Naked Imperialism in Venezuela

Over the weekend, the Trump administration fast-tracked its efforts to oust Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, the successor of Hugo Chávez and his policies of nationalizing key industries and pushing out most U.S. companies. The U.S. government conducted a bombing raid in Caracas, with a swift operation to capture Maduro and his wife, transporting them to New York, where they face federal charges that include using Venezuela’s government to run a narco-terrorism conspiracy.

Venezuela is well-known as the home of the world’s largest known oil reserves. In its Annual Statistical Bulletin for 2025, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) reported that the country had more than 303 billion barrels in reserves. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s report on the country notes, “Most of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves are extra-heavy crude oil from the Orinoco Belt,” and several recent estimates say that the total oil in place in this region exceeds 1 trillion barrels. Still, industry insiders say that the raw numbers associated with the Orinoco Belt’s vast wells of oil, both oil in place and oil regarded as technically accessible and recoverable, can be misleading given other important factors. The oil in the Orinoco region is thick and viscous, difficult to extract and producing a lower yield of usable finished product. Many in U.S. policy and business circles believe that such difficulties can be overcome with the proper levels of investment and needed updates to the industry’s infrastructure and technologies in Venezuela. As Reuters reports, “[O]utput has plummeted over the past decades amid mismanagement and a lack of investment from foreign firms after Venezuela nationalized oil operations in the 2000s that included the assets of Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips.”

Trump has never been a peace president or a principled opponent of aggressive war and imperial looting. His crude rhetoric, with its open acknowledgement of Venezuela’s oil riches, merely removes the polite, decorous language we’ve come to expect from our political figureheads. The U.S. government is not pursuing a new logic or discarding old values. It is reinstating our political-economic system’s commitment to imperialism and extraction, only without any pretense to humanitarian motivations or democracy-building. If the past several years have taught us anything politically, it is that the old categories of identity and ideological narrative are no longer capable of assuaging people’s fears or satisfying their need for answers. The new moment in American politics perhaps admits the tried-and-true old strategy: the strength of the United States, even economically and culturally, is at bottom military strength, and our ability to live the way we do here is a function of occupation and extraction, not “free trade.” More than any other individual today, Marco Rubio represents the relationship between the Washington consensus on foreign policy and the approach of Donald Trump, assuming there is a coherent approach to speak of. Both of these schools believe with religious passion that the United States should and indeed must dominate the world militarily and economically. Both have adopted and implemented a view of the supposed rules-based international order that permits the U.S. to aggress against sovereign states with impunity.

If this is a mask-off moment for many Americans, then at least they now know the stakes. They are beginning to see what the critics of our government’s lawless aggression and naked imperialism have been pointing out for decades and longer. Trump’s unapologetic aggression has given Americans an opportunity to better understand our history: this episode is part of a pattern whereby the U.S. either invades a country or supports in one or another way the ouster of democratically elected leaders, to install dictators who will be friendly to US geopolitical interests and to American companies. Americans should not be surprised that Congress was not notified prior to the weekend’s attacks on Venezuela’s sovereignty. The executive branch has attacked and invaded dozens of sovereign countries without Congressional authorization in the 80 or so years since World War II. Our government long ago stopped respecting either the Constitution or international law in its foreign policy decisions.

Many of our elites were surprised and outraged to learn that Trump currently has no plan of putting María Corina Machado in the Miraflores Palace. But this reflects a point that anti-imperialists often make to deaf ears in Washington: when the political-economic superstructure is founded on illegal wars and scaled resource theft, you get authoritarians and strongmen, not liberal ideals. This is a structural phenomenon that doesn’t depend on how polite elites feel about their own politics; it is a product of war and empire. American liberals rooting for Machado seem to know very little about the person they’re supporting, as usual. Machado is a vocal and consistent supporter of Israel’s genocidal regime, even calling for her country’s embassy to be moved to Jerusalem. The Chávez and Maduro governments severed diplomatic relations and official ties with Israel due to the country’s apartheid regime and brutal occupation of Palestinian territory. This decision has been enormously popular among Venezuelans, as the global community increasingly understands the criminality of the U.S. and Israel. Machado recently spoke to Benjamin Netanyahu, currently a fugitive from justice, to express her support. Meanwhile, Israeli officials have praised Washington’s coup in Venezuela, seeing the opportunity to place an ally, perhaps Machado, into power.

The American media and our major universities and think tanks routinely present celebrity opposition figures like Machado using washed-out, meaningless happy words indicating to us that they are “pro-democracy” or supportive of liberal freedoms in some vague sense. But their actual policy agendas and real-world alliances and loyalties are systematically and purposely obscured. This is to say that in our media system, there is often a wide gulf between the TV characters as shown and written and the real people connected with the world’s worst offenders in war-profiteering, stealing natural resources, and destroying the local environment. So we get a sanitized morality play in which the West are the good guys, promoting liberal democracy, and the rest of the world is backwards and authoritarian. Yet it is the United States that has started the vast majority of illegal wars in recent memory, and its domestic policies have long violated the most basic principles of human rights law. This warped morality play, scripted and televised, is how it’s possible to have a person like Machado treated as some great champion of freedom, even as she heaps praise on the Israeli government as it tears the Gaza Strip to shreds, as its leader is indicted by the International Criminal Court, as the entire world raises its voice against this genocide, with the exception perhaps of  a tiny and shrinking group of thugs in Washington, London, Tel Aviv and several embarrassed European capitals.

Again, the illusions are gone now. “The West” is implicated in the worst crimes of our generation, with or without Donald Trump. U.S. wars have murdered and displaced millions of people and transferred trillions of dollars of wealth to warmongers and powerful industries connected with the U.S. government. Our culture and discourse never deal with the dissonance, because what matters is one’s capacity to conform their statements and actions with the will of Washington, with the strategic priorities and interests of the United States. Beyond any country’s domestic politics, both the U.S. and the European Union blessed this in advance by maintaining the official position that Maduro’s government is illegitimate. During an appearance on BBC News back in December, Machado’s friend, the Venezuelan politician Leopoldo López, called openly for Washington’s military to coup his own country. He foreshadowed Trump’s coup by stating that there were options to remove Maduro “without collateral damage.”

Time will tell. As many of you remember, the U.S. government deployed many of Trump’s economic arguments in the lead up to the Iraq war: the country will become prosperous and free, and the resources will pay for the U.S. investment and more. It is long past the time for Americans of all political stripes and teams to put aside identitarian stories and look hard at what the Washington duopoly has been doing since long before any of us were born. Amongst the left in Latin America, there is much less confusion about the meaning of the moment. The reason people like Maduro are politically viable in the first place is because Venezuelans are rightly sick of US bullying and meddling in South America and in Latin America more generally. Venezuelans do not see their country’s oil as belonging to American companies like Chevron. The emancipatory movements of the world will correctly see this moment of open aggression and colonial logic as an opportunity to mobilize and organize. That is the silver lining: the illusion of U.S. government legitimacy is finally gone.

The truth is that the U.S. and its allies have long been the world’s greatest violators of international law, whether contained in treaties like the UN Charter or accepted customary principles. We have staged coups in between 20 and 30 countries since the end of WWII, engaged in a consistent pattern of strategies to serve particular industries and economic interests, and to install authoritarian governments who will not question our prerogatives. The relative merits of this strategy to one side, many of us in the anti-war, anti-empire, and anti-nuclear movements have been waiting for a time when we would be able to have an honest conversation about the strategy with our liberal friends and allies. It may be that the time is now, as Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine” opens a new era of unhinged American empire.

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