U.S. Out of Venezuela and Iran!
END THE FOREVER WARS ABROAD AND AT HOME
The U.S. Peace Council condemns the U.S. government’s escalating wars abroad and its deepening war against working-class, Black, Brown, Indigenous, immigrant, and other oppressed and vulnerable communities here at home. The same imperialist system that wages aggression against Venezuela and Iran intensifies repression in our neighborhoods, workplaces, and communities across the United States. These are not separate wars — they are fronts of a global imperialist system in decline, struggling to maintain its exploitative, unilateral hegemony in the face of a rising multipolar world.
In Our Americas and West Asia, the U.S. invokes “counterterrorism,” “anti-drug operations,” and “nuclear deterrence” to justify overt and covert forms of intervention, sanctions, and regime change in order to secure trade routes and geostrategic assets and maintain access to vital natural resources as China deepens its economic and political relations in the region. Venezuela is targeted for reclaiming its oil and building South-South unity; Iran for defying imperialist domination, supporting the Palestinian national liberation struggle, and advancing multipolar cooperation. Both nations are punished not for aggression, but for asserting sovereignty and helping shape a new world order no longer under the U.S. unilateral domination.
On 10 October, Venezuela formally brought its case before the United Nations Security Council, warning of the imminent danger of a U.S. armed assault in the Caribbean. The emergency session, requested by Caracas, followed a series of U.S. strikes on small vessels that killed over twenty civilians under the manufactured rationale of an “anti-narcotics” mission, provoking international outrage. Venezuela’s UN Ambassador Samuel Moncada denounced Washington’s “fabricated pretext for war” and urged the Council to act to prevent “the execution of an international crime.” China and Russia condemned the unlawful use of force and called for strict adherence to the UN Charter. The Maduro government demanded that the Security Council adopt a resolution affirming Venezuela’s sovereignty and territorial integrity — a call that, though supported by much of the Global South, was stonewalled by Washington and its allies.
The accelerating drive toward war reflects the crisis of U.S.-dominated global imperialism. The U.S. can no longer extract the imperial rents that once sustained its global dominance, because nations of the Global South are increasingly trading in local currencies, eroding the dollar hegemony that for over eight decades has enabled U.S. billionaires and military contractors to amass vast profits. As countries “derisk” — that is, reduce dependence on Western financial institutions vulnerable to sanctions — they are developing alternative financial and trade systems and deepening economic, security, and social development cooperation through new regional alliances.
The rise of multipolarity — and with it, new economic and security architectures independent of the imperialist core that has long extracted the South’s wealth of natural resources while simultaneously creating eternal debt — threatens the very foundation of the U.S. imperialism. In response, Washington resorts to the militarism of bombings, coups, and assassinations, alongside threats of invasion and genocide, coercion, and straightforward gangsterism: snapback sanctions, trade and tariff wars, and blockades. This desperation for total control is the logic of a decaying system.
At home, that same logic takes shape in the form of starving people’s basic needs, extracting even more wealth by freezing workers’ wages, moving to destroy Social Security, deteriorating benefits, and failing to maintain essential physical infrastructure — all to continue funneling billions of dollars into the coffers of monopoly corporations and oligarchs as income from abroad is threatened.
That same logic of violence erupts as domestic occupation. For example, in the early hours of September 30, 2025, Blackhawk helicopters and armed federal agents stormed a majority-Black apartment complex in Chicago, dragging residents from their homes and zip-tying children. Regular, heavily armed ICE raids, kidnappings, and National Guard occupations of predominantly working-class cities across the country — with majorities of people of color — are now blanketing the nation. This is occupation.
The ruling class’s relentless campaign to dehumanize immigrants serves this same system. It diverts popular anger away from the capitalist class responsible for economic decline, manufacturing consent for repression and militarization, and providing a pretext for surveillance, border expansion, and the growth of the carceral state. The criminalization of migration sustains a massive deportation and detention industry while reinforcing racialized divisions that weaken working-class solidarity at home and abroad.
Police, National Guard, and ICE raids on working-class, Black and Brown, and predominantly immigrant communities, militarized “Cop Cities,” and surveillance programs enforce the same imperialist order that bombs Gaza, sanctions Caracas, and surrounds Tehran. The 1033 and 1122 Programs funnel billions in war matériel to police, while ICE collaborates with local forces through 287(g) agreements — turning every city into a battlefield.
Imperialism’s internal and external wars are inseparable. Just as during earlier colonial eras, militarization of policing and the expansion of the surveillance state mirror the tactics of imperialist occupation. Programs like the “snapback” sanctions against Iran and the deployment of U.S. warships in the Caribbean to threaten Venezuela are symptoms of the same imperialist panic that drives Blackhawk raids in Chicago.
The U.S. Peace Council calls for:
– Hands off Venezuela and Iran — end sanctions, blockades, and war plans.
– Abolish ICE — end deportations, raids, and detention.
– Dismantle the 1033 and 1122 Programs — end police militarization.
– Shut down Cop Cities — stop domestic counterinsurgency training.
– Redirect war budgets to life-sustaining institutions and meeting human needs — housing, healthcare, education, and climate justice.
This is a war to preserve a defunct capitalist system in crisis — a system unable to rule without repression and unable to extract without genocidal violence. The struggle for peace must confront both the global architecture of domination and its domestic foundations in exploitation of the masses.
We must all move fast to stop this destructive madness.
October 12, 2025
