It’s been quite a busy few days for U.S. foreign policy. First was President Donald Trump’s brazenly illegal abduction of Venezuela’s head of state. Then Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened to make good on his longtime dream of retaking Cuba, warning that the Cuban government is “in a lot of trouble.” And on Tuesday, Trump’s senior adviser on fascism (or whatever his title is), Stephen Miller, declared that Greenland belongs to the United States and that Trump could take the territory if he wanted. This “Donroe Doctrine,” as they’ve termed it, is based on a single principle: that, as Miller ranted Tuesday, the United States will henceforth “conduct ourselves as a superpower” by using our military “to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere.”
Here’s the rub: When the Trump administration says “our interests,” they’re not talking about your or my interests, and they’re not talking about the nation’s interests. They’re talking about the interests of corporate elites. The Donroe Doctrine is a racket—nothing more and nothing less—designed to make the U.S. taxpayer underwrite resource imperialism for Trump’s billionaire buddies.
They don’t appear to be trying very hard to hide this reality. Trump has been pretty explicit that the Venezuelan takeover is not about freedom for Venezuelans. Asked whether he would demand the acting Venezuelan president offer amnesty to opposition figures or release political prisoners, Trump responded, “We haven’t gotten to that. Right now, what we want to do is fix up the oil.” The Venezuelan takeover is not about democracy. Asked about plans for “free and fair elections,” he responded, “Well, it depends.… We’re going to have to have big investments by the oil companies.” According to Trump, kidnapping Maduro wasn’t even about regime change. The new acting president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, was vice president under Maduro, so the regime running Venezuela today is identical minus one person. When Trump was asked, “What do you need from Delcy Rodríguez?” his singular response was: “Total access. We need access to the oil.”
So this gunboat diplomacy is about oil. But it’s not oil for American consumers. The U.S. is already the largest oil producer in the history of the world, and no country on earth exports more oil and refined oil products every day than we do. America’s domestic gasoline sales have essentially been flat for 20 years, so it’s a very safe bet that the U.S. refineries in Texas and Louisiana designed to process Venezuela’s expensive and dirty crude won’t be increasing domestic supplies. Rather, they will most likely convert that high-sulfur oil into finished oil products for export out of the U.S., which does nothing to lower prices at the pump for American consumers.
So who does stand to gain? The same people as usual: Trump’s billionaire buddies. In the case of Venezuela, these are the fossil fuel villains who are already poisoning our air and water and driving the increasingly catastrophic climate disasters that are destroying our homes, raising our property insurance rates, and threatening our future. That includes corporations like ExxonMobil, which has used the controversial investor-state dispute settlement system to claim $15 billion from the Venezuelan government, and ConocoPhillips, which has sought $30 billion via the investor-state dispute settlement system—claims Trump will likely use as a starting point for forced repayments to Big Oil. Both companies’ stocks, as well as Chevron’s, jumped following the Venezuela news on Monday.
It also includes billionaires like Trump megadonor Paul Singer, whose hedge fund Elliott Management last November acquired Citgo, the U.S.-based subsidiary of PVDSA, Venezuela’s state-run oil company. Citgo’s oil refineries stand to make huge profits from Venezuela’s heavy crude oil reserves, according to the executive director of refining and oil products at the Oil Price Information Service, or OPIS, who called this access “a game changer for U.S. Gulf Coast and West Coast refiners in terms of profitability.” Indeed, Trump has already launched that gravy train: On Tuesday, he announced that Venezuela would be “turning over” 30 to 50 million barrels of oil—he appeared to be referring to stock built up during the U.S. blockade—to be sold at “market price” in the U.S. And on Wednesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced that the U.S. would control Venezuela’s oil “indefinitely.” So refineries like those owned by Singer are about to be handed a massive windfall, while Trump—who took to social media to write that “that money will be controlled by me, the President of the United States of America”—gets a new slush fund.
In short, the Venezuela takeover is, like most major endeavors across Trump’s business and political career, a scam. The precise sequence of events leading him to target Venezuela and Maduro is anyone’s guess—and doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. The outcome is the important thing: Trump plans to use your and my tax dollars to guarantee the profits of the fossil fuel billionaires who bankrolled his campaign. Indeed, Trump just Tuesday confirmed that these companies should expect that “they’ll get reimbursed by us”—while, of course, keeping every penny of the returns.
We should expect the same approach to any future illegal land grabs by this administration. Should the Trump team proceed with its unhinged plan to annex Greenland next, the minerals and oil and gas reserves buried there will not be safeguarded for our collective national welfare; they’ll go to Trump’s billionaire friends, to be exploited in the most profitable ways available to them.
That is the real Donroe Doctrine. It’s not about pursuing U.S. interests—it’s about using the power and resources of the U.S. government to pursue the private interests of Trump’s oligarchic cronies. Of course, the former is bad enough. Using one’s military to, as Miller said, “secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere” is literally a description of the foreign policy of Mussolini and Hitler. But the Donroe Doctrine lacks even the fig leaf of supposedly doing all this for our shared national security and wealth.
The only good news is that there’s real political vulnerability to this scam. Nobody likes getting ripped off, and voters don’t want their tax dollars to finance the exploitation of other countries for the benefit of wealthy elites.
But Democrats need to actually say this. They need to explain why this rewarmed fascist nonsense is a terrible deal for the American taxpayers who’ll be subsidizing those billionaire profits.
Not everyone has gotten the memo on this point. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the two most senior Democrats in the country, responded to Trump’s attack on Venezuela first by excoriating Maduro—which only serves to frame his ouster as a positive achievement—and then by complaining about how Trump did not consult Congress prior to taking military action. This is political malpractice. Maduro being a bad actor is irrelevant to this debate for multiple reasons, including that his entire regime is still in place. And nobody cares all that much about dry proceduralism.
It’s looking increasingly unlikely, this week, that Venezuela will be the final target of Trump’s imperial racketeering. So Democrats need to adopt a better message, fast. The Donroe Doctrine is a racket designed to cloak the greed of a small number of billionaires in the mantle of patriotic nationalism so that their profits can be insured by the public. Trump is putting up our treasure—and in the future, perhaps, our blood—to make the richest people in the world even richer, all while he continues to jack up our health insurance rates and cut programs that support working people. It’s evil, it’s toxic, and it’s Democrats’ job to make sure the American people understand that.
