What are we doing in Venezuela? Given President Trump’s declaration that the United States will now “run” the country for the foreseeable future, the answer should be clear. It isn’t—not even remotely.
In the months leading up to Saturday’s shocking invasion of Caracas to abduct President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, as the U.S. bombed small boats from Venezuela and amassed an armada off its coast, the Trump administration offered one official rationale for its increasing military aggression: to combat drug trafficking, in particular fentanyl, which is responsible for tens of thousands of overdose deaths in America. Venezuela doesn’t produce that drug—it’s mostly manufactured in Mexico, with chemicals from China—and it barely produces any cocaine. But it’s true that Venezuela is a transit hub for cocaine, which is often laced with fentanyl before or after it reaches the United States. This fact, by the administration’s tortured logic, is why Maduro was snatched from his presidential compound and arraigned Monday in New York charges specifically related to cocaine distribution.
But there’s a difference between the administration’s stated rationale and its actual goals, which vary depending on the official. The military buildup was overseen by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who, as the son of Cuban exiles, is obsessed with removing Cuba’s Communist government and sees Venezuela, one of its few allies and its main source of oil, as a key domino in its downfall. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and the architect of Trump’s fascist immigration policy, reportedly sees Maduro’s downfall as a key part of his deportation strategy: A pliant Venezuelan government would make it easier to send more Venezuelans currently living in the U.S., regardless of their immigration status, back to their “home” country.
And finally, Trump, after announcing the invasion on Saturday morning, provided a new justification. “The oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time,” he said. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.” Trump may be the only person who thinks the biggest failure of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was our failure to “take the oil,” but he really does believe it. For him, Venezuela is an opportunity to rectify that mistake—and to do what the U.S. has historically done in Latin America, which is to give U.S. corporations free rein to pillage resources and wealth.
Taken as a whole, a clear picture emerges of an administration driven by alliances of convenience between ideologues who all see U.S. military power as a means to advance their own pet policies. This is Republican foreign policy in a time of MAGA: strategically unwise, yes, but also utterly incoherent because it’s caught between the neoconservatism that ruled the GOP for decades and the Trumpist “America First” foreign policy that is largely created on the fly by the president. And we are just starting to see what kind of damage it can cause.
“We built Venezuela’s oil industry with American talent, drive, and skill, and the socialist regime stole it from us during those previous administrations. And they stole it through force. This constituted one of the largest thefts of American property in the history of our country,” Trump said on Saturday. Given how much of his initial press conference after the invasion focused on Venezuelan oil, it’s understandable that many understood it as a Kinsley gaffe. The U.S. has long been fond of dressing up its imperialistic wars in the just language of democracy and liberation, but here was the president admitting that we were there to steal the oil. Just because Trump bluntly stated it, though, doesn’t mean that it wholly explains the invasion.
The military buildup off the coast of Venezuela did not begin because the administration was out to get the nation’s sizable oil reserves (which will be incredibly difficult to expropriate). It began for ideological reasons. Rubio, an ardent anti-Communist, saw an opportunity to strike a weak regime and quickly found an ally in Miller. But getting the president on board, according to reports, was more difficult. Trump has long painted himself as a kind of isolationist, though his actual approach to foreign policy is one that favors bombastic and often risky military intervention, and even regime change, as long as it doesn’t involve the deployment of American troops for extended periods or the launch of an official “war.”
Over the course of several months, pro-intervention forces in the administration got Trump on board first by convincing him that Venezuela was a massive exporter of illegal drugs, and then by convincing him that its oil actually belonged to the U.S. because the country—notably under Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez—had nationalized infrastructure that had been built by American companies. Toppling Venezuela has been a priority of the neoconservative right for decades for ideological reasons—the nation has been led by socialists since Chávez was elected in 1999—and related national security ones: Neocons did not like having a socialist nation, particularly one aligned with Russia and (later) China in the Western hemisphere.
As these officials made their case, military action began to take on its own logic. The administration began bombing small Venezuelan boats, which it claimed—without providing evidence—were transporting drugs to the U.S. These strikes may have been aimed at provoking a response from Maduro, or to acclimate Trump to the idea of using military force. Maduro didn’t take the bait, but Trump did. He appears to have been sold on a kind of hybrid Trumpian-neoconservative project to take over Venezuela: The U.S. would bomb Caracas and take out Maduro in a daring, middle-of-the-night raid, but we would leave his government and the nation’s military in place, not deploy American troops (beyond the special forces who snatched Maduro), and, according to Rubio, use sanctions and the threat of further violence to pressure its remaining leaders to acquiesce to our demands.
In short: We have bombed a foreign nation, kidnapped its leader, and essentially taken it over—while leaving most of its government in place. We have done so to weaken Cuba, deport more people, and acquire more oil.
Never mind that we don’t need Venezuela’s oil. Domestic production in the U.S. is so high that crude oil futures are near five-year lows, and oil companies appear to have little interest in reinvesting in Venezuela, given the cost of modernizing its crumbling infrastructure. But the U.S. is going to do everything in its power to take that oil, including apparently running the country, because Trump cares about it. For Rubio and Miller, that may very well be a fair trade. They get to advance their own policy priorities and ideological proclivities, some of which align with the president’s and some of which do not, and the cost is Venezuelan oil (and perhaps also that messy business about occupying a foreign country).
This trade-off explains so much of Republican politics in the Trump era. A xenophobic demagogue with no understanding of policy and little interest in governance took over the GOP. So neocons and nativists alike have learned to Trumpify their policies to achieve their desired goals, while also giving Trump a “win” he can crow about. That is how this administration arrived at the shocking decision to invade a sovereign nation and kidnap its president but apparently has no clue about what to do next.
What are we doing in Venezuela? Perhaps it’s naïve even to ask that question, given all we know about Trump at this point, because it suggests he knows the answer. More likely, he couldn’t care less.
