's transactional, unapologetic, naked imperialism that Pedro Palos says reflects

weakness, a declining hegemon turning to open coercion to secure resources and supply chains.

This moment also raises uncomfortable questions for the left. All too often, the anti-imperialist

left ends up defending authoritarian

corrupt regimes simply because they stand in opposition to Washington, reducing the emancipatory

and genuinely democratic socialist project to campism, the idea that any enemy of the U.S.

is my friend, even accepting the label of a socialist or communist camp,

regardless of these regimes authoritarian, repressive, and anti-worker rule.

Venezuela brings these contradictions sharply into focus, and so does Ukraine, because if the

world now accepts the division of the globe into imperial spheres of influence,

then the principles invoke to oppose Russia's invasion of Ukraine collapse as well.

Today we're going to explore these questions with Pedro Palo Zalup Bastos in Brazil on the Dunrood

doctrine and Venezuela, and then with Denis Piliash of Ukraine Soziani Ruch, whose organization

issued a powerful statement condemning the U.S. assault on Venezuela, and who also brings

deep scholarly knowledge of the Venezuelan process itself.

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