Last week, the United States abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, during a raid in Caracas, killing more than 100 people in the process. Maduro was then brought to the US where he faces charges related to narco-terrorism, cocaine distribution, and machine gun possession. 

Despite the formal charges, the flimsy drug trafficking story has largely fallen by the wayside as President Trump makes his real motivation clear: Venezuela’s oil. And he has declared his intention to take similar actions in other resource-rich countries, finally assuming his ultimate political form as an old-school, resource-plundering imperialist.

The US claim on Venezuela’s oil

Venezuela’s proven oil reserves are the largest in the world, with an estimated 300 billion gallons, or about 18% of the known oil in the world. If there was ever any question that oil was the real reason for Trump’s interest in the country, he quickly dispelled it when he revealed that he had been in talks with oil executives about the attack, even as he left Congress in the dark. He even televised a meeting with oil executives. 

Trump has essentially taken the Big Oil/US military conspiracy out of the dark, and now acknowledges it is driving foreign policy:

• On Truth Social: “Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil, to the United States of America. This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me…”
• “We will rebuild it [the Venezuelan oil industry] in a very profitable way…We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil.”
• “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies… go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure… We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.”
• “We will run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition… We can’t take a chance that someone else takes over Venezuela who doesn’t have the interests of Venezuelans in mind.”

It remains unclear to what extent the US will directly control Venezuela and its oil industry, but the idea that Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, or ExxonMobil “have the interests of Venezuelans in mind” is laughable. Trump has said he’s open to committing US troops to occupying the country indefinitely, and that may well be necessary to achieve the full control he apparently wants. For now, Maduro’s Vice President, Delcy Rodriguez, has assumed leadership, and it seems the Trump Administration’s goal is to strongarm the existing Venezuelan government into playing ball.

The administration has hardly even attempted to give a nobler justification for their oil plunder. They’ve tried claiming the oil is stolen, with Vice President JD Vance tweeting, “[Venezuela’s] stolen oil must be returned to the United States.” This is preposterous, and perhaps deliberately so – it’s more an attempt to demonstrate the administration’s brazen willingness to say and do whatever it wants without regard for truth, logic, justice, morals, or the law. 

Ridiculous as it is, the “stolen oil” line is an attempt to spin recent Venezuelan history and the administration’s two primary goals for Venezuelan oil:

• De-nationalizing the industry for profit. Venezuela nationalized its oil industry in the 1970s, meaning the resources and facilities have been controlled by the state and the profits are intended to be used for the common good. Big Oil continued to operate there under joint ventures with the state until 2007, when Exxon and ConocoPhillips exited Venezuela by order of then-President Hugo Chavez. They left behind equipment and facilities – as well as untapped oil they apparently still feel entitled to.
• Protecting the petrodollar. Since the 1970s, the US has tried to enforce an international agreement that requires all oil sales be done in USD. This agreement ensured for decades that virtually all governments needed “petrodollars” for their oil. Recently, though, the dollar’s supremacy has been challenged, especially by BRICS nations. Venezuela conducted much of its oil business with China in yuan.

When Trump talks of a national security mandate in Venezuela and elsewhere, this is at least partly what he means. And it’s true that rival superpowers circumventing the dollar threatens US unipolar hegemony. But that has little to do with the safety or quality of life of ordinary Americans facing deep inequality and widespread systemic dysfunction. Such are not Trump’s national security concerns. He means to secure unlimited, never-ending wealth and power for his billionaire friends.

MAGA’s “might makes right” foreign policy

Controversial as his actions in Venezuela have been, Trump has signaled no intention of slowing down or stopping there. Immediately after seizing Maduro he put other countries on notice, including Cuba, Colombia, and Greenland. Not coincidentally, these are all proven or potentially oil-rich nations.

Trump is turning the US from its longstanding global foreign policy to a “sphere of influence” approach. His idea is, seemingly, to focus on dominating the Western Hemisphere and ramp down US involvement in the Middle East (though not, apparently, without first making Iran great again). Meanwhile, Russia and China may be given more leeway to extend their spheres of influence throughout Eastern Europe and Asia, in Ukraine and Taiwan, for instance.

There’s a certain logic to it. His actions are murderous, criminal, and imperialist, but not purely insane. It may even generate popular support as the American people succumb to the misguided impression that they – and not just the international corporate concerns Trump serves – will benefit from it.

Take Greenland. It’s a sizable piece of land, about three times the size of Texas, and likely holds vast amounts of oil. But it isn’t a narco state, there is no terrorism, and they aren’t yearning to be liberated. There is no pretense of nobility at all in Trump’s declarations about Greenland, no higher cause to fight for. He talks about it like a 16th century conquistador might, simply saying, “We have to have it.”

