DONALD VLADIMIROVICH TRUMP’S “LIMITED MILITARY OPERATION” IN VENEZUELA
NOW FREE: You liberate a country to enslave it economically
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While our media are full of details about how the capture of Maduro and his wife was organized, one should focus on how strange this act is: Venezuela is now de facto occupied while the same government as before runs things. Trump said on January 3, 2026, that the US is “going to run” Venezuela indefinitely: “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” and, even more directly, that he considers himself “in charge of Venezuela.”1 No wonder Trump ignores the demands of the pro‑US Venezuelan opposition to play a key role in the new situation – the US wants to “run” the country outside any international legal claim (is it an occupation or…?), and it is deeply significant that it seems to prefer collaborating with Maduro’s vice president Delcy Rodriguez (if she will be able to enforce the US demands) rather than with the big figures of the opposition.
Why such strange behavior? The answer is simple: the US doesn’t care about democracy or the interests of the people’s will. Trump talks about indefinitely running the country – which means running it long enough to totally colonize it, controlling and profiting from its natural resources. The US is going to be “very strongly involved” in Venezuela’s oil industry: “We have the greatest oil companies in the world, the biggest, the greatest, and we’re going to be very much involved in it.” Trump already promises that “we” (the US) will be selling vast quantities of oil cheaply to its allies – in yet another crazy coincidence of opposites, giving power back to the people in Venezuela amounts to a new colonial expropriation of its vast natural resources.
In 1976, the pre‑Chavez government of Venezuela assumed control of the country’s petroleum industry, nationalizing hundreds of private businesses and foreign‑owned assets, including projects operated by the American giant ExxonMobil. In 2007, Hugo Chávez, the founder of Venezuela’s socialist state, assumed control of the last privately run oil operations in the Orinoco Belt, home to the country’s largest oil deposits. The White House said Saturday that the operation to capture Maduro and his wife and fly them out of the country was justified in part by Venezuela having stolen US oil. Trump said the US will indefinitely “run the country” after Maduro’s ouster and seize Venezuela’s massive oil reserves, recruiting American companies to invest billions of dollars in the gutted industry. Trump said US troops will have a presence in Venezuela “as it pertains to oil.” What does this mean? How can a country steal its own oil?
Trump wants Venezuela to return to the US the nationalized property of US oil companies, but Venezuela did the bulk of nationalizations back in 1976, well before the Chavez era, i.e., at a time when it was still considered a “normal” Western democratic country. What Venezuela did was at that time considered part of a process of nations taking over their own natural resources. Trump’s attack is thus directed not just against the “extreme Left” but against a global process of economic decolonization. Furthermore, Trump also treats the oil the US companies were not able to pump as stolen US property – he explicitly talks about seizing “Venezuela’s massive oil reserves.” To imagine a similar obscenity, one has to reach two centuries back, when Haiti achieved independence through a successful slave rebellion – but the price it paid for this was horrible.
After two decades of embargo, France, the previous colonial master, only established trade and diplomatic relations in 1825, and Haiti had to agree to pay for this the sum of 150 million francs as “compensation” for the loss of its slaves. This sum, roughly equal to the French annual budget at the time, was later cut to 90 million, but it continued to be a heavy burden that prevented any economic growth: at the end of the 19th century, Haiti’s payments to France consumed around 80% of the national budget, and the last installment was paid in 1947. When, in 2004, celebrating the bicentenary of independence, the Lavalas president Jean‑Bertrand Aristide demanded that France return this extorted sum, his claim was flatly rejected by a French commission (whose member was also the leftist Régis Debray!) – so while US liberals ponder the possibility of reimbursing US Blacks for slavery, Haiti’s demand to be reimbursed for the tremendous amount the ex‑slaves had to pay to have their freedom recognized was ignored by liberal opinion, even though the extortion here was double: the slaves were first exploited, and then had to pay for the recognition of their hard‑won freedom.
