If you think Trump’s threat to invade Venezuela is about stopping the influx of drugs into the United States, you need to take a closer look at Project 2025. That document advocates American hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. But Trump does not read documents or strategy papers. He wants to bully the hemisphere and control its vast natural resources. His “Gulf of America” apparently includes the vast oil reserves of Venezuela. The socialist nation has the world’s largest proven reserves. Still, with its politics chaotic and its military weak, and its close relationships with China, Russia, and Iran, it is an obvious launching point for Trump’s Napoleonic march through the Americas. Besides, handing over Venezuela’s oil fields to American Big Oil is the least he can do for the oil and gas executives who ponied up about $450 million – at least according to public records – to get their shill back into the White House.
His crowning gift to Big Oil may be the lucrative long-term investment opportunities they’ll have after his naval armada, which includes the world’s largest aircraft carrier, seizes Venezuela’s abundant fields. But there’s more. Trump got Congress to slash the industry’s taxes by another $18 billion, even though it already enjoyed billions in tax breaks. Additionally, he’s rolled back dozens and dozens of environmental regulations, opened public lands and waters for drilling, dismissed climate change as a hoax, and put fossil fuel executives in charge of public agencies.
It’s not that Big Oil needs big new reserves. The world is awash in oil, and the US is the world’s leading producer. In fact, when both Biden and Trump put Alaskan oil fields up for bid, there were no serious takers. Yet Trump’s functionally irrational “Drill Baby Drill” energy policies call for even more production. Although oil corporations historically control prices through policies of planned scarcity, U.S. producers opened their spigots to consolidate a monopoly by glutting the market. This strategy not only drives out small independent producers. It even puts OPEC over a barrel. Yes, in the short term, this strategy has marginally cut into Big Oil’s profits, but the current small decline is an investment in long-term market control.
Trump justifies military action and regime change in Venezuela by claiming that President Maduro heads the Cartel de Los Soles, which, he says, is a terrorist drug cartel. The U.S. Justice Department has even offered a $50-million reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest. Once the U.S. declares it a terrorist organization, Trump will have an excuse to invade Venezuela. No: he can’t legally use military force without congressional authorization. The facts, however, fail to back Trump’s accusations. As Charlie Savage explains in a recent New York Times piece, this so-called cartel does not exist. The phrase is a decades-old figure of speech mocking the Venezuelan military, who take drug money. More importantly, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Venezuela is not a cocaine producing country, and most Colombian cocaine comes through the Pacific coast. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration corroborates this by noting that 84% of seized cocaine in the United States comes from Colombia. This is not to suggest that drug trafficking doesn’t exist in Venezuela. It does, but the government does not appear to participate in it as Trump claims. In fact, one observer in a CNN interview maintained that Maduro has seized hundreds of aircraft and almost a hundred vessels in his attempt to stop the drug trade. As for the deadly fentanyl epidemic that he’s always talking about, the major suppliers are Mexico and China. Why isn’t Trump sending his armada to those places?
The charge that drug trafficking is a military-like threat to the United States is how Trump justifies regime change through military force. Ignoring Congress and defying the Constitution, Trump’s Department of War has already killed as many as 83 people in the Caribbean without showing a stick of evidence of criminal activity. Just as important, narco-trafficking is a legal matter, not a military one. His Caribbean murders and saber-rattling against Venezuela are shot through with illegality. A Congress with any teeth would impeach Trump for a third time. But then, presidents since Harry Truman have made a habit of using military power as if it were their exclusive property. And Congress pretends not to see. Just since the 1950s, U.S. presidents from Truman and Eisenhower through Obama and Trump have all used covert as well as overt military power with utter indifference to the Constitution, Congress, or public opinion. American presidents don’t take well to small nations that get in their way. Think Lumumba, the Bay of Pigs, Allende, and Saddam Hussein. Add oil to the mix, and you get the Eisenhower-directed CIA coup of a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953. That brilliant stroke of coercive diplomacy eventually led to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the ouster of the US’s puppet Shah, a hostage crisis, an oil embargo, and Iran’s ongoing efforts to get the big bomb. Recall, too, the Suez Canal crisis of 1956 that almost triggered a war with the Soviet Union; and of course, the Gulf oil wars of 1991 and 2003 to 2011. As Robert Engler observed many years ago in his seminal work, The Politics of Oil, the oil industry is a powerful private government that transcends national boundaries in its quest to control the world’s petroleum resources. To illustrate, he recounts the story of Standard Oil’s partnership with the German I.G. Farben company at the beginning of World War II, a partnership based on the premise that countries come and go, but Standard Oil is forever. For the time being, Trump’s dream of being crowned King of the World and Big Oil’s pursuit of world domination happily align.