Greenland is technically part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Their relationship is tenuous, and the idea of the US purchasing the territory is not as kooky or novel as it sounds coming from the Trump Administration. But Denmark is a longstanding US ally and a fellow member of NATO. Trump’s designs on the territory, especially his veiled threats to take it by force, represent a radical upending of the post-World War II international order in which treaty members honor principles like collective defense and peaceful conflict resolution.

In an interview on CNN, Trump’s Homeland Security Advisor and longtime top lieutenant, Stephen Miller, explained the administration’s belligerent foreign policy in his characteristically stark, fascistic manner: “We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world… The United States is the power of NATO… obviously Greenland should be part of the United States… Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.”

Miller’s ideas about force and power are not groundbreaking. Thucydides outlined them some 2500 years ago: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Usually, though, this is regarded as a lamentable feature of the world. MAGA and Miller are treating it like they just stumbled on some long-forgotten secret: “If somebody isn’t strong enough to stop me, I can do whatever I want to them.”

For centuries, human civilization has steadily lurched toward overcoming that brutalist reality by embracing the rule of law. Occasional atrocities aside, we’ve tried to lift ourselves above “might makes right” and develop more enlightened philosophies to govern actions between people, enterprises, and nations. Miller and MAGA want to scrap all that, advocating pure jungle law. Whatever chimp finds the biggest rock gets to bash the others’ skulls in.

When asked by The New York Times whether there were any limits to his power, Trump said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me… I don’t need international law.” And indeed, Trump has only grown bolder and brasher in his threats toward other countries, including Cuba, Colombia, and Panama. He even warned he’ll begin attacking mainland Mexico, saying, “We are going to start now hitting land with regard to the cartels.” The legality, morality, or even efficacy of such an attack doesn’t matter. If Trump wants to do it, and thinks he can gain something by it, he will do it. 

Donald the Great’s spot in the history books

Trump clearly believes in the great man theory of history, and believes that he’s one of them. He knows that great men can’t let themselves be held back by norms, laws, term limits, or Constitutions. Great men bulldoze their way into history books, for better and, more often, for worse, but they attain a kind of immortality either way.

As he ages, Trump’s legacy seems to be of increasing concern to him. In just the last few months he coined the term “Donroe Doctrine” to describe his foreign policy, demolished portions of the White House, planned to build monuments to himself like the ballroom and an arch, and added his name to the Kennedy Center. But the most ambitious goal of his great man scheme appears to be the full conquest of the Western Hemisphere in the name of Big Oil and American enterprise.

Maybe it’ll work. So far, public support for it remains tepid. But maybe he’ll take Greenland cleanly with a simple purchase and they’ll become like another Alaska. Maybe his coup in Venezuela sent enough of a warning that other countries will fall in line without more bloodshed. And maybe, as he extends US territory and opens up new markets for big business, history will start to look on him with more favor.

All that seems like a longshot. But even if he’s successful in those goals, there’s still no reason to expect ordinary people, either in America or its potential future colonies, to gain from it. Far more likely is that Trump will install a puppet, use the military and taxpayer dollars to build out oil infrastructure, and start pumping profits straight into the pockets of the same billionaire barons who always benefit, his friends and patrons. Corporate profits are already at record highs, but it hasn’t made the average life any better.

And even if we did use Trump’s plunder to invest in education, healthcare, and infrastructure, we’re dooming ourselves to a limited future if we fund it with oil. Our oil addiction is perhaps the deadliest sickness in human history. America just had its hottest Christmas ever, and as severe weather and widespread drought plagues more of the country, the realities of climate change are becoming increasingly impossible to ignore, even as the media and the Republican Party refuse to confront the cause.

In other words, Trump’s great man gambit to conquer the Western Hemisphere for Big Oil will be a disaster whether it’s a failure or a success.

It’s impossible to know how far this will all go. Trump is beleaguered by low approval ratings, scandal, and apparently poor health, but enormous damage has already been done. His contempt for both domestic and international law, as well as foreign agreements, has destroyed our credibility as a nation. His servitude to oil oligarchy worsens our addiction to a poisonous chemical that’s killing the planet. These and plenty of other threats grow more perilous every minute he’s allowed to act on his darkest impulses with impunity.

He likely won’t make America great, but Trump may go down in history as the man who made colonialism great again. He can be remembered as the man who did away with these pretenses of law, human rights, and treaties, and set the world back on its one right and true maxim: If you have more power, you take what you want. Oil, zinc, iron, whatever it is – just because it’s under somebody else’s land doesn’t mean it isn’t yours. It’s yours if you have the guts to grab it.

In raw terms, it’s a difficult worldview to dispute. It’s not the world I want to live in, nor is it the one I think most people want to build. But it is realistic and coherent in its naked barbarism. And without mass popular resistance and dramatic corrective action, it could quickly become our new paradigm.