Why Venezuela?
It's a trifecta of reasons
It is, of course, difficult to reconcile Donald Trump’s strikes on alleged drug runners in the Caribbean with Trump’s pardon of a convicted Honduran drug-trafficking ex-president,[1] if one indeed believes this is really about “narcoterrorism.” Plenty of folks think this is really about regime change in Venezuela[2] but John Bolton thinks it’s all about Trump wanting to look tough.[3]
It's hard to know. Venezuela has huge oil reserves and Delaware federal judge Leonard Stark, persuaded that Citgo was de facto an organ of the Venezuelan government, ordered the company—which is uniquely capable of processing heavy Venezuelan oil—sold off to satisfy Venezuelan debt, depriving Venezuela of a lot of refining capacity.[4] So this might be about oil. It also might be an additional pressure point against the Nicolás Maduro regime.
Bolton recounts trying to persuade Trump to compel regime change in Venezuela but that Trump really wasn’t interested.[5] So one question about the regime change motivation would have to be, why is Trump interested now? Trump does seem to like burning fossil fuels, which, in my mind, recalls the assholes “rolling coal” (emitting thick black smoke) in their supersized pickup trucks around Pittsburgh.
One question that keeps popping up in my mind about this fixation on Venezuela is, why Venezuela and not Cuba, with the latter a lot closer to U.S. shores? It seems that Cuba does have oil but not a lot of it.[6] It’s just another country whose regime U.S. politicians don’t like. And regime change in Venezuela would further isolate the Cuban regime.
I don’t think Bolton is wrong in assessing that Trump wants to look tough. That’s a throughline from the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, to choosing Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary (“Secretary of War”), to warmongering against Greenland, to bombing Iran, to indifference to Gaza genocide, to affiliating with Vladimir Putin, to a double tap strike on an alleged drug smuggling boat in the Venezuela.
And as to that double tap strike in which a second strike was ordered to leave no survivors from an alleged drug smuggling boat, dead men tell no tales. Meaning that they can’t contradict the Donald Trump administration’s strident assertions that these strikes in the Caribbean are on drug smugglers.[7] It is now beyond obvious that Trump views himself as sovereign in a sense proposed by David Graeber and David Wengrow, as beyond challenge on legal or moral grounds,[8] in part because his felony convictions and other prosecutions seem to him to have strengthened him. And he has separately suggested that because he rules the United States, he rules the world.[9] Thus, reinforcing the tough guy persona but also refusing any opportunity for these drug running allegations to be heard in court.
But just as any U.S. involvement in the Middle East may at least in part be about oil, and just as the threats against Greenland were in part about rare earths,[10] it is impossible to ignore the oil angle. And replacing a left-wing authoritarian with a right-wing authoritarian in Venezuela[11] would chalk up another regime on the scoreboard of right-wing versus left-wing governments in Latin America while pressuring Cuba.
We’re looking at a trifecta of tough guy Trump, oil, and geopolitics. Even if Trump is too much an imbecile to comprehend all this, it lines up a lot of right-wing advocacy.
[1] Burgess Everett and Shelby Talcott, “Trump’s push against Venezuela faces Republican blowback at pivotal moment,” Semafor, December 1, 2025, https://www.semafor.com/article/12/01/2025/trumps-push-against-venezuela-faces-republican-blowback-at-pivotal-moment
[2] Tara Copp, Ana Vanessa Herrero, and Rachel Pannett, “Venezuela orders massive mobilization as U.S. aircraft carrier approaches,” Washington Post, November 11, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/11/11/venezuela-aircraft-carrier-gerald-ford/
[3] Julia Ioffe, “Trump’s Venezuela Doctrine,” Puck, November 19, 2025, https://puck.news/will-trump-attack-venezuela-or-will-he-back-down/
[4] Maureen Tkacik, “The $30 Billion Identity Theft of Venezuela,” American Prospect, November 26, 2025, https://prospect.org/2025/11/26/30-billion-dollar-identity-theft-of-venezuela/
[5] Julia Ioffe, “Trump’s Venezuela Doctrine,” Puck, November 19, 2025, https://puck.news/will-trump-attack-venezuela-or-will-he-back-down/
[6] Worldometer, “Cuba Oil,” n.d., https://www.worldometers.info/oil/cuba-oil/
[7] Victoria Bisset et al., “Congressional committees to scrutinize U.S. killing of boat strike survivors,” Washington Post, November 29, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/11/29/hegseth-caribbean-strikes-kill-order-reaction/
[8] David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).
[9] Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, “‘I run the country and the world,’” Atlantic, April 28, 2025, https://apple.news/APGNdke68TJCCF-QwhhT88A
[10] William Booth and Laris Karklis, “Trump covets rare earth riches, but Greenland plans to mine its own business,” Washington Post, July 27, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2025/greenland-minerals-mining-trump-difficulties/
[11] Maureen Tkacik, “The $30 Billion Identity Theft of Venezuela,” American Prospect, November 26, 2025, https://prospect.org/2025/11/26/30-billion-dollar-identity-theft-of-venezuela/