Does all this not sound familiar? Remember the scandalous Oval Office confrontation with Zelensky, where Trump and Vance demanded that Zelensky express his gratitude for US help to Ukraine and pay for it by opening natural resources to US companies. So, again, as in the case of Ukraine, you liberate a country to enslave it economically – Russia the eastern part, the US the western part. This is why we should follow closely European reactions to the kidnapping of Maduro: as expected, they all follow the same formula – Maduro was a criminal who deserved to be deposed, but one should follow international law (similar to the typical West European reaction to the Israeli genocide, as a rule reduced just to expressions of worry about Israeli excesses) – as if the US had not already brutally violated international law. With the exception of Spain (Sánchez), no major European country did what Mamdani did: he unequivocally condemned the US act. To avoid a misunderstanding, there is nothing wrong in principle with arresting a criminal foreign leader, but this arrest should be grounded in a clear international legal form. In an ideal world, we should begin by arresting Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump himself. Together with Maduro, they should all share the same cell in the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.
So what about the second of Trump’s reasons, the drugs, i.e., Maduro as the boss of a narco‑cartel? The supreme irony is how the relationship between drugs and colonialism shifted in the last two centuries. When we think of opium today, our first associations are the evil Colombian or Mexican cartels, but there will be cartels as long as there is big demand for drugs in the US and other developed countries, so before saving the world from drug traffickers we should put our own house in order. Remember the horror of the two Opium Wars fought (not only) by the British Empire against China. Statistics show that, until 1820, China was the strongest economy in the world. From the late 18th century, the British were exporting enormous amounts of opium into China, turning millions of people there into addicts and causing great damage. The Chinese emperor tried to prevent this, prohibiting the import of opium, and the British (together with some other Western forces) intervened militarily. The result was catastrophic: soon after, China’s economy shrank by half. But what should interest us is the legitimization of this brutal military intervention: free trade is the basis of civilization, and Chinese prohibition of opium imports is thus a barbarian threat to civilization. One cannot abstain from imagining a similar act today: Mexico and Colombia acting to defend their drug cartels and declaring war on the US for behaving in a non‑civilized way by preventing free opium trade.
The Russian reaction deserves a special mention. Apropos the US capturing Maduro and his wife, Russia said that such actions, if true, constitute an “unacceptable violation of the sovereignty of an independent state, respect for which is a key principle of international law”: “In the current situation, it is important, first and foremost, to prevent further escalation and to focus on finding a way out of the situation through dialogue. Venezuela must be guaranteed the right to determine its own destiny without any destructive, let alone military, interference from outside.” Yes, but does exactly the same not hold for Ukraine, which also “must be guaranteed the right to determine its own destiny without any destructive, let alone military, interference from outside”? The most concise determination of what went on was given in a column in The Guardian: “It accelerates the slide from a mostly rules‑based world to one of competing spheres of influence, to be determined by armed might and the readiness to use it. David Rothkopf called it the ‘Putinization of US foreign policy.’ Russian commentators have frequently suggested that Latin America lies in America’s domain just as Ukraine was under the Russian shadow. Vladimir Putin thinks the same of much of Eastern Europe. Xi Jinping will draw his own conclusions.”2
The conclusion about Taiwan, of course. Another irony is that Trump exploded in fury after he heard that Ukraine tried to destroy one of Putin’s residences (a piece of news denied by the CIA itself) – now he has done the same thing to Venezuela in a much stronger way. Did he show his strength in this way? Was his act not rather a display of (or a reaction to) his weakness, which was clearly revealed in his reluctance to put strong pressure on Russia?
There is no love lost here for Maduro’s regime: probably at least some accusations about participation in narco‑trafficking are true, and (much more important) he personifies the utter economic and social failure of the “Bolivarian revolution,” which gave a bad name to contemporary socialist politics. It did not just oppress the liberal opposition; again, much more important, it squashed all its authentic leftist critique. There is no “but” here, no addendum in the style of “Maduro’s Venezuela was nonetheless an attempt at socialist revolution.” The first task of the Left today is not to castigate Trump for his crime (which was totally expected) but to analyze the reasons why the “Bolivarian revolution” went so terribly wrong.
In spite of that, however, one should unconditionally condemn the kidnapping of Maduro and his wife plus the economic and social background of this act. It brings back the darkest criminal past of Western colonialism and, to add insult to injury, it does this under the guise of supporting democracy. So, to paraphrase Stalin for the nth time, one should avoid any relativization or comparison here: the answer to the question “Which is worse, Trump or Maduro?” is: both are worse.
Recall Golda Meir’s words addressed to the Arab neighbors of Israel: “We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.” Owen Jones pointed out that these words of Golda Meir are “daubed on the ruins of Lifta, a Palestinian village whose residents were murderously driven out by Zionist paramilitaries in the Nakba in 1948.”3 This “deep” sentence contains supreme hypocrisy: it puts the blame for our crimes on our victims. Today’s political criminals move even a step lower: Netanyahu would never have said something similar about Gaza and West Bank Palestinians, and Trump will never say something similar about Venezuela – they both commit their crimes with direct pleasure, openly boasting about them. However, in the case of Trump and Maduro, one is nonetheless tempted to paraphrase Golda Meir: there may be a way to forgive Trump the act of kidnapping Maduro, but it is much harder to forgive him for compelling one to take a stance that may appear as support for or sympathy with Maduro. The conflict between Trump’s US and Maduro’s Venezuela is simply a false struggle, a struggle that obfuscates any authentic leftist prospect.
This and the following non-.assigned quotes are from https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4grxzxjjd8o.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/03/putin-russia-us-foreign-policy-venezuela.
The analysis that focuses on contemporary political scandals and the subjectivity of individual actors becomes fixated on the crude and obscene manifestations of power, thereby missing the ontological depth of the problem itself. Claims such as Trump’s assertion that Venezuela could be “run” do not point to a revival of nineteenth-century resource colonialism; rather, they confirm that nation-states have ceased to function as sovereign political subjects and have instead become components—hardware—within a global post-human operational regime.
While much critical attention remains preoccupied with violations of law and representative politics, power has already relocated elsewhere. It now operates through perceptual prioritization and invisible infrastructures, constructing a new coordinate of reality in which the capacity of subjects to form intentions has been delegated to an algorithmic meta-layer. What we are witnessing, therefore, is not a “scandal” but the system’s own logistical recalibration: a process through which politics is reduced to the level of a graphical user interface (GUI) and effectively liquidated in order to secure the smooth functioning of the system itself.
I think Trump (and/or his advisors) is right when he says the majority of Venezuelans in country don't support María Machado, but rather fear or even detest her. So this aforesaid impression of his is either common sense on his part, contra the Western MSM, and/or signals political sophistication insofar as the Anglophone Western MSM actually believes Machado is popular in country. By retaining Delcy Rodriguez it appears that the Trump administration seeks to have its cake and eat it too: i.e. defenestrate or rather literally sequestrate/kidnap Maduro, but preserve a regime that has demonstrated an evident ability to preserve law and order, but whose democratic licitness is hardly better than Trump's assumed takeover: i.e. both groups are thieves, but Delcy Rodriguez's group is incommunicado vs the Western MSM (insofar as it doesn't consider her regime legitimate), while the MSM would prejudicially consider a hypothetical Machado regime licit a priori as of this point, which would allow Machado a degree of divergence from the substance of Trump's dictums which acting president Delcy Rodriguez might not dare show, in contrast, for fear of likewise being kidnapped or worse.
Doubtless Trump has shown many indications that he's susceptible to racist sentiments and Venezuela is a very tempting target of prejudice in that regard, but when one sees the quasi racist disdain that the US strategists of empire showed Ukraine during its preliminary takeover under Obama, it seems that such quasi racist disdain is ultimately not 'personal' vis a vis a largely non-white country (Venezuela), rather it is impersonally mafia-like, in the sense that is contrary to international law and because it is, quasi-synonymously to the aforesaid, imperial. The more imperially you behave, the more legally irregular and unpredictable you behave within and without the imperial metropole. Ironically the Chavez revolution succumbed to the irrationality of racism itself, the externalization of its own racial ambivalence grew out of hand and significantly impeded the professionalism of the government to the point that it became almost a cult of a death wish vis a vis the 'great white giant' to the North.